OPINION: What did we vote for?

Political process in Ireland is rather different from most other EU countries. The biggest difference is that among the main political parties, including any smaller parties that have participated in past coalition governments, strategic differences in policy orientation are modest. Terms like left versus right, or socialist versus conservative, are not very meaningful. Differences exist, but are often nuanced and debated mainly within rather than between parties.
Party political stances tend not to be radical. There is unlikely to be an Irish version of the storming of the Bastille or the October Revolution. Election manifestos tend to resemble alternative budgets rather than alternative political positions. Debates between party leaders collapse into arguments about fiscal arithmetic rather than about strategic objectives.
All political parties claim that they want to improve the lives of citizens and focus on priorities and timing. In ritualistic leadership debates, angry assertions are tossed about that your tax cutting or expenditure proposals are not funded whereas ours are. This is usually followed by angry denials and counter accusations that leave us none the wiser. This might explain why only 60 percent of the electorate bothered to vote. We live in a low attention span, high conflict world.
The British government Land Acts of the late 19th century converted our previously revolutionary and dispossessed rural population into conservative property owners. The struggle for independence dominated social reform and after the execution of James Connolly, the Irish Labour Movement never became a dominant player in our governance.

Transactional clientelism
The next difference is the manner in which politics is regionalised, combined with PR in multi-seat constituencies. In the UK the imposition of an ‘outside’ candidate on a constituency raises eyebrows. Here, any aspiring councillor or TD is expected to be attentive to local needs and to have local connections. It is the kiss of death for a party to impose an ‘outside’ candidate.
Local focus is exacerbated by the centralised nature of our governance system and the lack of effective devolved governance. Internal problems of peripheral regions are assigned low priority by the centre. The role of regional politicians from such areas is to be a voice at or near the top cabinet table when decisions are taken that affect the region. They petition for change rather than demand it.
Irish constituencies are geographically large and complicated sub-regional divisions come into play in multi-seat constituencies. My local candidate may not belong to the party that I favour, but if she is a local, then she gets my vote if the candidate of my favoured party is distant! Our local TD or Councillor is not some personage who only appears at election time. Rather, she is a person to whom we demand regular access when issues of planning, pensions, local road repairs, etc are in play. Our Irish system of non-ideological politics has degenerated into transactional clientelism. We will vote for you if we know that you will support our cause when we need you.
The irony is that even though our politics is localised and our TDs sometimes seem to perform like slightly superior county councillors, we do not have a government minister with overall responsibility for regional development. What we have is a Department of Rural and Community Development which lacks any mandate or budgets to enable it to act to achieve equitable regional development.
That department focuses on modest improvements to towns, villages, social organisations, and so on. But responsibility for serious heavy lifting in regional development is scattered across a wide range of other government departments that focus on their own narrow responsibilities and are either unable or unwilling to engage in joined-up actions.

Who is in charge?
One of the less enjoyable tasks that I set myself was to read through the election manifestos issued by the main parties. First prize for length went to Fianna Fáil (189 pages), followed closely by Sinn Fein (174). The shortest manifestos were by the Green Party (88 pages) and Fine Gael (116 pages).
All manifestos were filled with good intentions and vote-attracting aspirations. What they lacked was any analysis by the three outgoing coalition partners (FG, FF and GP) as to how we ended up with so many problems and so many horrifically expensive cost over-runs that had emerged on their watch when their manifestos were chock full of great ways of solving the problems.
The manifesto that most appealed to me was from Labour, a key section of which was entitled ‘Our Ambition for Transforming the State’. Here there was a clear statement that the root cause of many of our problems stems from the dysfunctional way that our country is organised and governed. Piling in more public expenditure and cutting taxes in the absence of major structural reforms will not work. As it happens, the people of Mayo did not get an opportunity to vote for strategic regional development.
We have been landed in our present predicament by the illogical government behaviour of pushing an optimistic view of our economy while simultaneously highlighting challenges that they appear powerless to solve.
How did we arrive at a point where most of the crucial decisions in our state appear to have been handed over to quasi-autonomous national agencies run by civil servants (the HSE, TII, Uisce, Enterprise Ireland and more) and not by our elected government? Who is in charge in our country? The outcome of the election does not appear to have solved anything.

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