There's a frightening pay-off to ditching the EU and the social partnership - reliance on our own politicians, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
IF WE want to understand where we're at right now, we have to first deal with the apparent contradiction of the last 15 years in Ireland. On the one hand, we've had an outstanding economic performance, bolstered by a social transformation achieved with remarkably little conflict. On the other, we've had nothing like the brilliant leadership that these achievements would seem to imply.
Except in their dealings with Northern Ireland, Irish governments have been outstanding only in their mediocrity. Their default mode has been smug laziness punctuated by episodes of hare-brained hyperactivity in which bad ideas (Eircom privatisation, the Bertie Bowl, decentralisation, e-voting etc) are pursued with blind zeal.
How do we explain this contradiction? We have a dysfunctional political system, dominated by two almost identical parties offering no coherent set of ideological choices, undermined by corruption and clientelism and increasing unaccountable. But, until recently, the economy has functioned extremely well and Irish society, though it has performed much less impressively, has nevertheless achieved some real progress and coped with some difficult challenges.
How has this been done? The answer is one that we've kept quiet about, because it is decidedly uncomfortable for a republican democracy. We've managed because two large institutional forces have combined to force some good habits on to our way of doing public business and at the same time limited the harm that our elected governments could do. To put it bluntly, these institutions have saved us from the worst consequences of democracy - our insistence on electing mediocre politicians.
The two institutions in question are the European Union and social partnership. As it happens, we're now on the brink of simultaneously ditching, or fundamentally weakening, the influence on public governance of both of them. We could actually find ourselves - and I am sorry to inject such a horrible thought into an already gloomy summer - entirely dependent on the geniuses we elect.
Both the EU and social partnership have been important for reasons that are somewhat different from the ones that seem obvious. We think of the EU's contribution to the transformation of the Irish economy largely in terms of money - the billions of euro delivered to what was then one of the poorest parts of western Europe. But, as Rory O'Donnell has astutely pointed out, the most important effect of the EU money was indirect. The money had to be spent in a planned way and it had to be accounted for. Notions like long-term thinking and cost/benefit analysis, which are still absent from the political culture, were smuggled into public governance.
This dovetailed perfectly with the requirements of social partnership. The various national deals over the last 20 years have probably been less important for their impact on wage levels than for their creation of a framework for a common analysis of Ireland's current situation and future challenges. However unsatisfactory the outcomes in many areas of social policy, social partnership at least created a wider arena for policy debates and a way of setting goals and measuring progress.
Just as importantly, the EU and social partnership both operated negatively. They stopped governments from behaving quite as stupidly as they would otherwise have done. Without EU environmental legislation, for example, the damage done by Fianna Fáil's unholy alliance with the development industry would have been unlimited.
Without the EU's enforcement of equal pay for women, the movement of women into the workforce (one of the key drivers of the economic boom) would not have happened.
Without the minimum wage and the employment rights enforced through social partnership deals, the influx of migrant workers, problematic as it has been, could have been socially disastrous.
Now, the conventional thing to say about the EU and social partnership is that both have created a democratic deficit. This is undoubtedly true. EU legislation has emerged from a process that remains, for most citizens, largely opaque. Social partnership has involved key aspects of public policy being determined in talks behind closed doors between people who are not themselves accountable to the general public. But the awkward thing about this democratic deficit is that, to say the great unsayable, it has actually been rather a good thing. When democracy is dysfunctional, it makes sense to set limits to the potential folly of governments and to force them to think about the future.
The price, of course, is a bureaucratic and managerial paternalism in which various kinds of Irish and European apparatchiks decide what's good for us. It is also an even deeper atrophy of the political system which, instead of being reformed, is increasingly bypassed. And, at some point, there's bound to be a revolt against this paternalism.
We're going through that revolt at the moment, with the Lisbon Treaty vote and a breakdown in social partnership. This is absolutely fine, so long as we're prepared to accept the consequences. We're deciding to rely solely on the wisdom, creativity, foresight and leadership of the Government we've actually elected.
Personally, I find the prospect terrifying, but perhaps it really is time that we get what we vote for.