Having never met John Collison it is hard to know what to make of the decision by the technology billionaire to enter the national debate on our inability to get things done.
Is he yet another very successful business man who cares about his country and its problems even if he is a little naive about the price that democracies pay in terms of implementing reform and delivering long-term projects? Or has Collison spent a little too long in Silicon Valley drinking the Kool-Aid? Does he now want to import some of the less attractive elements of its creed into Ireland?
The first possibility is the simplest and thus the most likely explanation but the second also tracks – up to a point.
Collison and his brother Patrick founded Stripe – a payments platform aimed at small business – in Palo Alto in 2010 and quickly become absorbed into the west coast technology start-up and venture capital ecosystem.
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Their early investors included Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz. Back then Musk was a liberal but has been on his own “journey” to become the biggest contributor to Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Thiel has been dubbed the philosopher king of Silicon Valley and he defies categorisation. Libertarian, plutocrat, post-democratic. Take your pick. He remains an investor as does Marc Andressen,who has also made the journey from West Coast liberal to Trump supporter.
Sequoia Capital is one of the largest shareholders in the $100 billion company the two brothers created and Patrick Collison is said to be close to one of the firm’s partners Shaun Maguire, who recently described the New York city mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani as an “Islamist” who “comes from a culture that lies about everything”.
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The firm stood by Maguire on the basis that he had the right to free speech. Its chief operating officer, Sumaiya Balbale, a practising Muslim, quit.
John Collison is not his brother’s keeper but sticking with the biblical aphorisms: by his friends shall you know him.
His association with various skin-shedding west coast venture capitalists does not mean that Collison’s diagnosis of the problems that Ireland faces is wrong. But his hinterland should be considered when assessing his proposed solution.
You would not want to overdo it, however. Progress Ireland (a think-tank he supports and referenced) is not exactly the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing body closely associated with Trump’s agenda. They describe themselves as “pragmatic technocrats who are untainted by ideology”.
Collison seems in fact to be strongly influenced by the left-of-centre writing of Marc Dunkelman, a US academic with strong links to the Democratic Party and who was a senior fellow at the Clinton Foundation. Writing recently in the Financial Times, Dunkelman warned that a necessary condition for the rise of authoritarian leaders is that democracy fails to deliver what people want.
Collison’s diagnosis as to why Ireland is so bad at getting things done chimes with Dunkelman. As does his solution; democratically elected politicians must take back the steering wheel and deliver. But he seems to have missed a fundamental truth about Irish politics which is that the last thing a successful Irish politician wants is to be responsible for anything.
Our most popular politicians – Catherine Connolly’s election as president being a case in point – are usually those furthest removed from power and the hard decisions and consequences that it entails.
Collison is probably right in his central thesis that we have devolved too much power to agencies, state bodies and other quangos to the point where it has become counterproductive and impedes progress. But his list of reasons for how this came about is incomplete.
It was not just a response to public concern about political corruption, the need for technical expertise or multiyear oversight. The Byzantian system we have created also insulates politicians from the consequences of their actions.
Nothing encapsulates this paradox quite like the head of some state agency being called in front of an Oireachtas committee to be hauled over the coals by government backbenchers for implementing government policy.
The root of all this is our hyper-localised politics that, in turn, is a creature of our system of proportional representation, which means every vote counts. It’s very hard to see the massacre of the quangos envisioned by Collison happening without a change in the electoral system to a first-past-the post system that makes local issues much less relevant and local politics less clientelist.
A referendum to this effect was rejected by the electorate twice, once in 1959 and again 1968. It would be interesting to see what would happen if the question were put to the electorate again, this time as the only way for a strong leader to solve our congenital inability to get houses and other vital infrastructure built.
Collison has made a welcome contribution to the national debate. But it is a stretch to think that we want to change our electoral system enough to make his vision a reality.
