How to elect competent leaders

I agree with Paw Patrol. People mostly vote for people that are like them and seem like they hold similar values.

So if a midlands guy/gal in your example themselves like to talk about GAA and hold more populists beliefs, such as: 'Dublin gets all the investment. When is my village getting a new dual carriage road upgrade?!' - he/she shall vote for a politician who they believe 'cares' about these issues.

Nothing wrong with that btw. That's how democracy is meant to work. You can't legislate for people sometimes voting against the perceived 'common good'. Everyone has an equal vote.

Stacksofwacks wrote: »

Is it really though? Politicians telling lies and making false promises to get power instead of using truth and reason so people are hoodwinked into voting for them..The media has responsibility aswell as they want the guy who is a 'bit of a character' or gives good soundbites than tells the boring old truth.

It is, yeah! See every outcome has positives and negatives. You can limit the voting rights of people that disagree with you and against their will elect people you perceive as more 'competent' politicians.

However, equally someone else with different values can garner more support than you and do the same to you and voila - you now live in a dictatorship where you have no say in what government is formed. Sure that would totally suck, but hey! Didn't you just want to do the same to other voters?

Democracy is not perfect but other options tend to lead to more perverse outcomes.

There seems be some kind of correlation between educated, informed and active citizens electing competent leaders in some countries, while in other countries poorly educated, misinformed, lazy citizens elect pure shítbags.

So you obviously need more of the former and less of the latter.

Stacksofwacks wrote: »

Im not advocating a dictatorship at all I just want better politicians who know what the heck they're doing, I'm sure there are some good honest politicians out there but they seem in the minority, at least to me it seems anyway

I'm not saying you want dictatorships. Your post seems to suggest you want to find a way to exercise control over candidates. That in itself is fraught with issues, with dictatorship being a possible outcome whether you like it or not.

The problem with Irish politics, national politics anyway, is that it is clientilist.

We are electing members to a national parliament, and they focus on fixing local and trivial matters rather than legislating for the common good for the whole Country and its 5 million people.

Why and how? Because we have never properly addressed local Government in this State. We have 31 City and County Councils, large run by their executives as elected members have been gradually stripped of powers over the last 30 years because of corruption and irresponsibility.

What to do?

Start again from the ground up.

1. Community Councils to make representations for local issues.

2. Replace the 31 City and County Councils with 7 or 8 regional authorities. Authorities with full time elected representatives with control over and budgetary responsibility for devolved issues in their region; planning, infrastructure, transport, housing, universities, hospital groups, recreation, heritage, environment, the Arts, Sport etc - all linked back to a national strategy.

3) elected a national legislature by a list system, ie not linked to any area, or any particular group. Allow parties to run with their policy programmes, but the voter picks the Party for that policy, not the person for their local connections. In turn, the Party fills the number seats according to their votes, beginning with their brightest and best minds. This legislature then sets the direction of national policy and strategy in high level matters, taxation, justice, foreign policy, migration and the principles by which the regions must govern in turn. I would also either reform the Senate to be universally elected or be abolished. An exclusive electorate just of university graduates or business groups or whatever is inherently undemocratic. And I say that as one of them.

This, of course, requires the Turkeys to vote for Christmas to begin such massive constitutional change. But I think, what I'm outlining could be the change so much of the country demands, a path to a Second Republic, a 21st Century secular Western nation, preparing for the reintegration of Northern Ireland.

It is not an attractive career path for talented people in private business, who can pay themselves 10 times as much as a Taoiseach gets. That is why so few put themselves forward for election.

How do you know anyone will be a competent leader? People in interviews can come across as professional, hard working and have the paperwork to back it up. But in practice they can and do at times completely under perform.

And how do you measure competence? 2 project managers or politicians could get similar end results but we would likely have no inkling to the hardships that 1 of them had to deal with compared to the other.

If a project fails to deliver it doesn't automatically mean the project leader is a poor manager. It could be that 1 or more circumstances came to fruition or changed that make project less viable that anticipated.

Idbatterim wrote: »

Reintegration? Lol! A unionist bomb on an empty bus in dublin will put that delusion back a good decade minimum!

Why? As in why would any Unionist (and I presume you mean Loyalist) plant a bomb to improve their position? Why would they plant one in Dublin and why would it be on an empty bus?

I only ask, because it never improved the position of anyone in history who did it.

Greyfox wrote: »

We need to start by making politicians accountable for when they do a poor job, most of our politicians are useless because the current system doesnt punish mediocrity.

We can blame nobody but ourselves for that.

However, we do boot out many mediocre TDs every 5 years. Any ones we send back, well, thats on us.