If Ireland were in Africa, we’d send observers to help build democracy

TRY to imagine a little African country, somewhere in the middle of that great continent. From everything we’ve heard and read about it, it fits all the stereotypes.

A governing party that masquerades as democratic, but rumours of political corruption have been established time and again to be true. Members of the government all have big houses and drive flashy cars, even though they are surrounded by poverty.

But worse than that, over the last couple of years they have been systematically dismantling the essential trappings of democracy. Parliament is being treated with disdain. It meets very seldom and then only to rubber-stamp decisions already made by the government. There is no debate, little or no questioning, no opportunity for parliamentarians to make any real input to the law of the land.

Even though the country describes itself as a multi-party democracy, the size of the government majority is such that they can ram through anything they want to.

By and large, though, they govern by making announcements, and as often as not by doing secret deals with powerful vested interests.

Outside parliament, if you study the reports coming out of this little country, you can see other troubling signs. The freedom of information legislation that used to be trumpeted as a hallmark of the country's commitment to democracy is effectively gone. The civil service, which everyone saw as a bastion of independence, is being broken up and its senior figures being dispatched to different parts of the country. The government has decided to change the method of recruitment to the civil service, and independent observers have described the new rules as a recipe for the gradual politicisation of the service something people thought had been done away with years before.

The governing party has also announced that it wants to regulate press freedom. Although they have said on the record that their intention is to reform the libel laws, their essential purpose (and nobody in government has denied this) seems to be to establish a government-controlled press council, which will not only investigate complaints against the press but will also decide on such things as what constitute good taste and standards of journalism.

The government (itself awash with cash) also wants to do away with all the previous limits on election spending and the need to account publicly for how the money was spent. There are other warning signs that point to the possibility that any future election might be run in favour of the government party.

For instance, a few years ago it was discovered that there were huge amounts of money held in bank accounts throughout the country, and many of these accounts had been completely inactive. At the same time, some of the banks had been found to have been engaged in nefarious practices in the interests of their better-off customers, helping them to evade tax. Partly as punishment for these practices, and also because it made social sense, the parliament decided that the money in the inactive accounts should be effectively confiscated and put to good use. An independent board was established, and told to distribute the money where it could do most good, especially in terms of combating educational and other forms of disadvantage. Now, however, it has been revealed that the government has changed the rules. In future, the government itself will make all final decisions on how that money should be spent. Independent observers suspect that the move, which hasn't received much publicity, is designed effectively to create a government slush fund to be spent in marginal constituencies.

And now the last straw. A senior member of the government, who happens to be the government's director of elections, has announced that in future all elections are to be conducted electronically. Government spokespeople hail the move as symbolic of the country's great push to modernisation.

A massive amount of money will be spent on buying machines that people can vote on, and the results will be counted instantly. Following a national tender competition in which many of the country's advertising agencies and public relations firms take part, a huge contract is awarded to a firm whose principals have close connections with the government party.

It will be their job to educate the peasants of the country in how the system works, and to inspire trust and confidence in the system.

AS the details emerge, however, all sorts of troubling questions arise.

This new system has never been properly tested (the minister responsible dismisses any concerns about testing, announcing that he is very happy that the new system will work). There will be no way of verifying the results, no paper trail, no way of challenging a close result, no way of determining if the system has been interfered with or hacked into. There won't even be a way of proving that the software wasn't deliberately interfered with to produce the "right" result.

The company supplying the machines is highly reputable, of course, but no one knows who will ultimately control the software.

In the past, whatever about how election campaigns were conducted, and whatever the government party was able to get away with by way of phoney promises, the counting of elections throughout the country was always carried out in a pretty open way. Everyone could watch, and indeed most of the political parties had people who had become expert in counting along to such an extent that they were able to agree on predictions long before counts were over.

In future, voters will have to have blind trust in the system which determines their future.

In setting up the system, it has also been discovered that the government has no proper proposals, for example, to restrict access to count centre PCs during the count, or to ensure that only the right software is installed on count centre PCs. There will be no independent scrutiny of the software installation.

Voters will cast their votes with the help of a watching public official, and then they will have to rely on the government-controlled system to count the votes accurately. Unlike in every election since the country became independent, there will be no basis for challenge.

The concerns about democracy in this little country have now reached the floor of the European Parliament, which has every right to take an interest because Europe has been to the fore in assisting the rapid economic development of the little republic. Following a debate, it has been decided that the EU will put together a team of observers to try to investigate the situation, and to make sure that any election in the future will be free, fair, and independently run and scrutinised.

What they can't understand in Europe, though, is why Ireland has declined the prestigious offer of heading up the observer team. As one European official remarked, noting the way in which the Irish had said they were much too busy to get involved, "maybe we should look a little closer at Ireland instead".