Three signs that the old certainties have gone

Profound change happens so seldom in Irish politics that it can be hard to recognise it when it does. Governments and ministers come and go. Elections punctuate the general routine with the thrill of a blood sport. But the notion that the system itself might have been radically altered seems almost impossible. Which may be why we have made so little of the evidence in the last fortnight that something very fundamental has happened to the way political power works in Ireland. Like most changes, this one has accumulated at a pace so slow as to be almost imperceptible. But three separate events in the last two weeks allow us to see it for what it is. One - the establishment of the new institutions in Northern Ireland and between North and South - comes complete with all the right labels marked "historic" and "epoch-making". But the other two - the collapse of Charlie McCreevy's Budget and the publication of the Public Accounts Committee's report on the evasion of DIRT - are only a little less worthy of those epithets.

Taken together, these three developments mark the end of a notion of government that has shaped Irish politics throughout the century. For what they have in common is a huge shift away from the notion that a government is the single legitimate expression of the will of the majority as that will is expressed every few years in a popular election. Or, to put it another way, the end of a particular notion of national sovereignty that we have long taken for granted. Sovereignty has been the big issue of 20th century Irish politics. What is generally called the national question is really the sovereignty question. In the upheavals from 1912 to 1923, in the cold war between North and South in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and in the Northern Ireland conflict of the last 30-odd years, this is what was at issue. From whom did sovereignty derive? Over what territory did it operate? How could it be exercised? How and when could it be extended?

The answers to these questions remained a source of violent division until very recently. But in fact the basic notion of how sovereignty worked was shared by both the South and the North. Every four or five years, there was an election to choose a government by majority vote, and the winner became the sovereign power. Within the bounds of the law, the elected government did what it thought best. Parliament was there merely as an expression of the majority vote. Gradually, though, this notion began to be eroded. Three things became obvious. One was that traditional majority rule in the North was a disaster waiting to happen. When it did happen and the political system collapsed into vicious conflict, it became clear that no possible solution to that conflict could be constructed without fundamentally altering the old notion of sovereignty. In the event, the solution adopted had to be even more radical than anyone had imagined, virtually ditching the traditional notion of sovereignty in favour of an extraordinarily open style of partnership government.

Secondly, membership of the European Union taught the Republic a valuable lesson. It learned, over time, that trading off a large degree of notional sovereignty doesn't actually result in a loss of real power. On the contrary, the State has become far more powerful as a result of EU membership. Power is about ability to make choices, and the prosperity that has been shaped in part by the EU gives Irish governments far more real choices than they ever had before. At the same time, the structures of the EU provided the governmental elite, especially the civil service, with a new experience of attaining goals through negotiation rather than through diktat.

Thirdly, there was social partnership. It is worth remembering that this process began as a response to the all-too-obvious fact that sovereign governments had, by the late 1980s, made a dreadful mess of the task of governing. Ironically, the result of their exercise of sovereignty was, by 1987, a crisis in the public finances which threatened to place the State in the power of foreign bankers. The transformation of that situation required, and received, a new approach in which government reached a consensus with the social partners. That process, in turn, is becoming ever broader and deeper.

This approach does much more than replace the old language of a single "will of the people" with a new language of agreement and consensus. Prof Rory O'Donnell has pointed out that the kind of partnership approach that has been developing here is not one which starts out with a bland consensus among the partners. It has worked, rather, by identifying a problem and then trying to solve it. "Rather than being the precondition for partnership, consensus and shared understanding are more like an outcome. It is a remarkable, if not easily understood fact, that deliberation which is problem-solving and practical produces consensus even when there are underlying conflicts of interest, and even when there was no shared understanding at the outset," says Prof O'Donnell. Partnership, in other words, assumes the existence of real conflicts and works from there. And, of course, the Northern Ireland peace deal makes this even more explicit.

WHAT has now happened is that these developments have suddenly started to act on the political system itself. We have the Republic's cabinet discussing policy with its Northern counterpart. We have, for the first time in the PAC report, a real and effective example of a crossparty consensus emerging from a practical attempt to tackle a real problem.

And we have, in the implosion of McCreevy's Budget, stark evidence of what happens to a Minister who tries to pretend that government can still work in the old way. For the first time, a Budget has been defeated not by a vote in the Dail but by the wider, more diffuse power that now lies with the social partners and with interest groups in civil society. McCreevy's humiliation, then, was also the final humbling of the old, closed system of government by majority rule. The end of that system offers real opportunities for the renovation of Irish politics. Sooner or later, the kind of radical reimagining of politics that has happened in the North will have to take place in the South too. Whoever has the ability to make it happen sooner will set the agenda for the next 20 years.