OPINION: Centralised Ireland — a policy of divide and ignore

In most democracies, election campaigns are an opportunity for conflicting views of how a society ought to be run to be debated vigorously and openly. Contending national parties draw up manifestoes setting out their plans and bid to attract voter support. The job of local candidates is to sell the national party political platform.
The ongoing election in the US is a case where the opposing views of Democrats and Republicans are dramatically different and where the electorate is segmented into warring factions that can hardly bring themselves to communicate politely with each other. The Republicans spelled out these differences in a 900-page manifesto, ‘Project 2025’. A win for Donald Trump and his version of the Republican Party would produce a very different society to the one that would prevail should Kamala Harris and the Democrats win.
In a society that takes democracy for granted, one side can win even without attracting a majority of the electorate. For example, the Nazis never actually formed a majority in Germany in the run up to the crucial election of July 1932. But when they were invited to share power by the mainstream parties, they quickly extinguished the democratic institutions of the Wiemar Republic and formed a dictatorship.
A recurring problem with liberal parties in democratic countries is that they squabble among themselves, thus creating space for the rise of extreme parties.
In the 2016 US presidential election, many Democrats who disliked Hilary Clinton’s personality either stayed at home or voted for independent candidates who had no chance of winning. This permitted Donald Trump to win by a small margin. People seem reluctant to accept that elections are often about seeking the least-bad outcome rather than perfection.
Of course, we do things differently in Ireland. It took over 50 years for the divisions between the two main parties – Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil – to dissipate and a Grand Coalition with both parties to be conceivable. Political debate mutated into questions of managerial competence rather than policy goals, bypassing regional issues. Unlike Germany and other EU states, no purely regional parties emerged in Ireland.
Some years ago I was asked to accompany a group of students from St Nathy’s College, Ballaghaderreen, when they presented the results of a school project to TDs and Senators in Leinster House. The students had identified many of the reasons why the counties of the Northern and Western Region had not enjoyed the fruits of Irish growth as much as Eastern and Southern Regions. In the discussion that followed, one of the TDs suggested that forming a cross-party grouping from the Northern and Western Region would be a good way of highlighting and remedying the unequal development of the country, since the challenges were not party specific and there was probably much common political ground. I should have known better, but it came as a shock to me that no such group already existed.
The failure to take regional policy seriously, other than in ill-informed, top-down and centralised fashion, has consequences.
For example, in selecting candidates in a constituency like Mayo, the main parties struggle to provide regional coverage in a system that is not designed to do so. In the absence of a system of locally devolved government along the lines of every other EU state, small regions that feel neglected by the main parties have to come together to elect a local ‘champion’. The recent poll-topping performance of Cllr Chris Maxwell illustrated this, where vote tallies were heavily influenced by a regional rather than a party preference.
At the wider county level, the dysfunctional treatment of regional issues emerges in the strident quest for each county to have a voice at the cabinet table. In the absence of such a voice, there is a fear that the county will lose out to others that do have such a presence. In the present system, where development is a kind of zero sum game (your win is my loss), that is exactly what happens. The absence of a properly designed system of devolved governance ends up distorting national policy in a clamour of competing regional interests that are never discussed rationally.
So, between now and whenever the general election takes place, our media, and particularly our local newspapers, will be dominated by reporting on the selection of candidates for the main parties and issues circling around personalities, internal party intrigue and a quest for regional coverage in a system not designed for that purpose.
This is the outcome of an over-centralised system of government where almost everything is run from the centre. That we ended up with this system is no accident. It represents not so much a centrally driven policy of divide and conquer as a policy of divide and ignore. Elections should focus on strategic decision-making and not on local clientelist favours and services. We have tolerated the emergence of a system of governance that gets in the way of planning a more efficient and equitable future for our peripheral regions in a world where we can ill afford such blunders.
We are lucky to still live in a country where, unlike the US, the outcome will be much the same no matter who wins the election. But we could do so much better. We could live in a country where regional policy was debated rather than ignored and where these were policies which decided elections.

John Bradley is a former ESRI professor and has published on the island economy of Ireland, EU development policy, industrial strategy and economic modelling.