“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” Thomas Jefferson.

The recent poll in the Irish Times (here) provides an interesting link into what has gone wrong in Ireland in recent years. The facts revealed are one thing, in that may Irish voters are just plain wrong about many of the assumptions they make about their own country. But what’s even more revealing about this is the fact that the political establishment, from Fianna Fail to Fine Gael to Labour, seem incapable of grasping the significance of this. The reality is that there are Fine Gael and Labour backbench TDs who are going to lose their seats in 2016 because voters are actually wrong about the fundamentals of how our country is run. There are voters who think that those same TDs are basically helping themselves personally to funds equal to billions! Yet those same TDs are seemingly unwilling to confront that reality. And not just backbench TDs: just look at the government’s lacklustre response to Eoghan Murphy TD’s Tax Transparency bill, which would have addressed some of the issues.

Why is this? Why are Irish ministers of FF/FG/Lab so unwilling to deal with these issues? Some allege the usual conspiracy theories, but it’s actually worse. The reason Irish governments don’t deal with these issues is because of inertia, conservatism, fear of change (“We’ve never done THAT before, minister”) and a general lack of imagination.  The truth is that the defining ideology of most of FF, FG and Labour is that This Is The Way It Has Always Been Done.

One feature of the poll, for example, is the fact that most people don’t know or believe that most politicians have taken pay cuts. Some quite substantial. Yet the government has proven almost incapable of making a big song and dance about this because ministers are still quite well paid, and so don’t want to make a big noise and draw attention. Instead they let their achievements go unnoticed and let moronic myths take root in the Irish psyche.

In my time in politics I met people who were convinced that TDs paid no tax, that every TD got a chauffeur driven Merc, that 50% of the population is Muslim, that political parties get millions to pay for election campaigns, that refugees get free cars because “Dublin Bus are racist”, and that (I’m not joking) 50% of the national budget goes on TD salaries. As a political activist, I challenged all this nonsense, and got the “Yeah, but you would say that” response.

So here’s my question: whose job is it, on behalf of the state, to wake up every morning and communicate true facts to the Irish electorate? Not spin, but actual fact about how scrapping the government jet will not allow us to create millions of public sector jobs. In the run up to every referendum, we have a Referendum Commission whose loyalty is not to parties but the voter.

Why can’t we have a permanent Voter Commission whose job is to tell the truth every day, and get those facts out?

Fishambles’ “Guaranteed!”, written by Colin Murphy, telling the partly-fictionalised (although ringing true) story of the run up and night of the 2008 bank guarantee, is both informative and entertaining.

Watching it, I was struck by the atmosphere of the audience, who reacted to certain events and statements within the play in a way that a non-Irish audience would, I suspect, never grasp. For example, during the run up to the night, Murphy has his cast, in a wide range of real and imagined roles, read out actual public statements on events (such as “the fundamentals of the economy remain sound”), which on paper sound perfectly reasonable, but in an Irish context cause the audience almost to sneer.

The 2007 election, where the parties compete in an ever spiralling race to promise greater spending increases and bigger tax cuts, when looked at in this context and within the play, comes across as surreal, yet during the election itself was regarded by most people as perfectly reasonable. During the build up to the crisis, Murphy injects Brian Cowen in a series of comical scenes either singing in public or opening things in his constituency. There is a Nero fiddling air to it, yet one can’t help remembering that certainly the people voting for him (and most Irish TDs) were far more motivated by that sort of activity than the careful surveillance of our financial system.

As it happens, I personally felt that Cowen and Lenihan, and indeed even the Central Bank and the Regulator, come out of the story far better than you’d expect. As the options are laid out to the two politicians, every one of them comes with almost horrific side-effects. Faced with time running out, a serious chance of ATMs actually running out of money, both men come to the dawning. realisation that we are in fact a tiny insignificant nation afloat in a vast global financial system. For all the talk of the EU having too much power, the problem on the night is that Europe is (deliberately) just not integrated enough to deal collectively with the crisis, leaving pretty much every man for himself.

The other eye-catching nugget is how irrelevant our political system is, with the rest of the cabinet reduced to being rung by a civil servant and asked how they vote on a plan that could potentially burden the Irish people with a half-a-trillion euro liability. Sadly, watching the scene, you can’t help thinking it would not have made any difference if any more of the sort of people who make up the Irish political system were in the room or not. Christine Lagarde they weren’t.

Where Murphy really succeeds is in that difficult Sorkinesque task of taking a mass of very complex material and turning it into an engaging narrative.

Banking Inquiry? I’d give Colin Murphy an Arts Council grant and access to the DPP’s files. We’d get a much better return for our money. You can check it out here.

I recently attended a seminar hosted by Dr Teresa Reidy, Jane Suiter, Prof David Farrell and others on the outcome of the Seanad referendum. One point, made by Prof Michael Marsh, which made a lot of sense, was the fact that because we didn’t carry out extensive exit polling after the vote, we have no idea what voters were thinking. It’s a very valid point. We go to all this trouble to have  a referendum, and then have no scientific way of measuring the outcome.

Dr Reidy and Prof Farrell also made very solid points about the need for a proper Electoral Commission to manage elections, registration of voters, etc, and it got me thinking.

If political parties are using business-style marketing methods to influence voters, why can’t we have consumer protection style laws and agencies to ensure that the product we buy, a policy through voting, does what it is supposed to do on the (party) label? Continue reading →