Fine Gael and Labour promise radical changes but they cop out on the big issues, writes VINCENT BROWNE
THE MOST depressing feature of this coming election is that so little will change with it. Fine Gael and Labour have promised that.
Both parties have published documents that promise radical institutional change, both parties cop out on the big issues.
Yes, the peripheral changes which both parties propose are of some significance. Both propose a greater involvement of the Dáil in preparing legislation, before it is actually drafted. Both propose new arrangements for the scrutiny of public expenditure and the budgetary process. Both propose bringing the operation of State agencies within the ambit of accountability; giving more teeth to the Freedom of Information provisions; the establishment of a whistleblower charter and strengthening the powers of the Comptroller and Auditor General.
Labour proposes a constitutional convention which, inter alia, would examine the institutional structure of the State. Both promise electoral reform of some sort. Both want the Dáil to sit more often. Labour wants to curtail the use of the guillotine on Bills going through the Oireachtas “except in exceptional circumstances” – which looks like no change at all.
However all these proposals confirm that things will go on as usual but with, perhaps, a little more urgency and a little more transparency. You can bet both parties are fairly resolutely opposed to doing anything significant about the glaring deficiencies in our institutional set-up.
In its long-winded introduction to New Government, Better Government, Labour engages in the usual rhetorical flourishes: “We have to ensure that individual citizens feel a far greater sense of involvement in the decisions that shape their lives. But fewer and fewer people feel a sense of ownership of their politics. We need a more practical democracy, one that empowers citizens and ends the sense of exclusion of so many of our people.” And it follows this up with nothing at all that might involve citizens “in the decisions that shape their lives”, nothing at all about empowering citizens and ending the sense of exclusion.
Apart, that is, from a fairly meaningless participation of a few citizens, randomly selected, in the proposed constitutional convention and a fairly pathetic petitions facility.
I previously have offered, in these columns, a few proposals on how citizens might have a greater sense of involvement in decisions that shape their lives: that citizens could demand that any issue be brought to a referendum of the people at the behest of, say, 200,000 citizens, each signing a petition to that effect; that to involve far more people in politics, term limits be imposed whereby nobody be permitted to serve more than two terms in elected office.
There is no way Fine Gael or Labour would countenance either of these proposals because it would interfere with the entitlement of the political class to do things their own way. They wouldn’t put it like that of course. The objections to the referenda proposal would take the form of “yielding to populism” (as though that doesn’t happen anyway and as though protections could not be introduced that would guard against a panic response that affect fundamental rights); the incoherence that would arise were the people to have a referendum on every single decision that arose (as though anybody proposed that).
Objections to the term limits idea would be that they would curtail people’s democratic options in elections by precluding candidates that had been elected twice already (as though such curtailment is not offset by the pre-eminent necessity to involve as many citizens as possible in the democratic process); that term limits would preclude those in many ways best qualified because of the experience they had amassed (yes, but again overridden by the necessity to broaden the political base, and anyway experience and expertise would not be lost if there were a vibrant political community surrounding the formal institutions).
As for the Dáil, the real problem is not that it sits too little (that too) or that the wrong people are elected (I don’t think that is an issue relevant to the Dáil’s effectiveness), it is that the Dáil fails in its most important duty: to hold the government of the day accountable. This is because the government of the day controls the body that is supposed to hold it accountable. And that issue is not addressed at all by the two parties.
There are only two ways of dealing with that problem: the incorporation into the Constitution of a provision which would make it an offence to interfere with the conscientious autonomous vote of any Dáil member, in other words get rid of the whips system; and/or the introduction of a device known as a “decisive minority”, which would allow a minority in the Dáil or on an Oireachtas committee (say a third) to insist on an inquiry with full powers into any matter and a debate on any matter, without guillotine.
There is no way Fine Gael and/or Labour would agree to that, for it would curtail their power and force meaningful accountability on them, just as they are about to get into government after 14 long years.