OPINION: Is the world becoming more fractious?

I don’t suppose that there was ever a time when the world was truly at peace, people generally got on well with each other, and differences were settled with intelligence, negotiation and compromise.
In the not so distant past it may have seemed like that, but perhaps that was just an illusion. Of course, it was easier to ignore trouble when news took some time to filter through from abroad, and when it did, the problem usually seemed so far away that it was not considered to be a threat.
An infamous example of ignoring distant threats is the statement made by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on September 27, 1938, when Hitler began occupying Czechoslovakia. Chamberlin described this as ‘a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing’. It took only one year for the threat to arrive on the British doorstep in the guise of the Second World War.

Erosion of democracy
Today, it’s hard to imagine living in a world full of people ‘of whom we know nothing’. Live, real-time images arrive on our mobile phones at the same time as global events unravel.
We saw the aftermath of the incursion of Hamas into Israel and the massacre of innocent people very shortly after it occurred. We see Gaza being destroyed in retaliation and its people being killed as these events actually unfold. Images of Russian guided missiles hit our mobile screens at the same time as they actually kill people in Ukraine. We have ring-side seats at the latest shooting outrage in American schools. The angry chants of Trump supporters at election rallies come directly, unfiltered, into our ears.
One might think that a world of instant communication and exposure to such dreadful news might bring people to their senses and generate a resolve to do something constructive about it. On the contrary, instant and universal media have spawned a world of cut and thrust, of angry argument and even angrier counter argument, of false news and outright lies. Everyone with a mobile phone has their very own bully pulpit. Few people believe that news can ever be delivered impartially.
It’s hard to believe that in 1992 the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama published a widely admired book with the title ‘The End of History and the Last Man’. His thesis, briefly, was that 1989-91 saw not just the end of the Cold War but also the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final best form of human government.
Boy, was he wrong! What we see playing out in front of our eyes today is not the triumph of liberal democracy, but the erosion of democracy.

Mayo maelstrom
You might well ask, what relevance has all that for Mayo?
In our own county we have become so used to dysfunctional local democracy that we have ceased to notice that it is no longer fit for purpose.
We have permanently angry and vexatious county councillors at loggerheads with what seems to be an increasingly remote council executive, to the extent that the council’s CEO, Kevin Kelly, recently felt compelled to write to Westport councillors requesting that they behave themselves at a scheduled meeting with a senior official to discuss the pyrite housing scandal.
We have local TDs whose main aim seems to be to associate themselves closely with everything positive that happens in the county, irrespective of their actual concrete contributions, and to distance themselves as far as possible from anything negative or problematic.
When local circumstances require them to do something, they usually call for others to act and regard that as sufficient. By not articulating any wider strategic approach to challenges faced by the county, they create a vacuum that central government is only too happy to fill.
Their modus operandi is ‘clientelist’, ensuring that votes are contingent on ‘services’ to clients, rather than on their own performance as elected officials. This weakens democratic institutions and negatively impacts on the efficiency of government.
What disturbs me most about this situation is that with the imminent local and EP elections and the later national elections, in the absence of any realistic evaluation of their actual worth, we will almost certainly re-elect these incumbents again.
And the irony is that we can be comfortable with this situation simply because local councillors and local TDs have so little real power. It all resides in Dublin, with the cabinet, the civil service and state agencies. Instead of calling our own local politicians to account, we deflect our anger to Dublin.
Could such a system change? Indeed it could, but only provided we decide on job specifications of our politicians and evaluate them on their actual performance.
However, I am reminded of an anecdote told about Adlai Stevenson when he ran for US President against Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. He was told by his team that he would definitely receive the votes of every thinking person in the United States. Stevenson replied: ‘I’m glad to hear it; but I need a majority’.
Perhaps that is the nub of the problem. Have Mayo people ever even had the chance to vote or not vote for an Adlai Stevenson?