Reforms and solutions

ei.sdraob

We have a lot of threads about a large list of issues the country faces. Dr. Gurdiev made an article outlining several dozen reforms that could be undertaken by any government, fully or even partially.

These points are excellently laid out and It be hard for anyone (left,right,center,green or whatever) to disagree. Since they target the root causes of the issues that led us here. The mainstream media has not picked up on these yet :rolleyes: of course.

I am not going to post the lot here on thread ~(too long and detailed), but the article in full is here

One of his points on transparency I will coment on

In terms of transparency, default setting must be public disclosure and unrestricted free access to all data not subject to the secrecy of the state considerations. Sensitive data should be published with exclusion of sensitive information and identifiers, until the time when it can be published in full.

I do not agree with last sentence since it opens up a loophole, no secret should be kept from the public by the state or the civil/public service. "Government for the people by the people" and all that. Secrecy leads to waste and corruption as we have seen over and over with the likes of FAS, HSE and now the unions.

Justin Collery

I wonder about is this. What is happening right now is a wonderful opportunity to bin civil war politics. Both FF and FG and irrelevant, essentially the same, without principles, populist derivatives of the system that elects them. While I would never vote for Labour, I respect the fact that at least you know what you are getting.

In the current context we need real debate (all we have got so far is, there are no options, this is what we are doing). A party based on the principles pointed to by the OP could never really spring up in boom times, however the current climate is perfect for such a party.

Is there something systemically wrong that a charismatic, recognizable face does not come forward with such a new party?

[ Two arguments will be thrown at me here
1) Do it yourself.
You would not know me from Adam. The leader of a political party needs to be recognisable

2) This is just is just the PD's mark II
The PD's clearly did not stick to their principles as they supported successive governments whose policies were diametrically opposed to those pointed to in the OP. ]

Nijmegen

Just on transparency: I believe this to be critical in any functional democracy, and most of the best ones we look to as models hold it at the core of their values.

In Ireland we rolled back FOI, making it more expensive to request and generally the perception among people chasing FOI requests on a regular basis is that it's an Us vs Them situation with the public servants carrying out the request, rather than the kind of open exchange you'd hope for.

Even the likes of the USA trumps us on many counts here - for example, see all the websites setting up around public data that is released, such as to produce maps of crime hotspots in local areas.

With this sort of data you can then inform your community and push political and police leaders to do something about it.

On the idea of keeping some things a secret - I think that some things need to be kept out of the public eye, for example commercially sensitive information.

How and ever, I would appoint a strong and independant freedom of information ombudsman, who would hold sway over what is and isn't allowed out based on clear and published guidelines, so we know what's being held back and what's not.