RENEWING THE REPUBLIC:One-third of TDs should be elected from a constituency comprising the entire State to make government leadership accountable to the country as a whole rather than a clique from their party, writes JOHN ROGERS
BEFORE WE can properly tackle the economic dissolution of the country, we have first to establish the extent of our economic disintegration and its root cause and source.
What is the extent of the public and private debt that has been accumulated since 2001? Why was that debt accumulated – for what purpose, whether public or private – and what was the essential demand that underlay the creation of the debt? Was it greed? Who allowed it to be accumulated? Is it the case that responsible institutions of government did not know it was happening and did not know of the perils involved?
Seasoned and responsible economists wrote about the escalating debt but were ignored or treated as cranks. The Department of Finance, the Central Bank and the Financial Regulator sailed on, ignoring the impending crisis; indeed, they seemed to steer the country with its bloated cargo of debt into the iceberg, and as she shuddered and began to sink, they persisted in ignoring the reality.
The Government and the social partners persisted in their delusion and agreed a national pay deal in September 2008 that we could not afford.
Remember that in June 2008 the Government sought cuts of €600 million in public expenditure. So the system knew that there was an impending crisis in the public finances. Yet, in September, the Taoiseach sat up all night to await the outcome of the “successful” social partnership deal – a deal that all of the partners must have known was fatally flawed because we simply could not afford it. That deal has been a principal factor in causing the industrial relations crisis that now pervades the public service; and all the participants in the partnership process, particularly the government and the Department of Finance, carry the brunt of the responsibility for the current crisis.
But why were we encouraged and permitted to ratchet up such overwhelming national debt and to make this improvident pay deal? Plainly, the responsible institutions – the Central Bank, the Department of Finance, and the banking regulatory system – failed us. We elect government to provide direction and policy for these institutions but successive governments irresponsibly applied policies that added tonnage to the massive debt.
The root causes of this irresponsibility in government are a default in our value system and the political system itself. It is the latter that I wish to address here.
The formation of government here is determined by the relative political party strengths in the Dáil. But the selection of the Taoiseach, the leader of the government, who determines the composition of the government, depends entirely on the internal dynamics of the principal political parties.
One could describe the political parties as tribes with several independent and sometimes antagonistic fiefdoms. It is the relative power of the aggregate of coalescing fiefdoms in the two larger parties that determines the leadership of those parties and, therefore, the potential leadership of the government.
The constitutional model is that the people elect deputies to the Dáil from constituencies; the deputies then select the taoiseach and the taoiseach is then responsible to the Dáil.
We have been born into this system, we understand it, work it by voting in elections and manipulating it as well as we can, but does it work? Is it not basically a system that selects leaders on the basis of the relative strengths of fiefdoms within a tribe?
The truth is, as a system it gives us a leadership that is selected by a process of deal-making between deputies. The allegiance of deputies is first of all to their party, as with the fief to the tribe. The difficulty with this is that a leader’s political responsibility is determined, first of all, by his allegiance to his party – he won’t do anything that will hurt his party as he may lose the support of his deputies – fiefdoms would desert the tribe.
None of this is fanciful; we have all watched the tide go out for party political leaders. TDs’ support for their leader or taoiseach ebbs away as the leader is perceived to have become a greater liability to his party.
To imbue responsibility and thorough accountability in the leadership of the country, we should alter this system so leaders are selected by a process that engages their responsibility to the people on a direct basis.
Let’s assume a Dáil of, say, 120 deputies. Let us arbitrarily, for the sake of discussion, divide that membership into two groups. The first comprises 80 deputies elected from 16 constituencies of five deputies each. The balance of 40 deputies could be elected on the same day on panels of eight from the country as a whole; in other words, all of those 40 deputies would have a mandate from the country as a whole – not from regional or county-based constituencies.
A rule that the taoiseach and, say, five ministers approved by the Dáil, must be from among the 40 deputies elected from the country as a whole, would ensure such a taoiseach and ministers would have a direct mandate from the people and could truly be said to be not only responsible to the Dáil but to the people. This would transform the sense of political responsibility and accountability of the leaders of a government.
It would not dilute or break the party system, but it would mean that the parties going into an election would have to choose a leader who would secure the broad support of the people of the country as a whole. Of course, the Taoiseach would have to be elected by the Dáil, but he would now be a Taoiseach with a mandate from the people – not merely the choice of the dominant fiefdoms in the House.
One of the bonuses of this system would be that there would be a substantial cadre of deputies in the Dáil whose mandate would be truly national. There would remain 80 constituency-based deputies whose mandate would be derived from their constituencies and they would continue to pursue the best interests of their constituents alongside the national interest.
The basic idea behind this scheme is to address the deficit in a sense of responsibility and accountability by our political leadership to the country at large. It should dynamically focus the mind of the political leadership on the needs of the country and transfer the leadership’s obligation of responsibility away from their tribal party interests and back to the needs of the people.
Fine Gael’s recent attempt to adopt a list system as part of our parliamentary process is the antithesis of what is suggested here. List systems proceed on the basis that persons on the list are elected on the basis of the strength of their party vote. They are not elected by direct mandate of electors who have voted for the particular candidate, which is an essential feature of the idea of having a sizeable proportion of the Dáil directly elected by the entire country as a constituency.
It is absolutely vital that the people demand of the party political system that it carry out a revolutionary reform of the Oireachtas. A core principle of any such reform should be that the new system would establish a link of responsibility and accountability directly between the government and the people. We have to break the present system in which the principal loyalty of party leaders is to their party and tribe.
Enda Kenny’s recent retreat from his proposals to reform the Oireachtas when confronted by the vested interests of the Dáil club demonstrates just how fragile a leader’s “leadership” can be. It also shows how it is necessary for the people to drive home, well in advance of the coming election, their demand for a commitment by the parties to true reform of the Oireachtas.
Indeed, the people should take this into their own hands now by forming pressure groups that would be free-standing and independent of the political parties and that would put forward concrete proposals for reform. It could be that in the lead-up to the general election and the presidential election, the people could make it clear that their support for candidates in these elections would be wholly dependent on a commitment by candidates to a truly revolutionary reform of the Oireachtas.
Plainly, a programme of such reform is a major project and it may have to be devised in stages, with appropriate participation by the people in its various phases.
The people should approach the next presidential election on the basis that presidential candidates would be expected to ensure that the presidential election becomes a forum for a continuing reform process in which all institutions, including the presidency, are analysed critically so that they can be reformed the better to serve us.
John Rogers is a senior counsel. He was attorney general of Ireland from December 1984 to March 1987 during the Fine Gael- Labour coalition led by Garret FitzGerald and Dick Spring, who nominated him to the position