Why did the Irish make such a mess of democracy?

http://nialloloughlin.blogspot.com/

Fair play to you Irish. What a great election! The thrilling campaign careered from the gay Joycean scholar candidate being accused of defending a Palestinian child abuser to the Eurovision Song-winning Christian Fundamentalist candidate screeching about car crashes, slashed tyres and attempted murder. The nation watched  as the ex-IRA leader shot down and killed the corrupt and greedy Dragon’s Den ogre, and that was just the Live TV debate!

At the start of the campaign all the presidential candidates lined up on the lawn outside Áras an Uachtaráin, and I wondered where else on earth I’d ever seen such a disparate collection of fading celebrities and ageing politicians gathering to do battle.

And then I was confused. Was this the Irish Presidential Election or the new series of Strictly Come Dancing?

Thanks goodness for Martin McGuinness for metaphorically knocking some sense into the Irish people, who were unbelievably yet again drawn to the guy with the big car and fat cigar. When will you ever learn?

Well, maybe you have, because you voted in the right man. On a national level, Michael D. is a proven humanitarian, peace advocate and a champion of the arts. On a personal level, it feels great that the Head of State of my adopted country is somebody who I have chatted with on the street several times. However sad and egocentric it may be, I’m delighted that the new President knows me by name. We have collaborated together on a few occasions when I was working with teenage Travellers, and way back in 1993 I interviewed him for this colyoom, (excerpts from that interview can be posted here soon, if any colyoomistas would like to see them!).

The diversity of the candidates reflects well on the growing enlightenment of this republic, but the process that they had to undergo to become candidates appears farcical to this Englishman.

After all those years of oppression you had a blank canvas.
After all those years of colonial masters dictating the limitations of your freedom, you had the freedom to deny yourselves any limitations.

Depending on which Irish person happens to be chewing my English ear off, you Irish suffered either 400, 700, or 800 years of brutal colonialism. After all those centuries of having alien overlords imposing their laws upon your country, Irish people could finally choose their own constitution.

You did not have to pander in the slightest to the political model that had been harshly visited upon your country for aeons. You were free to build a fair and just electoral system. You had the chance to devise simple political models that might draw joyful breaths from hearts of every free Irish citizen. Instead, you made an absolutely shabby and disgraceful mess of your democratic processes.

Significant problems arise in both England and Ireland with the elections of the Upper House and Head of State. The English rather ingeniously avoid any controversial democratic practices concerning these two bodies by avoiding elections altogether. Unfair and anachronistic it may be, but at least they don’t pretend that in these areas democracy is at work.

Much as I dislike the House of Lords and feel at best ambivalent about the monarchy, both arcane institutions are starting to compare pretty favourably with the way you Irish have chosen to elect your Upper House and Head of State.

Do you, an educated Irish person, have a clear understanding of who represents you and why? I doubt it. I made some effort to understand how the Seanad is elected, but instead decided you couldn't make it up.

Of the Seanad's 60 members, 11 are elected by the Taoiseach, 6 by university graduates, while 43 are selected from 5 panels, which have a number of members allocated as 5; 11; 11; 9; 7 respectively, with a minimum to be selected from each sub-panel allocated as 2; 4; 4; 3; 3.

You had a blank canvas, but instead chose that good old 11:6:43 ratio that you find naturally occurring absolutely nowhere in nature, mathematics or common sense.

Skipping over the entire debacle of which particular privileged sectors of Irish society are allowed to elect Senators, we arrive at the happy fact that if you want to become President of Ireland, all you have to do is be an Irish citizen, over 35, and nominated by at least 20 members of the Oireachtas or at least 4 local authorities.

Why pluck these seemingly random and pointless numbers from the ether, and apply them to your constitution? Why does your Head of State need the approval of at least 4 local authorities? What possible advantage might people who plan roundabouts and organise wheelie bin runs have over your own decision-making abilities?

You had a blank canvas. Why make it all so complicated and elusive? Why not choose a number, any number, say 1,000 signatures, and a person can run for President?

After 20 years of living here, I suspect that the needless involvement of local authorities has a great deal to do with gombeen politics and nothing more. If Sean Gallagher had not been able to take the ‘Roundabout’ route he’d have had to parade his true Fianna Fail colours, at a time when that is political suicide.

Such circuitous Irish behaviour as the Presidential candidature process is often excused as a post-colonial reaction to years of trying to secure freedom by keeping secrets from the Powers-That-Be. Now your very own Irish Powers-That-Be are able to deny freedom to the Irish people by obfuscation within their own constitution.

After all those years you had a blank canvas. Your electoral systems could have been gloriously simple. Yet the very same Celtic twirl of thought that created the Back Door system in the GAA Championship, whereby a team can beat another in a knockout competition and later lose to the same team in the final, has created an electoral Jackson Pollock.

This referendum is the Emperor's New Clothes of democracy!

It's a shame that I now feel so apathetic and cynical about the European Union.
20 years ago I was a strong and fervent believer in the power of European unity, but looking back now, I wonder how much of that was down to the desperate and urgent need we all then felt to calm the Soviet and American superpowers, who were forever threatening to use Europe as the venue for their nuclear war.
In my mind I dreamed of a United States of Europe, strong enough to tell the big bad boys to shut up, go away, take their Intercontinental Ballistic Nuclear Missiles and station them a lot closer to their own homes. I hoped that the EU might offer a world-beating combination of financial might, historical depth and cultural strength to the worldwide mix, and hold firm as a great force for peace.
The seed that grew into this European Union was formed when the French, German and English considered a coal and steel co-operative in the late 1940's. Naturally the English wanted none of it, (Nasty dirty Johnny Dago, we have plenty of coal, yuk yuk go away, you rather lowly recently-liberated people) but planted into the rubble of a billion bombed out houses and nurtured by the exhausted war torn millions of Western Europe, the seed of co-operation germinated into a spirit, and above all, a determination that we would never go to war with each other again.
With the very best of intentions, I settled down to read the wee leaflet that had been delivered to our door. What was this Reform Treaty all about?
Checking to see if both sides had been allowed the same space, I found only an upside-down Irish language version of the English language 'Yes' vote's arguments.
But really, that didn't matter either, because before I read to the end of the very first paragraph, I had given up.
Under the heading 'What is the Reform Treaty?', the para was trying to explain the name of the thing that we were voting for:
"Its official name is the Treaty Amending the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty establishing the European Community."
My brain flushed awash with images of Monty Python's 'Life of Brian', the debates between the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front.
In a vast conference suite, somewhere in Brussels, people had been hammering out this bureaucratic befuddlement.
"Bonjour, guten tag, hello, buenas dias, prynhawn da, dobar dan, bom dia, svitchi svotcha, bugga booger, a dunkin donutski..."
"Yes please to get on with it. Last two weeks only beetroots saying hello we are in so much heat and bad coffee, honey drip drip drop as we say in my country honey drop a long time it taking to not get business done."
"Put on your interpretators headphones you foolish balkan type. I am not interested in your lack of manners and cultural ignorance of my people's protocols."
"So this reform treaty can be maybe called a Reform Treaty of Lisbon Treaty?"
"No, because Lisbon Treaty is already reforming treaty of all the other treaties, so they their names must be having in the name of this treaty. Beetroot fool."
"My delegation respectfully request that this Reform Treaty be called: The Reform Treaty that will be Reformed by any given EU member State, Country, Principality, Nation, or Dodgy Region with its own Funny Dialect and Enough Nutters With Bombs, near good-sounding City where in five years when We need to change Treaty again we will vote Treaty replacing all other Treaties and excluding Cities and Countries who have already either won a World War, or Eurovision , or already had a Treaty named after them ... Treaty."
Not much of a way to run a continent, really.
The Reform Treaty referendum, as presented to the Irish people, is nothing but a retelling of the children's story of the Emperor's New Clothes, wherein the voice of one innocent child screams out the truth that the Emperor is riding naked through the streets, allowing all in the crowd to stop pretending, and mock as one.
We are willing participators in a democratic process, but we are loathe to own up and confess that we have no clue what we are voting for. Even those of us sad souls who have read the damned treaty have no clue what we are voting for.
We want to vote 'Yes', because there is always the feeling with the European Union that you have to be in it to win it. But Ireland has already won the EU's Euromillons, and is now having to pay to support other less-well-off countries, and nobody likes that.
Our inability to understand what is being reformed is actually hampered by exponents on both sides.
A recent letter to a local paper from Fianna Fail MEP, Sean O'Neactain, stated:
"Ireland will have exactly the same rights of representation within the European Commission post 2014 as Germany and France."
On the very same page, a letter from Sinn Fein supporter Anna Marley stated:
"...under the new formula, Ireland's voting strength is cut in half while the voting strengths of the largest states - France, UK, Germany, Italy - doubles."
Pathetic, isn't it, and the only loser is democracy itself, because we are being invited to vote out of ignorance.
After my recent rant about the bureaucratic nightmare that is the EBU and the Eurovision Song Contest, I was sent a note by a friend of Conservative Party MEP, Chris Heaton-Harris, who is rightly concerned about his fellow MEP's' own ignorance of what they vote for in the European Parliament itself:
"MEPs vote to approve the budgets of each EU institutions like the Commission, the Parliament, the myriad of European agencies. Towards the end of one such session, as we were voting to approve something called the GNSS Supervisory Authority, my colleague Chris Heaton-Harris stood up and asked whether there was a single MEP present who knew what the GNSS was. There was an awkward silence. The Deputy Speaker, a genial Spaniard called Alejo Vidal-Quadras, told Chris that, by the end of the day, everyone would have looked it up."
(the GNSS is the European Global Navigation Satellite System.)
This colyoom will not advise you whether to vote 'Yes' or 'No' on June 12th. An old friend once told me that if you can't work out the answer, you might simply be asking the wrong question.