Ireland is too small for strong leadership.

Cody Pomeray

Ireland is such a small island that it seems unable to support political life that does not belong to centrism.

This means that ideological parties have to become pretty indistinguishable from each other to survive on a national platform. If they want to stick to their beliefs, they must exist on the margins of political life, with slim chances of ever implementing their policies.

And anyway, whatever ideology there does exist in the Oireachtas is further diminished by the PR system, which gives rise to coalition governments.

This means that Irish policymaking is lacking in much, if any, ideological conviction, brave measures being diluted to the point of being meaningless, and overall policy may be vulnerable to populism. In other words, it leads to weak leadership.

It would be fair to say that we have seen evidence of this unimaginative, middle ground, weak policy in the post DeValera years as the civil war divide abated. It could even be reasonable to say this weak leadership was the basis of the property bubble.

What if Ireland needs strong medicine? It seems that in modern Irish politics, strong leadership has only been seen once in a blue moon, either by a de facto national government (the Tallaght strategy) or when the IMF directs it.

Is our small size our most serious political crisis?

sparkling sea

Cody Pomeray wrote: »

Ireland is such a small island that it seems unable to support political life that does not belong to centrism.

This means that ideological parties have to become pretty indistinguishable from each other to survive on a national platform. If they want to stick to their beliefs, they must exist on the margins of political life, with slim chances of ever implementing their policies.

And anyway, whatever ideology there does exist in the Oireachtas is further diminished by the PR system, which gives rise to coalition governments.

This means that Irish policymaking is lacking in much, if any, ideological conviction, brave measures being diluted to the point of being meaningless, and overall policy may be vulnerable to populism. In other words, it leads to weak leadership.

It would be fair to say that we have seen evidence of this unimaginative, middle ground, weak policy in the post DeValera years as the civil war divide abated. It could even be reasonable to say this weak leadership was the basis of the property bubble.

What if Ireland needs strong medicine? It seems that in modern Irish politics, strong leadership has only been seen once in a blue moon, either by a de facto national government (the Tallaght strategy) or when the IMF directs it.

Is our small size our most serious political crisis?

No our lack of interest in politics, parochial political culture, our PR system, and our lack of a representative mirror image of society Oireachtas members, are our biggest problems

Irish Steve

Have to admit, I do wonder if some strong leadership might have made a difference to things like the property bubble, the public sector bubble in terms of numbers and "benchmarking", and some of the other excesses of the last 10 to 15 years.

OK, hindsight is always able to see things more clearly, but some of the things that were done in terms of money spent, and the ways it was spent were not the best of things that could have been done.

Even things that should have been forseeable, like the poor design of the M50, the total waste of money in terms of how the bridges on the M50 were built, the waste of money on having to upgrade the M50 in less than optimal ways because of bad design, the money wasted on upgrading Newlands Cross twice instead of doing it right the first time, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Dublin Airport, some of the appalling design tiger estates, the lack of clear strategy for roads that leaves narrow pinch points at Drumcondra, so it goes on, and a lot of it is poor leadership, parish pump mentality, and an inability to look forward, or even see what has happened in other (larger) countries that have already gone down some of these paths years ago, and already learnt from their mistakes.

Eircom and the appalling broadband legacy, Zombie banks due to poor oversight, and bad management, the whole sugar fiasco, even fundamental infrastructure issues like sorting out CIE, most of them fall because of a lack of strong and decisive clear leadership, and way too much of that is the quality of the pool available to select those leaders from, the political pond has been murky and not well populated for a long time now, partly due to history, nepotism, and all the other things we know about.

Changing it won't be easy, the parish pump and brown envelopes are still a very powerful factor in national government. It would be nice to change that, but actually doing it will require a fundamental change of attitude from the electorate.

thebman

Look at Germany, same thing on bigger scale. No debt write down for Ireland and pushing out Euro crisis until after election.

Just more evidence that all politics, everywhere is local.

Scofflaw

I can't see this being a function of size at all, I have to say. A student body of 5000 in most countries can easily elect a decent number of radicals, right, left, or green, and they regularly do so - that Ireland doesn't do so with an electorate numbered in the millions cannot therefore be a simple reflection of size.

And that Irish student bodies generally elect moderates/centrists/parochialists, much as the country does, is perhaps also telling.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Cody Pomeray

thebman wrote: »

Look at Germany, same thing on bigger scale. No debt write down for Ireland and pushing out Euro crisis until after election.

Just more evidence that all politics, everywhere is local.

The problem isn't that politics is local, it's that policy is stuck in the centre-ground.

Yes - look at Germany, where you do have political parties with substantially opposing policy vision. There is real choice. Same with France and the UK, and all of the large European countries I can think of.

Scofflaw wrote: »

I can't see this being a function of size at all, I have to say. A student body of 5000 in most countries can easily elect a decent number of radicals, right, left, or green, and they regularly do so -

Yeah but political participation in the Universities is arguably something that attracts an artificial concentration of voters and candidates who spend their lives academically attached to the social sciences. Such voters usually have disproportionately strong opinions relative to the outside population.

So University elections are a different kettle of fish and probably aren't reproduced in the real world.

In the real world, strong ideological voices can find it difficult to find a place in a small electoral pool.

I accept that the Irish psyche may be intrinsically moderate, but whatever the genesis of centrism in Irish politics, the problem is in ever overcoming it.

Kinski

Cody Pomeray wrote: »

The problem isn't that politics is local, it's that policy is stuck in the centre-ground.

Yes - look at Germany, where you do have political parties with substantially opposing policy vision. There is real choice. Same with France and the UK, and all of the large European countries I can think of.

You do see some more ideological parties making electoral headway in smaller European states too, such as the various far-right groups whose support grew in the 90s and 00s in places like Denmark, Finland, and Austria.

I think the historical memory of Ireland's independence struggle and subsequent civil war, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, have had a major role in ensuring the hegemony of moderate conservatism in Ireland; a strong association has developed in the Irish psyche between entrenched ideological politics and violence, and that's turned voters off.

Additionally, we don't have the kind of socialist tradition that somewhere like France does, and as such the development of a strong labour movement has been inhibited, while we've only experienced large-scale immigration in recent years, so for a long time there wasn't much scope for racist extremists to build a political platform that was likely to draw any significant support (and of course, given the numbers of our citizens who emigrated, many - though by no means all - Irish people may well be instinctively sympathetic to economic migrants.)

Cookie_Monster

The inherent moral corruption of the Irish people built up over the decades is far more of a factor. People vote for the man that'll do them a favour or fix the potholes and then his son and so on and so on.
It makes it impossible for someone who is actually interested in making real changes to get voted in and stay in for long enough to make an impact and is therefore self perpetuating and extremely difficult to ever change especially as those on the inside have no incentive to do so as it would disadvantage them.

johnnyskeleton

I think Ireland is too big an area to be governed by one national parliament. Despite Dublin contributing more than it receives, the perception is that Dublin is taking money from the rest of the country, so people have no problem electing Lowry et al to feather their own nests.

Also, the amount of money being spent is huge, giving massive room for corruption or at least self inflated pay packets. I think that if tax, education and health were all dealt with on a local level, with national government only concerned with security, defence and international relations, people would care a lot more about where their tax money was going and how it was being spent. Plus, it would be difficult if not impossible to bail out the banks without at least obtaining the informed consent of the local authorities.

ardmacha

Centrism does not in itself exclude competence and honesty or long term planning. The lack of these things is the problem, not the centrism.