Planning: let’s have real democracy
The role of councillors with vested interests in building or property, or who lobby for others with such interests, is the key. Such councillors, like officials on the take, expose an intrinsically corrupt system.
Corruption is not simply direct payments for favours. Corruption includes secret or unaccountable exercise of undue influence by some at the expense of others.
Corruption is a result of what we call “democratic deficit”.
Councillors’ behaviour could encourage calls for ceding planning entirely to unelected officials. Two parallels spring to mind.
Decisions on waste disposal are now a reserved function of county and city managers. The public, through its representatives, is denied any say.
The abolition of health boards eliminated any public say, through local representatives, in health policy, now effectively ceded to the HSE and medical professionals, neither publicly accountable.
In both cases, the ‘solution’ to admittedly flawed democratic controls is to eliminate democracy altogether.
Whatever one thinks of incineration, it cannot be right in a democracy to impose it against the people’s will.
The mess in which the ‘solution’ to health administration has left us needs no elaboration.
To return to planning, an obligation to record all politicians’ representations, written or oral, is a good idea. Fear of exposure in misrepresenting the public interest should be an effective check. More fundamental is your encouragement of public participation. This could be facilitated by making our democracy participatory.
Systematic corruption that frustrates the public could be reduced, if not eliminated, if representatives were subject to more frequent elections (say every two years), and to recall by petition at any time, for flouting the electorate’s will. Many decisions affecting communities could be made by referenda (as in Switzerland).
In an age of technology, such solutions are entirely practical. They merely require implementation by our legislators. In doing so, would they not affirm their commitment to democracy? I’m not holding my breath.
Later this year, the public will have an opportunity to decide an issue by referendum.
All the indications are that the Lisbon Treaty — like the essentially identical Constitutional Treaty rejected in referenda by the Dutch and French people — will limit further the real say of European people in decisions about our lives.
Imposing water charges on schools is a result of ceding to the centre decisions that should be made locally and accountably. That all Europeans bar the Irish are denied by their arrogant rulers an opportunity to have a say on this is sufficient reason to vote ‘no’ to the Lisbon Treaty.
Dr Colmán Etchingham
Department of History
NUI Maynooth
Co Kildare
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