The people must choose the next government — not the markets

NO, no, no, no, no.

Is that clear enough?

No to the whole idea of a national government.

No to the search for a “consensus” about how to deal with our deficit.

No to any notion that the people who got us into this mess are the same people who can get us out of it.

I wonder sometimes if the people who advocate this kind of thing, usually using all sorts of big words, really know what they’re talking about.

Do they know what a national government is, for instance? It’s a government with no opposition, or certainly no meaningful opposition. And therefore no real accountability — and God knows there’s little enough of that already.

If we’ve learned nothing in the last few years, we’ve surely learned that the culture of creeping secrecy that has pervaded decision-making in all its forms has done untold damage.

Would our banks be in the mess they’re in today if we’d had a proper system of accountability in the past 10 years? Would the property bubble have happened if finance bill after finance bill hadn’t contained more and more tax shelters — often without mention, let alone debate?

Would our healthcare system be as troubled and damaged as it is if successive ministers hadn’t hidden behind entirely unaccountable structures?

Would we be as divided a society as we are if the culture of secrecy hadn’t been allowed to grow exponentially over the past 15 years?

The answer to all those questions is no.

The chair of the Beef Tribunal, Liam Hamilton, once said the tribunal itself wouldn’t have been necessary if the Dáil had been given honest and full answers to questions. And some things never change. It’s more accountability we need, not less. And that means we need a robust opposition just as much as we need a dynamic government.

Maybe, at the start of this crisis, there might have been a case for all differences to be set aside. But there’s been too much secrecy about how decisions were arrived at, too many big decisions with really profound consequences already made without any real attempt at consensus. Now is the time for change, not more of the same.

One academic last week, in the course of arguing for a national government — and one that would include a couple of business people he especially admired — described all forms of ideological difference as “petty party political routine”.

His written view is that “Ireland needs the agreement between its main parties to form a strong, stable emergency national government of unity, to agree a four-year plan during October, followed by a snap general election in advance of the December budget”.

Could you imagine anything more absurd, or more dangerous? The very last thing Ireland needs right now is a government founded on a secret deal, with no mandate from the people and no answers to the questions we most need answered.

Questions like: where did this idea of a four-year timescale to eliminate the deficit come from? Is it our idea, or someone else’s?

Who is running our country, if this idea isn’t our own? Is the IMF in charge already, or some ratings agency we never heard of before? Who the hell are Fitch, for instance? All I can find out about them on the web is that they advise clients how to make money and they’re owned by a company that’s also in the property business. This is the kind of outfit we’re supposed to run scared of?

And there are more questions. If a four-year plan is already a fait accompli, through some mechanism that hasn’t been explained to us, what does that tell us about our sovereignty and independence as a country?

Why four years? Why not five or seven, or 10? If it’s to be four years, who will get hurt? Who pays? Will the EU support us? At what price? What conditions? We’ve heard all the arguments about what the markets need. What do our people need? What does our whole notion of a society need?

If we’re going to tear public spending apart for the sake of this four-year “recovery”, what are the implications of that for our education system? Or our healthcare? For elderly people? For children? For people with disabilities? For communities living in despair?

If we tear up the fabric of every social contract we’ve developed over the past 30 years, when are we going to rebuild it? And how? I think we all know we can’t get through this without pain. But the least we’re entitled to is the knowledge that the pain will be worthwhile — that our children will be able to build a future in their own country at the end of it, that people in need will retain some measure of dignity, that the quality of everyone’s life can ultimately be restored.

A lot of that we can do even while the pain is being inflicted, by pulling together, by recognising the value of solidarity, by relying on the individual and community strengths we all have.

But none of it can be done without trust and without a basic understanding of what some of the terms mean. Take that word solidarity, for example. I’ve read some commentary recently that implied that at a time when we need solidarity most, it’s just selfish to argue that benefits for poor people can be protected.

Well, that’s actually what solidarity means — it means that better-off people have an obligation to those who have less. If you try to use the word solidarity to suggest that the poorest people in Ireland have to take their medicine too, that’s a corruption of the language.

THE key thing, though, is trust. There’s never been a moment in my entire adult life when there was less trust in authority in Ireland.

Politics has let the people down — but so have religion, business, banking and several of the professions. We never needed a fresh start more than we do right now. In the immortal words of Ray Burke, we need to draw a line in the sand.

The people, more than ever before, have a right to decide. Whatever plan is formed to deal with the crisis we face, it cannot, under any circumstances, be formed behind closed doors.

The leader of our present Government has never chosen, even once, to address the whole people about the challenges we face and the reasons why. If an open and honest address to the nation isn’t possible, how can we possibly accept anything that is cobbled together in “confidential” meetings between party leaders?

Thankfully, I don’t expect the opposition parties to go along with this charade. I believe they are committed to the notion that whatever a new government does, it must be done with the trust and consent of the people. There can be no new government in Ireland without the people’s choice.

To do anything else — for the sake of the financial markets — would be the ultimate betrayal. It would certainly be democratically corrosive and could even be the beginning of the end of the republic we used to call Ireland.