Why are elected Dáil members abrogating responsibility for Nama to party members?
THE GREEN Party is playing a dangerous game. Whatever view one takes of the merits or otherwise of Nama, it must be unnerving that the fate of the most significant legislative proposal ever to come before Dáil Éireann is being left in the hands of a few hundred Green Party members.
The disproportionate power that TDs from a smaller party can hold in this country if they sign up for government can itself be an uncomfortable reality. That however, is at least a predictable consequence of the constitutional representative democracy in which we live. Under the rules of our politics, adopted by the people in the referendum on Bunreacht Na hÉireann in 1937, the people do not elect the government.
Voters elect a Dáil of representatives and any group of TDs who make up a majority can then elect a government and pass laws. The dynamics of our party systems and the declining electoral fortunes of Fianna Fáil have meant that almost all our governments since 1989 have been coalitions.
The leadership of smaller parties going into government have usually sought the approval of party conference before entering coalition. This was the approach taken by Dick Spring when leader of the Labour Party and, more recently, by the Green Party when entering the Government with Fianna Fáil. On each of these occasions however, the decision at the particular party’s post-election but pre-coalition gathering was on a single question, usually in the form of a motion to approve an entire programme for government rather than a line-by-line vote on each policy.
The Greens have, however, now become the first party in government to leave the decision on how they will vote on a piece of legislation to a gathering of party members, almost all of whom hold no electoral office.
The Greens claim to be the most democratic party, but what they are now set upon is a distortion of our democracy. Letting a clique of party membership decide the fate of legislation is not democracy; it is oligarchy – government by a select few rather than government by the people.
The mandate to shape the Nama legislation that John Gormley and Eamon Ryan enjoy at Cabinet flows from the fact that their nomination as Ministers was approved by a majority of the Dáil on May 7th, 2008.
The vote which they, along with Ciarán Cuffe, Trevor Sargent, Paul Gogarty and Mary White, enjoy in Dáil Éireann on this legislation arises from the mandate to represent bestowed upon each of them by thousands of electors who voted for them in their respective constituencies in the 2007 general election. Why then are they abrogating their mandates to a self-selecting gathering of Green Party membership scheduled for October 10th next?
The vote that the party’s two Senators will enjoy on the Nama legislation – assuming the Bill gets to the Seanad – arises solely from the fact that the party was gifted two of the nominees to that House available to the Taoiseach elected by the Dáil. Yet Dan Boyle and Deirdre De Burca will also have to follow what the Green Party membership decide.
Of course parties should listen to their grassroots. The activists who have slogged at lamp posts, doorsteps, church gates and in party policy forums deserve to have particular attention paid to their views. What they are not entitled to is a veto.
Not since David Trimble left himself beholden to the Ulster Unionist Council in a manner that regularly stalled the peace process and ultimately destroyed him politically has a party leadership allowed itself to become so entangled by its internal rules.
Party grassroots are by their nature more committed and usually more conservative. They are often more hardline. Seán Lemass would never have managed to abandon protectionism if he had put it to a vote at a Fianna Fáil ardfheis. Albert Reynolds could never have transformed Fianna Fáil’s Northern Ireland policy from one of “unity first” to one of “peace first” if he allowed himself to be constrained by the attitude of his grassroots. Similarly, it is likely that there would never have been Garret FitzGerald’s Constitutional Crusade and there certainly would never have been Alan Dukes’s Tallaght Strategy if the decision on these initiatives had been left to Fine Gael branch representatives.
Gormley and his parliamentary colleagues may yet manage to chart a course through the particularly complex route of decision-making which appears to operate in their party. It is unfortunate, however, that they have allowed Nama to become the sole, or at least predominant, focus of the most recent wave of internal anger within the party.
The Greens’ members are bruised by the outcome of last June’s local elections, in which they were damaged by the electoral hit directed at Fianna Fáil.
Their post-electoral trauma is all the more intense because of the intimate nature of internal dealings of a small party. Members are understandably frustrated by the situation in which they find themselves – stuck in no-man’s land, they realise there is no point in putting themselves into the voters’ firing line by charging into an election.
The decision-making process is all the more difficult for them around Nama because it touches on issues of particular sensitivity to the Green Party’s alternative view of how our economy and society should be organised.
The membership should have an input, but it would be more democratic if the parliamentary party made the ultimate decision on how the party will vote on the legislation. After all, they are the ones who were elected to legislate.