Why the Irish Democratic Party?

Before I begin, please allow me to recommend the following books to you,

• The Sins of the Father by Conor McCabe.

An overview of the many, many years of mismanagement, class warfare and narrow self interest which predated the foundation of the state by many decades. In short, Ireland's problems have toxic roots which reach all the way back to the famine years. Dr. McCabe's thesis reveals that those decisions which have had the most negative impact upon Ireland's long term future have been made purely in the interest of winning an election and retaining power.

• The Power Game by Stephen Collins

The political editor of the Irish Times traces the history of the Fianna Fail Party.  The copy I have leads up to the tenure of Bertie Ahern.  More than a party at war with 'the blueshirts' of Fine Gael, it has been in a constant state of crisis within its own ranks pushing and pulling at itself. Charles J Haughey's period in office was nearly inevitable. The party which has governed our country the most in the last century fully deserves the forensic scrutiny Stephen Collins brings to this book.

• Breaking the Mould by Stephen Collins 

This is the 'how to' and 'how not to' manual when it comes to forming a new political party in Ireland. Despite the dreadful reputational attacks they had to deal with from Fianna Fail in their two decades plus of existence the last 'newest political party' went into government four times with Fianna Fail. Naturally, as someone working on starting up a new political party, this book caught my attention and helped enormously especially with what not to do and how to avoid 'mission creep'.

• The Bankers by Shane Ross

This book told an ugly tale but told it with the panache and familiarity of someone of Mr. Ross' pedigree both as a merchant bank insider and as a dissenting independent senator,  I would be very interested to see just what Mr. Ross intends to bring to his 'new party'.  How much has he moved on from his days of being among Ireland's most privileged and most destructive?  Will he use his insider knowledge to clean up our finances or will he use his impressive contacts to paper over the cracks?

• Follow the Money by David McWilliams.

The media economist's sequel to his hit book The Pope's Children, revealing his personal witness of the sequence of events that led to the disastrous bailout. David McWilliams then riffs on his Pope's Children characters to illustrate just how Ireland went from the best performing economy in Europe to one of the European economy's worst liabilities. It was a very good refresher course in what happened in my country over the nine years that I had been away in France. 

So, to make sense of my decision of joining the Irish Democratic Party and committing my efforts to changing the entire spectrum of Irish politics, reading some or all of these books would be a great guide to my rationale.

So why did I join a 'start up' political party and why am I putting my head over the parapet?

Because of something I know that nobody else in Irish politics appears to be aware of and if they do, they certainly don't want to tell us:

IRELAND DOES NOT HAVE A REPUBLIC, IRELAND HAS A HEGEMONY.*

What does that scary looking statement mean?

*If you clicked on the links you would have been brought to the respective pages on Wikipedia, naturally there are other, less fluid research resources on the net but, for the purposes of this simple blog, Wikipedia is fine.

A Republic is a system of government in which the power resides in the people.   Now, we only truly have the facsimile of this as has been evidenced by the recent transfer of billions of bad banking debt onto the shoulders of the Irish people and the very perpetrators of this banking collapse and scandal have not been brought to book. Nothing the Irish people can do, short of armed insurrection or a mass taxation strike, will turn the heads of the politicians we have supposedly elected under a republican system.

What I will show you now will prove that Ireland doesn't have a Republic and never had a fully functioning Republic to begin with.  The Republic, the political system best suited to bringing peace and prosperity to our long suffering people, was cruelly snatched away from us by the very people who claimed to be 'republicans', and it was all for their own gain.  This isn't about ideology this is about greed and ambition.

Like every viable political system, The Republic operates on a hierarchy of authority and responsibility, with different roles and budgets for each layer of the hierarchy. Irish Republican Democracy reflects the model of Parliamentary Republic where the head of state, An Uachtarán, has no executive power. Now, for the Parliamentary Republic model to work, the State's functions need to be separated and ruthlessly protected by each tier of responsibility.   Notice I haven't said tier of power or authority, because, in a real republic, somebody has to carry the can.  If you have written the cheque then you must honour the payment,

The model's responsibilities should look like this:

An Uachtarán - The symbolic head of state and the embodiment of the people and the constitution. 

An Seanad - The guardians of the constitution, ensuring that Dáil legislation satisfies the constitution.

An Dáil - The legislature of the country.  The Dáil holds the debate and then votes on bills presented by the ministers, and the cabinet,

An Comhairle Cuigeach (Provincial Councils) - These don't exist and yet, these are essential for the provision of large budget services - Instead we have invented Quangos to provide the services a state needs to provide.

City Mayors - Optional level of control based on whether the city has a sufficiently complex range of needs and duties.

An Comhairle Contae/Cathrach - (Town or county councils) - These do exist and used provide a wide range of services but budgetary power has now been handed to Quangos.

All the tiers should be elected and answerable to the public, like this.

What we have is this as far as I can see:

An Uachtarán - A symbolic head of state.  Representing the people but having no duties for the constitution.

An Seanad - A much maligned body of junior party hacks and aging lecturers in politics who do not appear to understand their mission one jot.

An Dáil - Controls every part of public life and even has a whip hand on some quangos but not others,  I believe that the Dáil is trying to do far too much for their abilities and resources.

Quangos - These bodies basically control the budgets for each state service provision and have no visible accountability to the Dáil outside of being 'grilled' occasionally by a Parliamentary Inquiry or Tribunal which has no legal power to punish.

Local councils - Where junior party hacks and aging senators end up if they can't even get into the Senate.

My tongue may be somewhat in my cheek but I want to make it clear that a Republic needs all the tiers of its political, financial, legislative and social functions being handled by the relevant and correct bodies.  The state cannot be run from one room in Leinster House any more than a war can be successfully fought with just one kind of soldier.

By effectively removing the powers and authority of locally elected government, leaving the various Councillors with very  few opportunities to effect a change for their constituents the Dáil has attacked the very structure of Irish Democracy.

By setting up Authorities, Quangos and Private Bodies such as Irish Water, Gas Networks Ireland and Eriva - the Dáil has effectively wrested control of those functions from the people best qualified to provide them and installed a statutory corporation which operates as a shelf company for future selling off of Irish resources. Ireland's own resources are no longer protected by constitutional bodies but private concerns.

By constantly sniping at the constitution and refusing adequate debate and information to the electorate, the Dáil is effectively vandalising the very edifice of Irish sovereignty at a time when national sovereignty everywhere is under sustained multinational and imperial attack. 

This is the behaviour of a Hegemony, seeking to limit power flowing to others and keeping all the power, wealth and authority for themselves and their own class.

Therefore it is right and good for this Dáil to face questions they haven't faced since the foundation of the State and to be challenged by a body that is structurally impossible to corrupt or bring to heel using intimidation or changing the law to suit them.

The perfect weapon against Hegemony is Participatory Democracy,

That is why I have joined the Irish Democratic Party.

The architecture of a real Republic.

When I left Ireland in June 2005, everybody I knew was interested in holding only one conversation. I could talk sports and I would receive polite monosyllables, I could try religion and I would get an agnostic shrug, politics was for undergraduates only and even sex was kind of passé; the real juice was in house prices.  

Everyone I knew was a house price millionaire.  We had all bought our houses at roughly the same time, we had all sort of the same mortgages, we were all earning just enough to maintain our monthly bills, in fact some of us could afford to have that newfangled broadband installed.  I was still stuck on dial up.

But....no matter what our financial struggles were, we had a cast iron asset which was heading into the stratosphere and with one fell swoop could pay off all of our bills and wash us clean of debt.  Our houses became our religion.

So, like good devotees to this religion of architecture and finance, we studied its catechism of build quality, location, aspect, local schools and most importantly whether the garden was south-facing (South being the Mecca of our new religion).

We made regular pilgrimages to showrooms, garden centres and housing exhibitions; our Camino de Santiago involved stops at Blanchardstown, Dundrum and Liffey Valley on the ring roads culminating with a quasi spiritual ecstasy in the Botanic Gardens and the National Stud's Japanese gardens in Kildare.

So, given the amount of time and effort we put in to learning the new codes of home worship, I am going to use the language of this religion to describe how to rebuild our Republic in the manner it should have been built in the first place.

So, to begin with, let's look at the site.

When one builds a house one makes a good survey of the site (unless you're a 90's developer) to ensure that the ground is firm enough to actually support a decent structure and yet soft enough that the ground can actually be broken to lay a foundation.   Let's call this site 'My constituency'.

So the people need to be neither too soft nor too hard to build upon. This translates into that the people need to be neither too easily led nor too rigid in their beliefs. We can see that there are powers aiming for both of those constituencies:  The privately owned media wish to manipulate the easily led and the protest movements wish to shore up the rigid against negotiating with the other side. Neither position promises much for the future.  Nothing of lasting quality can be constructed in these places.

Yes, one can throw up a number of temporary buildings in a swamp but they will soon wash away with the first flood.  Even planning for the flood fails to solve the underlying problem of the swamp. Likewise, one can manipulate people's thoughts and even their wavering votes using media and well funded publicity stunts but in the end, those votes will just as easily flow elsewhere leaving you up a pole and isolated.

One can build a stone gravity wall on a stone escarpment but, without foundations, the wall will collapse if it is extended out too far.  Thus all the stone ground offers us is the chance to build a tower because everything else will crumble. Likewise one can hold a very narrow position for a long time using a committed, almost cult like vote but that level of rigidity will alienate other voters.  One is left in one's ivory tower unable to deal with a broad range of issues and challenges. 

My constituency certainly won't be the most common or widespread terrain available but it will provide the most security of tenure. My constituency will have a diverse nature, covering different levels and will offer great views and will suit its surroundings admirably providing a pleasant vista.
My constituency needs to be made up of rational people, capable of teasing out an argument and exercising critical thought. These people come from diverse backgrounds and classes, they are different generations and they have reached different outcomes in their personal and professional lives.  What they have in common is that they can fairly argue the merits of participatory democracy and convince others of their sincerity.  They retain their friends and neighbours who have different political positions so they know what is going on around them but, by not trying to 'convert' their friends, they earn us great respect.

As I said, My constituency is the rarest of constituencies but it is also the most desirable and envied.

Now for the foundations.

Depending on how high you want to build and what quality of materials you wish to use, your foundations will have to be dug sufficiently deep to support the entire structure. Plus there's no point in having a deep foundation on one side of your site and just gravel on the other side. The load needs to be borne equally and at regular intervals so that the entire structure can hold up. Now there is the added challenge that the building site needs to be leveled first to ensure  the easiest build, otherwise your architect is up against a whole patchwork of stresses and balances which will inevitably collapse the entire structure on the first jolt.

In short:  A Republic needs to recognise its people at the same level and to treat them equally, otherwise the stresses and imbalances will tear the entire state apart, A Republic needs this spirit level discipline to be maintained for each tier of the construction, (Social, Legal, Political, Financial, Services) or else it will inevitably collapse into the chaotic rubble of demagoguery, oligarchy or hegemony.

The Republics of Rome and Greece collapsed into Imperialism, the Republics of Raniassance Italy collapsed into incoherent factionalism leading to fascism, the Republic of Ireland is nearly completely dominated by the hegemony of international finance and domestic corruption.

It's time to show the zombie village builders and their ilk how it's done.

The monarchy, the empire, the dictatorship and the theocracy all require fear and oppression to operate,  The oligarchy, plutocracy, aristocracy or military junta require actual violent force to ensure they can continue. All these systems are in existence on the surface of our planet right now and living under such conditions is especially unpleasant to us because we have torn more and more rights and freedoms from our state.

The Republic is an idea which captures the imagination and loyalty of free thinking people because it offers the reward of more influence and better conditions for participation. It doesn't matter how much one participates in a monarchy, the king will always be the king. It doesn't matter how many rights one negotiates for in a dictatorship, the dictator decides. In all other political systems the power lies with the people at the top of the pile.  Only in a republican democracy does the citizen enjoy the power to control the government.

Now, how true is that of Ireland? Have we ever had a Republic?

Let's be honest, we've come a long way from the subject colony of the British Empire we were one hundred years ago.  True, Dublin and some of the larger cities enjoyed higher qualities of life than many northern English cities but having an Anglo Irish ascendancy came at the cost of  the common people's rights and incomes. The Irish ascendancy were quasi-feudal in their position and culture and, if you weren't one of them, then you weren't one of them.  It was a society that employed servants and maids, which treated workers and service providers with genuine disrespect.  It was a society completely at odds with the new realities brought forth by the advent of 20th century technologies.  It was doomed because it was far too rigid to adapt to a better educated and ambitious population.

What came after the passing of the Anglo Irish ascendancy was a group of people who had idealism enough to embrace and declare a republic however as time and a civil war passed, Ireland was left with a new class of elite family who were the proverbial 'beggars on horseback' and that is how it has remained ever since.
  

When we look at the great Republics of the world the political architecture is always the same; semi circular. Think Greek Symposium, Roman Forum, French Senate, Arthurian round table etc.  They are all semi circular surrounding a speaker's pedestal.  It is simply the best way to organise factions without favouring one over the other. All other designs offer an unfair advantage to one or two factions closest to the speaker. The 'long room' parliament design in use in Britain, which is not a Republic but a Constitution-less Constitutional Monarchy, infected our own Leinster House enabling two parties to bait and caterwaul at one another resorting to personal jibes and gaming the debate over exploring important issues an`d seeking good governance.

The secret to having a more efficient and honest government really is in the architecture.  So for a real Republic we need not only to change the form of democracy but also we need to change where that democracy is housed and expressed.  We need also a place for people to be able to congregate within the new Dáil where the deliberations and debates of our elected representatives can be seen by the public. Keeping our representatives holed up in a Georgian Ascendancy bunker isn't conducive to transparency and accountability

The Houses of Parliament in London and the Congress building in Washington are both very imposing edifices but I don't think that governance needs the drama of High Gothic or the authority of Neo Classical lines.  We simply require a building that is both functional and open to light and view.  If we want transparency in our politics then I would suggest that we should start with the buildings our government works from. There's no need to build one as we have already done that during the Celtic Tiger years;  Dublin's Liffeyside International Convention Centre would do just fine.  Think about it.