We have an odd kind of democratic system. For historical reasons we have a weak form of local democracy. And we also have a national parliamentary system that in recent times has provided a very limited form of democratic control over the executive - although the operations of the strengthened Public Accounts Committee suggest that more effective parliamentary accountability may be in the offing.
But at another level what might loosely be called popular democracy has become immensely powerful - has, indeed, got out of control. All kinds of local groups, as well as various vested interests, claim, and seek to exercise, veto rights over our public authorities whenever an effort is made to pursue a broader public interest.
At a time when rapidly changing economic conditions are creating a need for ever speedier reactions by the public authorities, the scale of consultation demanded by, and conceded to, local and vested interests in our State is drastically slowing down the process of public administration.
Of course some of these consultative processes are necessary to protect the longer-term interests of our community - for example the planning permissions system, without which the damage done to our environment would be many times worse than what we have seen over the decades.
But the cumulative delaying effects of consultations with local interests, on top of the already slow and cumbersome decision-making system at Government/Civil Service level, is now creating serious bottlenecks for an economy growing at a pace that has had no parallel in Europe since the immediate post-war recovery period.
We have seen this recently in Dublin, where the promised introduction of quality bus corridors and the construction of the Luas system are taking years longer than was planned. In the case of Luas, the blame lies primarily with central Government, which, having failed to advert to the traffic demand implications of rapid growth, allowed an inadequate scheme to proceed at a leisurely pace, then took several years to accept the need to review it, and finally fudged the whole issue, failing in the end of the day to provide for the demand the system is going to have to handle when completed.
The QBC delays, by contrast, seem to have been due to the length of time given to consulting commercial and private interests along these routes. The system of bus corridors that should have been in operation long ago is not now scheduled to be ready until the end of next year - and even then is apparently going to lack key elements such as "park-and-ride" facilities in the suburbs.
And look at the motorway system in and around Dublin. We must surely be unique in Europe in having a principal national highway - the road leading from Dublin towards Cork and Limerick - which starts to be a motorway only after the traffic begins to thin out 20 miles or so from the capital. As we enter the next century the most heavily-loaded section, that from Dublin to Naas, remains a grossly overcrowded and dangerous dual-carriageway, with dangerous entry and exit points and crossroads.
Why is this the case? Many years ago I was chairman of the road traffic committee of Foras Forbartha, the independent environmental research body that was abolished by one of Charles Haughey's governments and brought back into the Department of the Environment.
In that capacity 30 years ago I raised the question of whether the volume of traffic on what was then the single-carriageway Naas Road might already, or soon afterwards, justify a motorway.
The answer I got was that the Department of Local Government had not evolved a motorway standard, i.e. a traffic volume figure that would require a motorway, rather than a dual carriageway. And, it seemed, they were not prepared to do so, precisely because if such a standard were to be drawn up it would have to be based on international standards - and those standards would require the construction of a motorway between Dublin and Naas. And that would cost too much.
And so an inadequate dual carriageway was built - and 30 years later that is still all that we've got on this route, until one gets to Naas. At that point, to cater for the reduced traffic, the road divides into two new motorways - one to Kilcullen and the other to the Curragh!
Since the early 1970s what Dublin's traffic problem has self-evidently needed has been a combination of five principal innovations:
1. Frequent suburban, or light rail, services on about seven key routes, viz. from Drogheda/Howth, Ballymun/Finglas, Maynooth/Castleknock, Kildare/Naas, Tallaght, Cabinteely/Dundrum, Greystones/Bray/Dun Laoghaire, operating virtually on a 24-hour basis.
2. Quality bus corridors on roads between these rail routes, served by an adequate number of comfortable buses charging reasonable fares, and provided with suburban park-and-ride facilities.
3. A frequent main line service on a new rail route between the airport and the city.
4. A sufficient supply of clean, modern taxis that would facilitate, inter alia, intra-city business movement by people prepared to use commuter public transport, who need to move around the city during the day.
5. Enforced street car-parking restrictions, limitations on the construction of off-street car-parking, and almost certainly also car-pricing for movement of private vehicles, along the lines of the system now being introduced in Oslo.
I have the impression that 2006 is the earliest date by which we are promised that a reasonable proportion - by no means all - of those measures will be in operation.
Other countries seem to have been able to complete projects of this kind much more quickly and efficiently. To the extent that this is true, should we not examine why we are so much slower, with a view to eliminating administrative blockages, over-elaborate consultation mechanisms, and restrictive practices designed to protect sectoral interests? Such interests include the taxi lobby, to which the Taoiseach seems to have succumbed.
There seem to be an extraordinary unwillingness in Government circles to realise just how damaging the absence of an acceptable taxi service is to our State's image in the minds of businessmen from other countries.
The shortage of taxis is not just an inconvenience for native city-dwellers: it is a scandal that is damaging our reputation abroad.
At the same time we need to reconsider the present monopoly operation of bus services by a single provider, Dublin Bus, which is vulnerable to staff and trade union pressure.
Dublin Bus is in fact a more efficient operation than it is often credited for. If bus services are irregular and inadequate, this has primarily reflected a combination of two failures by the public authorities - the failure to tackle the Dublin traffic problem and the failure to provide sufficient capital to secure an adequate number of buses and a sufficient urban bus subsidy to keep fares at the kind of level normal in many other countries.
But in the absence of competition, the interests of any company's staff are liable to take precedence over the public interest. However, if a separate agency had the function of determining what routes should be operated and what frequencies were required on each, and if batches of routes were then opened for bidding on the basis of the lowest subsidy (or, if profitable, the highest payment), I suspect that Dublin Bus would win most, perhaps even all, of these concessions.
But the company's hand would be strengthened against any unreasonable claims by employees, and competition of this kind would ensure efficient operation.
The simple fact is that in this State the public interest needs to be given a much greater priority in all our affairs than has been the case hitherto, and private interests need to be restrained from exploiting monopoly power.