It’s time TDs abandoned the parish pump for the big issues

THE notion of reducing the number of TDs – as most recently suggested by Fine Gael leader Enda (July 25) – may have some merit, particularly if the electorate’s largely clientelist relationship with Dáil deputies, whereby votes are exchanged for real or imagined favours often relating to very personal and local matters, can be altered.

Is it really appropriate or efficient that the elite of national politicians, including ministers with hugely challenging portfolios, are seen as the first people to be called into the fray to sort out (or be seen to sort out), say, the allocation of medical cards?

Without decrying their representational constituency roles or the people who put them where they are today, should all TDs not have more important responsibilities to be dealing with than being distracted by such minutiae? Imagine a political landscape where, unencumbered by the suffocating influence of the parish pump, the men and women we send to (a now pared-down) Leinster House could find their valuable and expensive time freed up fully to embrace the roles of national parliamentarians. This would allow them to devote the due care, consideration and attention to detail one would expect of someone charged with legislating on affairs of state and channelling their talents into working the oracle to make Ireland fairer and more competitive.

But who would pick up the pieces? If political influence is to continue to be treated as a currency to be deployed on a case-by-case basis where “the system” somehow breaks down, I see no reason why this role cannot be entrusted definitively to the tier of government that is actually closest to the citizen, namely local authorities?

A prerequisite, of course, to assuage TDs’ concerns about having the rug of representation pulled from beneath them, would be to transform how the public differentiates between the two layers of elected representatives and their functions, thereby preventing unrealistic voter expectations.

This would clearly require ringfencing micro-level interventions as the proper remit of local councillors.

While politicians will always compete among themselves as counterparts there is little sense in a turf war between the national and the local levels.

At a stroke, local politics would become infinitely more relevant while even the most enthusiastic TDs would surely be dissuaded from expending unnecessary effort on directly associating themselves with particular achievements on the scale of pothole repairs when the bigger picture calls for them to be looking into the gaping chasm in the national finances.

As an extension beyond the peddling of influence, a degree of proper devolution of the accompanying administrative decision-making on local matters would deliver a self-contained reinforcement of local authorities.

Without any complicated institutional shake-up or displacement, this would surely serve somewhat to compensate our county towns and regional cities which seem increasingly unlikely to reap the employment dividend promised by the 2002 “decentralisation” plan.

Ronan Gingles

Avenue Michel-Ange, 56

Brussels 1000