We need to rebuild trust in our maligned politicians

With distrust in our politicians soaring and semi-state and banking chiefs earning huge sums, it’s crucial for Taoiseach Enda Kenny to deliver on his pledge to restore our the public’s faith in them.

WHO do you trust? Nobody it seems. Priests, gardaí, lawyers, journalists and civil servants. Virtually anyone who was once held above suspicion is now approached with great caution. So shaken are the Irish people by events of the past three years that we have lost faith in virtually everyone. That is, if a survey published this week is to be believed.

The Irish public have virtually no faith in politicians. So wary are we that we are four times more likely to believe the words of a random stranger than we are to trust our elected representatives.

While democracy always needs a healthy dose of scepticism, it cannot survive without an essential bond of trust between the electorate and those they elect.

“Who do I trust?” is an especially important question that everyone asks when choosing who to vote for. Assigning power to somebody you don’t personally know to do what you believe to be right by you and your country requires the same sort of faith you place in the stranger airplane engineer. It’s impossible to know for sure how somebody else will behave, so trust becomes the most essential commodity between voter and politician in any democracy.

Emerging from a regime that broke this essential agreement, it is not surprising to learn this week that almost nine out of 10 adults had no faith in what politicians were telling them in a survey carried out during the February election campaign. Only half have any trust in priests; one third trust journalists; and two thirds have faith in the judiciary. Unsurprisingly, politicians are the absolute bottom of the trust heap, with 12% saying they believe what TDs say.

The country has just come through a period that saw the raw truth of horrific clerical abuse unveiled, the comforting economic splurge that was used to hide the pain stripped away, the safety of a sound banking system collapse and the economic sovereignty which defined our identity lost.

With little retribution, no-one to blame and a confusing final conclusion that we are all at fault, at least when it comes to problems of the economy, the people of Ireland are left wondering where to turn.

A similar study carried out at the end of 2010 found levels of trust in politicians at about 20% — a figure that left Ireland among the bottom of the table for faith in politicians.

It is all a long way from the Celtic Tiger years when people “could believe and trust in extraordinary things”, according to the report on our economic collapse by Finnish civil servant Peter Nyberg.

Our current state of cynicism serves to underscore our past over-reliance on trust.

Nyberg said Ireland was gripped by a “speculative mania” in which “traditional values, analysis and rules” were lost in a “new and different world” in which people believed in magic things such as “unlimited real wealth from selling property to each other on credit”.

Far from our current state of wariness, there was “little suspicion or doubt” about the direction being taken on the path that would eventually lead us into economic dependence.

Irish people in general signed up to a “group think” when “people adapt to the beliefs and views of others without real intellectual conviction”. The media and political system “took a supportive rather than a challenging role”.

While we were far too trusting in the good times, the Irish are now too untrusting in a time when faith in politicians to revive the economy is more important than ever. It is borne out in successive studies that trust in politicians is linked to economic success, and specifically to the perceived equality in a country.

Is it any wonder that people are a bit suspicious when, after being told by the last administration that bankers and top civil servants were being forced to take a financial hit, we now find out their cash awards were getting secretly higher?

While publicly announcing cuts in their salaries ranging up to more than €700,000, bosses of semi-state companies were “more than compensating” by increasing financial perks that come outside of their basic pay, according to last week’s report on state assets by economist Colm McCarthy.

The news came just a day after it emerged that former AIB boss, Colm Doherty, had received a payment of €3 million after the promised crack-down on pay in bailed-out banks.

Just two days later, there was a further assault on our diminished capacity to believe and have faith when former Finance Minister, Brian Lenihan, said the European Central Bank (ECB) — what should be a great international trusted institution — forced the €85 billion bailout on Ireland last November.

Then this week it emerged through Freedom of Information documents, that the cabinet knew the finance minister was beginning talks with the EU, ECB and IMF bailout team while continuing to talk down the possibility of a bailout.

A schedule of Cabinet records showed that a memorandum for the Government regarding the “minister for finance’s engagement with the IMF, ECB and European Commission” was discussed at a meeting on November 16.

The next morning, Brian Cowen insisted in the Dáil that bailout talks had not begun, backing up claims by ministers Dermot Ahern and Noel Dempsey that reports suggesting otherwise were fiction.

“The statement made by ministers over the weekend were based on the fact that we were not in negotiations and we’re still not involved in negotiations,” he said during leaders’ questions.

This was a symptom of the secret and covert manner under which the previous administration operated, which has left an endemic mistrust by Irish people in Irish public life.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny promised things will be different under the new regime. In his first speech following Fine Gael’s electorate success, he told supporters in the Burlington Hotel that there would be a “democratic revolution” in which he would close “the chasm that has opened between people and Government”.

In his first speech as Taoiseach to the Dáil, he promised to be “open and truthful with the Irish people”.

He said political reform was “essential to restore trust in politics and in Government” and promised “a fair society where people trust and have faith in the institutions and services of the state and where those services demonstrably work for them”.

Fianna Fáil too has a role to play in rebuilding this trust by coming completely clean about the mistakes that were made. But for the country to restart rebuilding, the Taoiseach needs to keep his word and bridge the gap of trust.

Politicians will always make promises they can’t keep, it’s the nature of a job based on selling hope and aspiration to people.

Some degree of mistrust is necessary to filter this rhetoric and the attitude of Ireland during the boom years shows how dangerous too much trust can be.

But because we grant politicians a great degree of autonomy to make decisions and act in the best interest of the country we have no choice but to trust them if that system is to work.

After trusting too much for so long, we now trust too little. And that will be the biggest obstacle to bringing the country back to recovery in the years ahead.