POLITICS:Irish Governance in Crisis, Edited by Niamh Hardiman, Manchester University Press, 256pp, £15.99
The Government has made much of its recently established Convention on the Constitution, which holds its first working meeting today. Consisting of 33 elected representatives and 66 randomly selected members of the public, this body has been tasked with deliberating on a range of institutional, political and social issues.
The Government has rightly been criticised for the convention’s narrow remit, which consists of a carefully selected list of nine issues along with an opportunity “to make such other recommendations for constitutional reform as it sees fit”.
Nonetheless, the fact that it is being convened at all – a first in Irish politics – reflects a pervasive view that the Irish political system is not fit for purpose. The members of the constitutional convention would do well to read this volume on Irish governance and politics, edited by Dr Niamh Hardiman, senior lecturer in the school of politics and international relations at University College Dublin.
Of course, there has been no shortage in the past few years of books tracing the fall from grace of the Irish economy and polity. Indeed, the production of books on the collapse of the Celtic Tiger has become something of a cottage industry. In this context, we might legitimately ask why we need yet another book on the failures of Irish politics and policymaking. The answer lies in this volume’s systematic, comparative analysis of Irish politics and policymaking. Going beyond the immediate crisis of Irish governance to identify longer-term trends and underlying causes, it analyses the capacity of the State to achieve particular policy objectives and seeks to explain why State capacity has varied over time and between different policy areas.
Collectively the chapters argue that the structures through which public power is exercised, and the way in which competing societal interests are mediated through political processes, have a decisive impact on policy outcomes. Three prominent themes emerge: first, the dominance of political parties and the related weakness of legislative control over the executive; second, the limited capacity of the State to co-ordinate societal interests towards outcomes that are in the public interest; and, third, the (in)ability of political institutions to attain democratic legitimacy.
Given the Irish experience of recent years, the chapters on regulatory governance (by Jonathan Westrup) and the governance of the economy (by Sebastian Dellepiane and Hardiman) draw the reader’s immediate attention.
However, one of the particular strengths of the volume is that it casts the net much wider and looks at strengths and weaknesses of Irish governance across a range of sectors, including egovernance (Lee Komito), crime and security (Aogán Mulcahy), urban regeneration (Diane Payne and Peter Stafford), waste management (Brigid Laffan and Jane O’Mahony) and healthcare (Claire Finn and Hardiman). In doing so, the volume provides the reader with a broad and deep understanding of the current state of policymaking in Ireland, and its historical development.
Another strength of the volume is that it places the Irish experience in a comparative context, drawing out similarities and, more often than not, differences between Ireland and other countries. Some chapters achieve this task of comparison more successfully than others; particularly strong in this regard are Hardiman’s introduction and conclusion, and the chapters on accountability (Muiris MacCarthaigh), party politics (Seán McGraw) and the “triple crisis” of the Irish economy (Dellepiane and Hardiman).
One weakness, hardly unique to this edited volume, is that while the cross-cutting themes identified in the introduction and conclusion appear throughout the case studies, they are not discussed systematically in each chapter. A more consistent application of the volume’s guiding analytical framework to each of the chapters would have further enhanced the coherence of the collection as a whole, though doing so may have dulled the narrative of each chapter.
Planning system
Any edited volume such as this that aims for breadth is vulnerable to the charge of exclusion, and this collection is no exception. In particular, the absence of a chapter focusing centrally on the planning system seems odd.
Although a number of the chapters touch on relevant aspects, the book lacks a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the failures of the Irish planning system. Given how central these failures were to the growth of the disastrous property bubble, and the fact that they illustrate so well the core themes set out in the introduction, the book would have benefited from a chapter dedicated to analysing this policy area.
Hardiman’s concluding chapter, which puts forward a set of proposals focusing on reforms to the role of the Oireachtas, ministerial appointments, the design of regulatory governance, and the public sector, reveals an interesting tension. These well-informed but quite far-reaching proposals stand somewhat in contrast to the “historical-institutionalist” approach underpinning the case-study chapters. Broadly speaking, this emphasises how contemporary political and institutional choices are constrained by past political and institutional choices. For this reason, the concluding recommendations for institutional reform appear particularly ambitious, as they seek deep and fundamental reform of existing institutional structures and patterns of behaviour.
Hardiman implicitly acknowledges this tension and the related problem of expecting any sitting government to undertake the types of reforms proposed: “reform requires an incumbent government to implement changes that directly limit its range of influence. Governments have tended to prefer a minimalist approach to self-binding in institutional design, rather than the robust and far-reaching changes proposed here.” Indeed, the limited remit of the constitutional convention illustrates this problem clearly.
Whether or not the recommendations put forward by Hardiman and her colleagues are given the consideration they undoubtedly deserve, this volume represents an important addition to our existing knowledge of Irish politics and policymaking, and serves to illustrate the valuable contribution of social-science research. If ever there was a critical juncture at which this research could guide the process of institutional reform, it is now.
