Tinkering around the edges of real political reform
WE have a different Government, but are we being governed differently?
The Taoiseach has just led his Government to the end of its first full parliamentary year and the Dáil will go into recess until Sep 18.
The Government is showing signs of wear and tear at a surprising early stage in the political cycle. Recent spats with political journalists are a symptom rather than a cause of tiredness and irritability. Being able to grin and bear the media is a requirement for politicians. Tetchy relations with the press are inevitable eventually, but it does not augur well that relations have deteriorated so sharply so soon.
Of course in a sense it is nearer the end of the game than the beginning. We may have a nearly-new government but many of its leading figures are veterans on their last political lap.
The Taoiseach is the longest serving TD in the Dáil. He was leader of the opposition for nearly a decade and veteran of one of the longest marches in Irish politics. It is just two years since the internal party heave against him. Enda Kenny’s determined rebuttal of his opponents made or at least remade his reputation. It is worth remembering that for most of the previous eight years as a party leader he was more mocked than praised in the media. Clearly neither he or those closest to him ever fully recovered from the laceration. A defensive default approach to communicating is re-emerging under the pressures of government.
Aside from the Taoiseach many senior ministers, including Michael Noonan, Brendan Howlin, Ruairi Quinn, Pat Rabbitte and Joan Burton are all veterans. They survived under the rules of a political system they vowed to radically change on coming into government.
The radical reform promised coincides with the greatest economic crisis in the history of the State. If that crisis is the best leverage for reform, it has to be acknowledged that no government has faced such daunting circumstances. Following a succession of tough budgets, a further €2bn plus in cuts will have to be found for next year. That is going to be very hard politics.
The importance of changing the way we are governed as distinct from just changing government is to future-proof our system against the repetition of past mistakes. To the Government’s credit, some change has come. Possibly one of the most significant is the overhaul of the Department of Finance and the creation of a Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. Together with new leadership at official and political level and the recruitment of expertise there is a clear impetus to implement the deal with the troika and manage the Croke Park agreement. Both, if ultimately limited, are significant change agendas.
The introduction of gender quotas as a requirement for public funding of political parties is a key cultural change for politics. Over time it may result in a rebalancing of an unrepresentative body politic. If quotas are perhaps discriminatory, the Government has done what it said it would. Selection conventions for the next general election will be the scene of mass political castration.
The political establishment itself has been further pruned. Aside from further pay cuts for the Taoiseach and Tánaiste, Garda drivers for ministers have been redeployed and money saved. The serious damage caused over the pay of special advisers is that the Government foolishly failed to make a virtue out of bringing in more and not less outside talent to a system that in part was not fit for purpose. Arguably the absence of outside advice is a reason why ministers seem to have been captured so completely by the system they vowed to change.
If change has come, and the Government will say there is more on the way, so far it has not been fundamental. It is abundantly clear there is no will to radically overhaul how the Dáil works. Leinster House is now warehousing more government backbenchers than at any time in the State’s history. The committee system is, with notable exceptions, as ineffective as ever. Arguably the Public Accounts Committee and the Finance Committee are the best. But critically, bills are almost inevitably brought to the parliament only when they are written. Discussion, let alone real input, at an earlier stage in committee are almost entirely absent. And when bills are published it is the job of government TDs to troop through the Tá lobby and keep opinions to themselves. If you keep our TDs in a herd and keep the herd in a pen you will have no problem preserving the group-think they were elected with an overwhelming majority to challenge.
The flawed, institutionally defensive and intellectually introspective thrust of government is largely preserved. Ministers become impressed and then dependent on their able and hard-working senior officials and senior officials are usually both. But this is to fatally confuse the ability of a skilled train driver who keeps a clapped-out rust bucket on the rails, with the need to send the machine to the scrap yard. The train drivers invariably advise that the machine can be tinkered with. It trundles on and on. The Croke Park deal is part of the great national trundling on. It is improving the workings of the current system, while working to preserve it.
The Government to its credit is restoring Ireland’s credibility and shoring up its finances but it is not clear that it is really reforming how it works.
* Gerard Howlin is a public affairs consultant and was a senior government adviser from 1997 to 2007.
