The platform for electoral success should be a fairer society for a fitter economy, writes Fintan O'Toole
Yesterday morning, after he had finally done the deed, the Taoiseach called for the general election campaign to be a clean one, focusing on policies rather than on personalities. This is, of course, the standard rhetoric for the occasion. But there is at least a reasonable chance that the Taoiseach might get his wish.
Personalities may indeed be less dominant this time than in the last two campaigns. The "Bertie factor" remains a key asset for Fianna Fáil, but after a decade in office it has been subsumed into the general political climate. For very different reasons, something similar may be true of Enda Kenny.
Polls and focus groups have shown consistently that the alternative taoiseach is not seen as an inspiring figure. But this, too, is now a given, and the task for Fine Gael and Labour is the more limited one of persuading a majority of voters that they, like many previous governments, can be effective without a powerful figurehead.
We might, then, be spared a presidential-style beauty contest and be given a chance to choose what kind of country we want to live in. This debate will not be about the past. The Taoiseach's greatest achievement, his role in the negotiation and eventual implementation of the Belfast Agreement, will not be a major factor in the campaign. The careful staging of his lap of honour as a peacemaker gives him the opportunity to take a bow, but the bows come at the end of the show.
By focusing on Northern Ireland, Bertie Ahern risks inviting the electorate to draw a conclusion he surely does not intend: that his work in this field is done and his specific skills are no longer required.
The same goes for the other apparently unassailable asset of the outgoing coalition: the almost uninterrupted wave of economic growth. The Government parties' failure to get any evident boost from the maturing of SSIAs, itself so obviously timed to create a pre-election feel-good factor, suggests a broader psychological truth. People attribute their economic successes to their own hard work and, in a culture with an increasing sense of entitlement, are not inclined to thank governments for anything.
There is, moreover, a rising sense of economic anxiety. Average house prices fell in March, for the first time since January 2002, and, in a society where the sense of wellbeing is so utterly wrapped up in the property market, this is clearly producing a feel-bad factor. Consumer confidence is dropping, in terms both of people's assessment of their current situation and of their expectations for the future. Politically, this can cut both ways, generating an impulse either to punish the Government or to stick with nurse for fear of something worse. But it does mean that there can be no bland assumption that, in economic terms, the next five years can simply be a repeat of the last 15.
This, indeed, is the core of the debate we need to have over the next four weeks. Ireland can't afford mere complacent continuity. We can't afford it economically because the trends are not positive. The economy has been losing competitiveness since 2002. Growth in GNP per capita is set to decline from 3.7 per cent last year to 2.2 per cent in 2008. Exports are growing more slowly than world trade as a whole, so Ireland is losing market share in the global economy.
Unemployment, though incomparably less serious than it was 20 years ago, is beginning to rise. The growth in Government revenues is due to slow down quite significantly, from almost 10 per cent this year to 6.6 per cent in 2008.
And, from the social and environmental points of view, we can't afford complacency either. The long economic boom has turned Ireland into one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but it has done little to affect the structural inequalities in society. In the United Nations Development Programme's Human Poverty Index, Ireland remains the second-worst performer of 18 OECD countries listed. We still have one in 10 children living in poverty and one in four at risk of poverty. This is not a mysterious phenomenon: State expenditure in Ireland on social protection and education is lower than the EU average, and significantly below the level in the highest spending countries. There is no reason to think that, even if the economy continues to grow, any of this will change without both political urgency and a radical improvement in the capacity of public agencies to deliver real change.
There is, in fact, a huge disjunction between our self-perception as a rich country and the realities experienced by citizens on a daily basis. Is a country rich if you can't drink the water? If primary school places in areas of population growth are so scarce that we are already seeing the emergence of social tensions between indigenous and migrant populations competing for inadequate resources? If class sizes are the largest in the EU and childcare provision are among the worst?
If we continue to hold 350 people with intellectual disabilities in psychiatric hospitals because there is nowhere else for them to go, and the number of people with intellectual disabilities who lack appropriate services actually rose between 2005 and 2006 to 2,371? If one hospital alone (Cork University) has 10,000 people waiting to see a consultant? If the death rate from cancer among Irish women remains the second highest in western Europe? If the infant mortality rate is actually moving upwards?
If 42 per cent of men and half of women in the workforce have no private pension? If a quarter of a million people live in seriously inadequate housing?
Tackling these problems demands more than just an argument about which set of potential ministers is likely to be more competent. Voters will certainly focus on the question of delivery and the quality of individual leadership is certainly an issue. But there needs to be a much larger debate about the nature of governance in Ireland.
Why, for example, was Dr Roderick O'Sullivan's detailed report on the degradation of water quality in Lough Corrib, published in 1996, completely ignored by officials and politicians until Galway's tap-water became a health hazard? Why is the much-heralded and hard-won National Spatial Strategy, supposedly a blueprint for balanced growth and sustainable development, ignored by the Government itself? Why are modest mechanisms for increasing accountability, such as the Freedom of Information Act, so easily gutted? Politicians need to tell us not just about what they would do in government, but about how they would govern.
Most importantly, politicians need to make a fundamental conceptual leap. The Irish political and civic consensus over the last 20 years has been built around one key assumption. Both the main political parties and the social partners agreed on a rough division of labour between the economy and the State. The economy produces the wealth, the State takes some and uses it to address social problems and inequalities.
The argument is about how much the State takes and what it does, not about the basic process. It is a model that has, up to a point, served us well. But it is no longer adequate to the challenges facing us over the next 10 years. In the last phase of Ireland's development, social policy emerged on the back of economic success. In the next phase, economic development depends crucially on social policy.
This isn't some far-out radical notion. It is what the business, labour, farming and official interests gathered in the National and Economic Forum have been saying for two years now. They know that Ireland has to move up the global value chain by becoming a successful "knowledge economy".
They know that this can't happen in a society that leaves many in a state of resentful dependency, that can't plan its growth coherently, that can't provide world-class educational and health, that has so many children whose potential is stunted from the start.
They are convinced, as they put it, "that the development of a dynamic, knowledge-based economy has inherent social implications that can serve social justice and a more egalitarian society, but also that the development of Ireland's welfare state is integral to sustaining the dynamism and flexibility of its economy. In a globalised world, the strength of Ireland's economy and the attractiveness of its society will rest on the same foundation - the human qualities of those who participate in them."
That task of integrating economic progress and social justice is the fundamental job of our society for the next decade. Whoever can articulate the challenge with most clarity over the coming weeks will best convince the electorate that they have what it takes to meet it.