Reforming politics - Politicians’ greatest challenge

NO MATTER how thick-skinned politicians are there must be the more perceptive and caring ones, sick to the teeth of virulent criticism.

They have had to accept that great swathes of the population regard them with at least as much contempt as respect, much less the deference some seem to expect.

That very many of them will dismiss such criticism, if consider it at all, as extreme underlines the chasm dividing the elected and the voters.

Today we publish comparisons between the lot of a member of the Dáil, from the Taoiseach right down to the semi-mute, almost invisible voting fodder we call a backbencher, and the circumstances of their colleagues in Britain’s House of Commons.

No one will be surprised that the gulf is spectacular. Irish politicians are paid more, sit in session for far shorter periods and represent far fewer people. Though the principle is familiar, nevertheless some of the figures still have the capacity to startle. Last year the Dáil sat for 101 days while the Commons managed 146. This year the House of Commons took a summer break that stretched to 39 days, our lot needed twice that to recover from their ordeals. When the Oireachtas, sometime in October, accepts that the summer has passed and they collect the suits from the cleaners for the resumption of parliamentary affairs they will have enjoyed a summer break lasting 81 days.

Our TDs each represent about 25,000 people while an MP has to consider 95,000 constituents. Despite that imbalance our representatives are paid more – €112,000 as against €78,885. The sad reality is that this kind of comparison can be made with more or less every democracy and the differences will be significant.

Despite this our parliamentarians have no real appetite for confronting the practices, indulgences and conventions that have reduced what was once the great dream of a representative, proactive democracy into a dysfunctional, corrupt and increasingly disregarded greyness.

Sadly, that description applies even before you consider the artificiality of the primary division that underlines Irish politics. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have few if any major policy differences and only exist to echo ancient animosities and are of little or no relevance while unemployment is destroying families and individuals; while emigration, the greatest curse of the Irish, is sucking the lifeblood from our future once again.

Germany can be reunited, China can embrace capitalism and the Soviet Union can collapse but Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael cannot surrender their divisive and destructive legacies.

Recently the grandly titled Joint Committee on the Constitution – Review of the Electoral System for the Election of Members to Dáil Éireann published the result of their considerations. In normal times a document so unequal to the challenge of the day could be quietly ignored but in these desperate days the reforms proposed were so limp, so uninspiring and utterly predictable and self-serving that they only deepened the sense of stasis surrounding our civic life. So much more was expected, so much more is needed.

In a few short years we will mark the centenary of the event on which this Republic was built. We still have time to make it a celebration rather than a regretful occasion to consider lost opportunities. If 2016 is to be a celebration our politicians will have to face the greatest challenge of all – the challenge of changing the system that confers so much power on them but changes so very little for those who voted for them.