If the politicians get to pick a new Taoiseach, that will be the last straw

HAVE you ever wondered what would drive you on to the streets?

Not just to take part in a march, but actually to get involved in a campaign of ongoing and unremitting protest, to sit in front of the tanks? Everywhere I go, I detect a huge sense of anger and frustration, and it’s growing.

But it doesn’t yet seem to have crystallised around a particular issue. In fact, if anything, the anger is dividing us rather than uniting us.

The split between people who work in the public sector and everyone else, for instance, is actually inhibiting any impetus for change and improvement in the way we make crucial decisions.

Last week, when it was the turn of low-paid workers in the passport office to protest in the only real way they could, it was they rather than public service management or policymakers who bore the brunt of the public’s anger.

It’s easy to understand the frustration of people who have applied for a passport and have failed to secure one, and indeed the argument that they were denied a specific constitutional right is a strong one. But who really wants to live in a country where huge sections of the workforce are denied the right to involve themselves in trade union activity?

We tend to take reasonable working conditions for granted nowadays, but how long would that last for any of us if people struggling to come to terms with deep pay cuts were denied the right to take any action at all? Underlying all this is a deeper issue, and it’s the steady erosion of our democracy. It manifests itself in all sorts of ways.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about a government mandate here. I may not agree with a lot of the policy decisions made by the present government and its predecessors, but they do have a mandate from the people — at least for now. We have a properly elected Taoiseach and government, and they have a right to carry on until that mandate expires. I didn’t vote for them, but that’s neither here nor there. The people did.

I’ve heard the point made repeatedly that since Brian Cowen wasn’t elected by the people, he has no proper mandate. If that’s true of him, it was true of the majority of his predecessors.

Since our constitution was enacted in 1937, we’ve had 11 Taoisigh (WT Cosgrave, whose title was President of the Executive Council, left office several years before the constitution was adopted).

Seán Lemass, Jack Lynch, Charles Haughey, Albert Reynolds, John Bruton, and Brian Cowen all came to office the same way — by being elected by the Dáil without having first secured a mandate from the people. John A Costello was elected by the Dáil as Taoiseach without ever having led his own political party in an election campaign.

So a majority of our elected leaders had no better or bigger a mandate than the present Taoiseach did. Most of them got the job because they succeeded (in some cases ousted) their predecessors as party leader. Bertie Ahern came within a whisker of being elected Taoiseach the same way, but in the end had to settle for election by the people. In doing so he was following in the footsteps of a small minority of Taoisigh — Éamon de Valera, Liam Cosgrave and Garret FitzGerald.

Mind you, several of the people chosen by the Dáil rather than the people didn’t wait too long before they looked for a full democratic mandate. Haughey and Reynolds called elections (reluctantly) a number of months into their terms, and most of the others went to the people within a couple of years.

If Brian Cowen waits until May 2012 before seeking a popular mandate, he will easily be the longest-serving Taoiseach not to have been elected by the people.

But that’s his right, based on the precedents we’ve always accepted and the way the constitution is written. And indeed, if we take the constitution literally, the Dáil would have the right to replace Brian Cowen with another Taoiseach if it wished to do so, again without any mandate from the people.

But would that be democratic? It would certainly be unprecedented and, in my view, it would be an insult to every democratic value and instinct we ought to regard as important.

It seems there is a growing feeling within the main government party that their leader has failed them. To be more accurate about it, they’re worried that his unpopularity might cost them their seats whenever a general election happens.

Last week’s reshuffle is seen as having failed because it did nothing to stem the tide of unpopularity (not, mind you, because it failed to address some of the more fundamental problems we face). And therefore Brian Cowen, defended by his backbenchers the week before for courage and determination, as they saw it, suddenly lacks courage and vision.

Is this a good enough reason for the party to change leaders and in the process change Taoiseach without an election? Actually, there couldn’t be a worse reason. Whatever one might say if the current Taoiseach were, for example, suddenly taken ill, the idea that we had three Taoisigh in the lifetime of one Dáil simply and only because a majority of its members were afraid to face the electorate would be scandalous.

In years to come we might well come to recognise this period in Irish life as one where democracy was seriously undermined — in all sorts of ways.

What’s happening about NAMA is one example. It is one of the most serious decisions ever taken by an Irish government, a decisions whose policy repercussions are likely to affect us for several generations. It is being followed this week by the effective nationalisation of the banks.

It’s entirely arguable that the cart is being put before the horse here — if we’d nationalised the banks earlier, we mightn’t need NAMA at all.

BUT the essential point is that these are two decisions of extraordinary importance. Much smaller policy decisions than these in the past have been the subject of green papers and white papers. Now, our future is being mortgaged and we are being given absolutely no right to speak.

In smaller, but equally critical ways, our democracy is being compromised too. Take the Glass Bottle site controversy, for example. This was a transaction, involving hundreds of millions of public money, in which the purchasers were inextricably tied up with the vendors and in which the potential developers came to have enormous effective influence over the planning process. And all behind closed doors.

Public money sloshed around like a private slush fund, and nobody was willing to tell us.

Yes, we might well come to recognise we have done enormous damage to ourselves over recent years and, above all, to our concept of democracy. But if anyone thinks they can once again dump a Taoiseach (whether we support him or not) and put another in his place without recourse to the people, surely that would be the last straw. Surely then, in defence of the last vestiges of democracy, we ought to be taking to the streets.