So you’re sick and tired of political system – well, it’s your own fault

IN the Belgian general election held this week, the New Flemish Alliance party won. This has raised the question whether a new country – Flanders – is to be created.

One of the interesting aspects of this, from a Flemish point of view, is that it gives the people of Flanders the chance to design a new country for themselves. The last time we looked at how we were going to organise ourselves was in 1937.

One of the more frustrating things about being Irish is that we live in a country that produced, arguably, the greatest rock band in the world, has contributed far more than its fair share of world-class actors, writers, business people and sports champions, but yet has a level of national political discourse that would match a Haitian public sewerage board meeting. Why is the level of our national discourse so inferior to the other great things we’ve been able to achieve as a nation?

It’s easy to blame politicians who, in their headlong pursuit of a well-paid pensionable job, regard the responsibility of making painful choices as something to be avoided at all costs. Regrettably, being a TD or a senator is too often seen as a career prerogative and not for what it really is – a citizen’s privilege.

Just examine, for once at least, the leaflet that drops on your doormat from your local representative – it will go out of its way to avoid offending you by highlighting issues on which tough decisions need to be made right now and how these issues are truly going to affect you – to do so would be to run the risk of causing offence and possibly losing a vote or two.

Yet, when I was honoured with the opportunity to enjoy that citizen’s privilege for seven years, I discovered there is a specific group of people who act secretly to avoid painful decisions and push their own agenda regardless of the cost to the nation as a whole – it’s us, the Irish electorate, and we do it again and again.

As citizens, we can no longer abdicate our responsibility for the people we elect; it’s not as if, on each polling day, two million people secretly sneak into the country, vote in our 165 legislators and then, having inflicted their choices on us, sneak out again, leaving us, the natives, to indulge in another five years of finger-wagging in the general direction of Kildare Street.

Let’s be honest – most of us want to elect a local fixer to negotiate with the state on our behalf. There is nothing inherently undemocratic in that; in fact, such a practice can be traced back to the role of the Tribune in ancient Rome. Our problem is that our system, as currently structured, effectively stops at that, and goes no further. &It’s all very well voting for the local guy or gal, but the problem is this is the only guy or gal we’re voting for. Put it this way, can you imagine if Hillary Clinton, while dealing with the potential international crisis that is North Korea firing a nuclear missile on Japan, had to spend more of her time sorting out public street lighting in New York state?

We do need local representatives, but we also need national ones. In order to achieve that, we must realise that a participative democracy such as ours is about much more than just passively voting every five years. As Thomas Jefferson wisely noted, “a properly functioning democracy depends on a well-informed electorate.”

We, as an electorate, have a duty not only to inform ourselves to a much greater degree – the level of our ignorance of how decisions affecting our daily lives are arrived at is something that never ceases to amaze me – but also to become involved in community or professional groups in areas of particular personal interest.

For example, it is has been my experience that too few people in this country see the connection between the taxes that government raises and the services it provides in return. When I’ve had discussions on this point, people complain about the amount of money wasted by government.

Yet I can clearly recall a politician who did something about government waste and was punished for it. Take the late Jim Mitchell who, as chair of the DIRT inquiry, saved hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money but was ejected from the Dáil by his constituents for not spending enough time on constituency matters. Whose fault is that?

I would suggest the fact that there weren’t 9,000 people in Dublin Central willing to reward Mitchell for his Trojan effort says far more about voters’ unwillingness to take responsibility for how our country is run. We can’t just leave taking national responsibility to politicians – see, it’s not just their country, it’s ours as well.

We can’t have 165 TDs fixing Mrs Murphy’s pension and no one working out how we are going to pay for the pensions of future generations of Murphys. Our politicians’ dilemma is that we are completely unwilling to reward a TD who devotes his or her time to the latter rather than the former. In fact, in a worst case scenario, such a deputy will be punished, severely.

There’s been a lot of talk about how we all must make sacrifices. The greatest sacrifice we could make is to accept the reality that we, all of us, actually have to make real choices.

Who has to pay the higher taxes and who doesn’t; who takes a pay cut and who doesn’t; who gets to bear more pain. For example, does a school lose its special needs teacher or does an elderly citizen take a pension cut. And if neither of them, then who? The answer cannot be “not me”.

The truth is the best we can do in the current climate is to try to minimise pain by identifying those who are better able to take it; to promise that any section of society can be spared pain without another section taking on an extra burden is, at best, foolish, at worst malicious and always fundamentally dishonest and ultimately counterproductive.

What is needed now is a generation of politicians, of patriots, who are prepared to be unpopular, if necessary. The great sacrifice we need to make is twofold. Firstly, we must challenge our politicians to have a real vision of where they want to lead the country and also to tell us the truth about the pain they are about to inflict on us, and why it’s necessary.

Secondly, we as a people must be willing to elect these politicians and recognise that their opponents who promise a painless solution are seeking our votes by selling us snake oil.

The time is right for real political reform, from the bottom up as well as from the top down. Instead of writing yet another report on reform (for the Seanad alone, there have been at least 13), let we, the people, change the way we run the country; let’s participate actively in our democracy, as the system was originally designed, and as our grandparents did less than a century ago. Unlike in Belgium, we don’t have to draw a new border through Mullingar to make that political reform happen. It’s not difficult. There’s only 4.2 million of us and we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel.

Real change requires real sacrifice and means we must all take a more active role; we must inform ourselves about how decisions are made and become involved in the process and we must also adjust to reduced incomes so those less well-off can feel just a little less pain. No whingeing. Let’s keep our ‘sacrifice’ in perspective – it will be a mere minor adjustment in lifestyle compared to what the generations before us had to endure.