Three things are needed for a parliamentary democracy to work well: a government; an opposition with enough support to offer a credible alternative; and a sufficient degree of policy differentiation between the two to provide the electorate with a meaningful choice. Without such an opposition any government is liable to become lazy and inefficient, if not worse; as with the 19791997 Tory government in Britain.
That is why I have always regarded as examples of lazy political thinking occasional Labour Party suggestions that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael should merge.
A government with the kind of potentially permanent majority that a Fianna Fail-Fine Gael merger would produce would be bad for democracy. It might, of course, be good for the Labour Party, support for which would in such circumstances no doubt grow over time. But given the enduring character of party loyalties, even in their somewhat attenuated modern form, the time it would take before such a mammoth party would lose its majority to Labour might be dangerously long.
Since the foundation of the State we have had two 16-year periods of government. The first, from 1932 to 1948, was contributed to by a combination of two factors: the difficulty Fine Gael, as the State-founding party, clearly experienced in adjusting to the task of becoming an effective opposition in the 1930s, and the second World War, which made many voters reluctant to change horses until the war was over. While in this instance the quality of government does not seem to have been too much affected by the length of office, this experience contributed in turn to Fianna Fail's subsequent difficulty in adjusting to opposition in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Of course, in the 1950s the whole political system suffered to a degree from the longevity of revolutionary politicians, who - de Valera and Cosgrave excepted - had typically reached positions of leadership before or around the age of 30, and many of whom consequently remained in key positions for almost 40 years.
Some believe this may have contributed to the political and economic failures of the 1950s. For the first 30 years or so of the life of the State the dominant role of these revolutionary leaders in our public life had the effect of discouraging young people from entering politics.
The first significant cohort of new entrants to politics belonged to the generation born in the 1920s, a few of whom stood for election in the late 1940s or 1950s, but most of whom did not hold office until the 1960s, 40 years or more after the foundation of the State. That was the period of Fianna Fail's second 16-year period in government. And this time the length of the period in office proved more damaging, for several reasons.
It is, of course, true that after Lemass became Taoiseach in 1959 that government went through a period of vigorous and constructive activity. Far from reversing the radical steps to dismantle Fianna Fail's self-sufficiency policy that the second, 1954-1957, coalition had begun to take during the winter of 1956-57, Lemass built on these reforms.
And, in the early 1960s, Lemass's government applied for EU membership, prepared for free trade, started to open our markets to British products, and initiated the process that led eventually to the quadrupling of numbers in both the second-level and higher education sectors.
But the second half of this 16-year period was a less happy one. The pace of change slowed notably. Inflation was allowed to get quite out of control, so that by early 1973 it was running at over 10 per cent, fuelled by wage increases in excess of 15 per cent; a very poor base indeed from which to face into the oil crisis that erupted the following autumn.
Coming into government in March of that year with a range of radical policies, the national coalition government found that, far from precautionary preparations having been made by the Civil Service to prepare for the possible need to implement these policies, there was strong resistance at Civil Service level to some of the changes.
Thus, instead of helping to implement the new government's capital taxation proposals, repeated attempts were made to persuade the government to abandon these reforms. This and other cases of resistance to change seemed to emanate from a period during which the Civil Service had become unaccustomed to a government initiating significant policy changes.
But, much more disturbing in the long run was the fact that during that 16-year period a few of the younger entrants to politics had been people who, whatever may have been their initial motivation for entering politics, were eventually prepared to abuse political power for personal financial gain. This cancer might not have developed in the way it did if that government had not remained so long in office. Had this malign process been interrupted by periods in opposition, the damage might have been much less.
Of course, that second 16-year period of one-party government has since been followed by three decades of constantly-changing governments, even though three of these in succession, in quite different formats, were led by the same party over a period of seven years. Changes of government provide a safeguard against political laziness and arrogance, but 10 changes of government in less than 30 years could be regarded as overdoing the process of keeping governments in check. Such frequent changes of government can also have a potential down side, leading to damaging discontinuities in policy. However, in our case such discontinuities have in fact taken place only in the area of redistributive policies, where the presence of the PDs in two of these six governments has led to temporary shifts away from broadly progressive redistribution policies and towards regressive policies favouring the better-off.
However, in the case of the present Government this shift to the right has apparently lasted only for a single Budget. But so far as economic policy is concerned, during these three decades of ever-changing governments there was only one brief, but enormously damaging, discontinuity, between 1977 and 1981. During that period some taxes were abolished, and current public spending was boosted from less than 39 per cent to over 52 per cent of GNP.
By the time the government changed in 1981, Exchequer borrowing for the following year threatened to reach a figure well over 20 per cent of GNP as against the figure of 9.4 per cent to which it had been reduced in 1977 in the aftermath of the first oil crisis. It took seven years to get this runaway crisis under control.
But apart from this unique episode of major mismanagement, successive governments have maintained a consistent fiscal record. And there has been absolute continuity in the three other key policies: low corporate taxation (since the late 1950s); expansion of education (since the late 1960s); and, after extravagant pay increases had been "talked down" from over 23 per cent in 1980 to 4 per cent in 1987, the negotiation of a series of social contracts that has ensured pay moderation, and thus phenomenally rapid employment growth.
Our combination of frequent government changes with well-designed and consistently applied macro-economic policies is probably unique. But in other policy areas there remain serious weaknesses.
Despite the fact that over the next 10 or 12 years we look like experiencing an expansion of resources unparalleled in Europe outside periods of recovery from the destruction of major wars, in the years since 1993 there has been no sign of politicians and/or public servants planning ahead to deploy these massive resources in the most effective way. Instead, as they have become available, these substantial additional resources have so far been doled out in an unplanned way in successive Budgets.
At the same time, the geographical distribution of resources available to the State seems to be influenced not so much by an objective analysis of needs and priorities as by demeaning "pork-barrelling" at cabinet level; a political practice that fosters the distortion of cabinet formation on geographical grounds rather than on the basis of perceived ability to govern well. In this respect we are still behaving more like a proverbial Third World country than a prosperous northern European democracy. Indeed, the way cabinet formation is spoken of in terms of "the car" going to a particular county more closely resembles tribalism in some parts of Africa than anything known elsewhere in Europe.
It is important that the economic success we have achieved does not blind us to these deficiencies in our political system; not just the element of corruption, which happily we can now hope to see weeded out of the system, but also other abuses and weaknesses that could prevent our people from securing the full benefits of their collective economic achievements.