The rise and fall of the House of Solon.

Democracy: the system of government that has outlasted every other system of government devised by man,  to date over 2,500 years of continuous success and adaptation to revolution, conflicts and the ambitions of the powerful, is I believe to have been due to the vision of one man, Solon. 

Before Solon, Democracy wasn’t possible because he established a rule of law and central ethics of fairness and equal status for citizens. These two ideals powered Athens from a wealthy city state but of no more importance than any other city state to the most powerful and respected form of government in the Ancient world within a few short generations; defeating the Persian Empire at Salamis and defeating the Spartans soon after to emerge as Ancient Greece’s dominant power. The path to democracy was far from smooth and it required a two generation tyranny to provoke it into being but, without Solon’s laws and ethics of fairness over patronage and equity over privilege, the people wouldn’t have risen up to take the power back from the tyrants in the first place.

“By the early 6th century B.C. social tensions in Athens had become acute, pitting the poorer citizens against rich and powerful landowners. Many citizens were reduced to the status of share croppers, and others had actually sold themselves into slavery to meet their debts. To resolve the crisis the Athenians appointed Solon as archon (magistrate) to serve as mediator and lawgiver. Plutarch and Aristotle describe in some detail the constitution devised by Solon, who then went into voluntary exile to avoid being pressured into amending this legislation. Solon cancelled most debts and freed those Athenians who had been enslaved, but he refused to redistribute property or to deprive the aristocracy of most of the political power. As he tells us in his own words as recorded by Plutarch:

For to the common people I gave as much power as is sufficient, Neither robbing them of dignity, nor giving them too much; and those who had power, and were marvelously rich, even for those I contrived that they suffered no harm. I stood with a mighty shield in front of both classes, and allowed neither of them to prevail unjustly. (Plutarch, Life of Solon 18.4)”

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Now there’s a little context required for us to fully understand what Solon did and why he deserves his mention in the annals of Democratic history. Solon understood the danger represented by a vengeful rabble more acutely than the aristocratic clans whom he protected. His equanimity towards the rich and wasteful wasn’t an indicator of his being easy to bribe but, it was a sign of just how disciplined he was ensuring a balanced foundation to Greek society as opposed to a popular one. When he came under intense political and social pressure to repeal or rescind his laws in favour of the powerful and the paid-for popular swell, Solon chose the option of exile to ensure that his constitution, ratified by the people, could not be overthrown or rescinded by individual magistrates or politicians. To overthrow the constitution, the entire elite had to be in agreement, this principle was established fifty years before the people of Athens ever heard the word ‘Democracy’.

 

Thus the nursery of democracy was justice and equity.  Instead of imposing an unrealistic and unmanageable equality in which every person was given the same amount of wealth irrespective of their position or ability, Solon eased the burdens of the weakest, freeing them from servitude but he did not destroy the structure of his civilisation as many modern radicals dream of doing.  Because he provided and wisely defended its rock-solid foundation, Democracy itself can be called the House of Solon. The most effective part of his constitution for the Athenian State was demanding the active participation of Athen’s citizens themselves.

An important concept clearly laid out for the first time in Solon’s political poetry is the notion that political participation was the duty of the citizen, not just a privilege to be exercised or not as one chose:

He saw that the state was often in a condition of factional strife, while some of the citizens were content to let things slide; he laid down a special law to deal with them, enacting that whoever when civil strife prevailed did not join forces with either party was to be disenfranchised and not to be a member of the state. (Athenian Constitution 8.5).

While Solonian reforms did not establish democracy, they were a crucial step on the Athenian road to democracy. Solon's constitution, consisting of moderate redistribution rather than a revolutionary transfer of political power, nonetheless granted important rights to the lowest class of citizens.

This middle course pleased no one, as he himself tells us:

Wherefore I stood at guard on every side, A wolf at bay among a pack of hounds. (Athenian Constitution 12.4).”

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Use it or lose it, basically.  Solon understood that tyrannies form more quickly from the apathy of the privileged than the anarchy of the poor, or as Shakespeare put it in Sonnet 94:

“Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds”

This duty to participate in the politics of the state ensured that Athens had no shortage of eager men who would police their own patch jealously and were expected to do so. This imposition upon an elite more used to drinking parties and the entertainments of poetry and drama due to their wealth largely inherited from their clan estates and worked by indentured debtors perfectly reflects the France of Louis XVI and of today; the neo-liberal/globalised world of Foxconn suicides and empty financial scam towers. We are due a Solon-style shake up of what the wealthy and influential can put upon the impoverished.

I say, impoverished and not poor because nobody freely chooses poverty; that part of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ theory is largely correct but when the conditions of gaining even modest wealth is taken out of the hands of many and reserved exclusively for the connected few then revolution is never far away. The problem with revolution in the 21^st Century is that our weapons are devastating of the entire civilisation and revolt inevitably falls into civil war and violent anarchy.

As stated above, the path to democracy was blocked by two tyrannies that lasted nearly sixty years. By tyranny, I mean a system of governance not directly calibrated to benefit the people. It wasn’t necessary to rule with terror or wander about in a black mask and cloak urging people to ‘feel the power of the dark side of the force’. A tyrant was simply someone who seized power by political coup or violence and not by popular election. The first tyrant, Peisistratos, was popular and enjoyed a great groundswell of support but, after many failed election attempts he simply forced his way in through bribery and empty populist promises, breaking all the traditions and rules to gain absolute power despite the popular vote and the wishes of most of his peers; sound like anyone we know?

Peisistratos’ period of rule wasn’t particularly harsh and he tolerated useful rivals such as Milatedes (who later defeated the Persian navy at Salamis) and Cleisthenes. His period of power (546-527 BC) saw a lot of grandiose building and glitzy events (still not getting it?) which provided his supporters with all of the ‘Whataboutery’ they could possibly need to defend their idol.

The real rot set in when Peisistratos died and his tyrannical position was inherited by his two sons Hippias and Hipparchos. Hippias played the statesman and Hipparchos played the lover and showman. Naturally the lover and showman got stabbed by a love rival (possibly a critic?) and then all hell broke loose in 514BC. Hippias, obviously with one eye on his back, set about eliminating all possible rivals including Cleisthenes and even his own nephew also called Peisistratos (á la Game of Thrones). Lots of public executions ensued.

Luckily, Ancient Greek clans have a lot more gumption than Irish insiders and they waged a four year war on Hippias’ tyranny until they finally managed to entice the Spartans to intervene in 510 BC.  The Spartans were the US peacekeeping expedition of the era with all that that entails both good and bad. King Cleomenes of Sparta quickly put whatever resistance he encountered to the spear and asked questions later. Hippias and his armies of supporters were driven out or slaughtered. This set about a free for all among the elite Athenian families and factions eventually setting Cleisthenes up against Isagorus, an elite faction leader of not terribly strong will and his backers, the Spartans.  Obviously Cleisthenes couldn’t defeat then entire Spartan army with his one faction and defeat would have left Isagorus in power as a Spartan satrap, doing the bidding of his benefactor to the detriment of the Athenian people. 

Cleisthenes, in such a tight spot, looked to Athenian history and found the example of Solon.  He proposed a new constitution in which Solon-style rule would be the new order. This got the attention of the people who had memories of a gilded past in which everyone had their own freedom.  Although Cleisthenes’ forces were routed by the Spartans and he faced exile with his followers. However when King Cleomenes of Sparta attempted to invoke de-facto Spartan rule via his puppets the people banded together and laid siege to the Spartans in the Acropolis, determined not to lose their freedom again. Cleisthenes was ushered back as the nominal head of the interim government but he had no doubts that his promised constitution had better be delivered or else….

Why the history lesson?  

Never doubt that the people are the power, despite all the propaganda and shows of central power that they are exposed to, the people are not sheep. Individuals can be broken and terrorised and a mass movement can be misled in the short term. A people with the ambition of a better future for their children are unbeatable. Even when King Cleomenes returned with the entire Spartan army and two other city states in support; they could not take Athens because they recognised that a people fighting for their own freedom would fight to the last man.

Cleisthenes’ name comes down through the ages to us today not because he enjoyed the infamy of Adolph Hitler or an Ivan the Terrible but because he was that rarest of rare creatures: a politician who delivered what he promised (not that he had much of a choice given that even the Spartans wouldn’t intervene to save him if he reneged on delivering his promised new constitution).

Thus democracy was born as a means to reward the people who had won their own freedom. This is where Cleisthenes revealed his astonishing realism and thoroughness. Having seen that Solon’s equity rule had been easily swept away by the tribal interests of whichever popular tyrant was rising among the rich and privileged clans, he broke up the clans not by force but by election.  Cleisthenes offered his range of new rights and public responsibilities not to the established aristocrats but to all free Greek men of even modest means via their enrolment in one of ten new tribes. Enrolling in a tribe wasn’t just joining a club but receiving a new home in the area of Attica that belonged to that tribe. Basically, people who probably shared homes with several generations now got a brand spanking new house and land to farm into the bargain. Who was going to pass that one up? 

By creating a completely new system of distributing power, he cut across the tribal loyalties of all the aristocratic families and they could not protest lest they felt the wrath of their former loyalists.

It didn’t matter whether that man knew the great classical poems or just made clay pots, that man’s rights flowed to him through his membership of a new democratic tribe which may have also had members of previously rival Athenian factions but now their lives depended on their new loyalties. In Bronze Age warfare, the most effective formation was the phalanx, a group of spearmen in a line behind shields where it was the shield of your neighbour that protected you and you protected the next man along the line. Knowing this; very few Athenians opted out of their allotted tribe. 

Each tribe was named after an Eponymous Hero selected by the Delphic Oracle to represent that tribe. Public messages pertaining and relevant to that tribe were posted below a bronze statue of that tribe’s hero upon a plinth of all ten tribes so that much governmental information could be distributed efficiently in a matter of days. In this way Cleisthenes invented news broadcasting with separate channels. Members of a tribe were allotted their duties completely at random via the world’s first randomizing computer (yes, they were extremely clever) so that all members of that tribe’s names were placed in numbered slots and a series of black and white pebbles were dropped down a chute so that the selected person was assigned by his name culminating with a white pebble dropping at the same time (much fairer than a tombola) which was impossible to cheat.

Why I am going to this degree of detail is to illustrate that one doesn’t simply change an entire political system with a piece of paper but one needs to think each step through and be consistent with the ethic even to the point of inventing a completely new technology in the process. If Solon provided the foundation, it was certainly Cleisthenes who provided the walls and the ten pillars of the house that democracy still resides in.

The House of Solon is your typical Greek Temple design so beloved of banks and government offices. Once you are able to interpret the symbolism of Neo Classical and Rococo friezes and pediments, the values of those societies become abundantly clear. Contrast this frankness and earnestness with the intellectual and stylistic poverty of ‘modern’ and ‘post-modern’ building styles and it should be no surprise that we currently live in a period of time dubbed ‘Post Truth’.  Nothing we see around us on our screens, in our architecture, even on our own bodies is what it seems; our entire aesthetic is an ugly mishmash of cheap knock-offs, preset templates, second-hand soundbites and Photoshopped lies. 

So it is with our politics.

The house of Solon still lacked a roof by the end of Cleisthenes’ reforms and, as any builder can attest, without a cap or brace, walls and columns can easily fall over. The roof and downward pressure needed to stabilise our House of Solon was provided by that most divisive of characters, Pericles. Pericles’ democratic record is no less impressive than that his two predecessors on the face of it but his steadfastness in the face of massive populist revolt and the threat of all of Athens being destroyed by the more powerful Sparta was counterbalanced by his determination to expand.

Pericles’ period of power was from roughly 461-427BC but this included a period of war, ostracism, and political controversy. To the commentators of the day, Pericles was Marmite: you either loved him or you hated him. In this he was no less a populist than Peisistratos the tyrant but he had far greater ambitions. Pericles had the vision that historical glory was a two horse race between Athens and the increasingly envious Spartan kingdom. By banding together a generation earlier, the two Greek city states had defeated the vast Persian Empire much like the US and USSR had defeated the seemingly unstoppable Third Reich of Hitler but, once their common enemy was defeated, they began a cold war to win over as much territory not under their flag but under their ideology. So it was with democratic Athens and martial law Sparta.

If Pericles could be said to have a modern equivalent it is John F Kennedy; showing hawkish aggression when his territory was infringed upon and untrammelled ambition when he was secure. The Space race, such an inspiration to me as a child, was war in all but name between the US and the USSR despite the fact that the scientists behind the race to the moon ended up working together long before Glasnost.  What Pericles did was to open the door to constant reform and querying the orthodoxy of set laws and traditions in order to ensure that the Athenian democracy better reflected the needs and day to day challenges faced by Athenians as long as they could argue for it fairly.

Much of that could be called populism but he was noted to avoid the tricks of rabble rousers, constantly forcing the people who listened to his speeches to think for themselves as individuals. He rarely raised his voice or whipped himself up into frenzy but held his line of calculating logic even as Athens and Sparta were at full war with one another. When the question of Athenian citizenship came up, Pericles went against the populist tide to ensure that only the children of two Athenian parents could be citizens. This was indeed unfair and inequitable to those disenfranchised children of the ten tribes but it did reflect the pressure Athens was under through an influx of peoples voting with their feet to live within the superior quality of life that Athens provided to the region of Attica.

 

This may have fatally divided Athenians into a two-tier society which would fracture on his death but Pericles maintained his logic to the end; perversely being just as unbending as the conservatives in order to ensure that democracy was robust and stood against even the greatest of challenges and only changed when the people voted for it in response to a logical argument as opposed to a popular groundswell. 

The challenges he faced 2,500 years ago are perfectly mirrored today on our streets.

Pericles’ gift to democracy was the duty to reject of orthodoxy for its own sake and to constantly examine the flaws in society using logic and far sightedness as opposed to knee-jerk responses to sudden events. Less inventive than Cleisthenes and less intractable than Solon, Pericles nevertheless spread the word of democracy across the Ancient world and it was his orations and logical points that influenced the Roman Republic when it was being formed which is why we know about democracy today.

I will leave you Pericles own words which laid out the definition of democracy that we still believe in and recognise:

“Our polity does not copy the laws of neighbouring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves.  It is called a democracy, because not the few but the many govern. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences;  if to social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity,  class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state,  he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition.”  Theucidides – Pericles’ Funeral Oration

However, this essay is about how we have allowed this definition to be betrayed in Ireland and across the entire west. Democracy: The House of Solon is falling and crumbling and its sorely needs sensitive renovating to bring it back to its classical glory. Maybe other champions of democracy in other countries are aware of this and are writing about it too but this is how I see it.

Today the house of Solon (Ireland Branch) is a bawdy house run by a tacky pimp who is not afraid to use his fists upon the workers trapped within it. The house of Solon is now on shifting sands as opposed to firm foundations with every u-turn and populist gesture made solely to win votes in the next election. The political parties who dominate my Ireland have no core values or obvious mission. 

What does Fianna Fáil mean if not just a party of fantasised mythology, past glories, and its own reputation?  What has Fianna Fáil built in the last 30 years?  What has Fianna Fáil sabotaged in the last 30 years?  The latter list is far longer than the former and yet they maintain their popularity because of how awful the other parties are.

What does Fine Gael mean?  What language is ‘Fine’ even? Where are the core values? Where do these centre right parties differ when it comes to how your life is shaped? They don’t.  Both voted for the bailout, both continue with the repossession courts and both have pushed through even MORE legislation to ensure offshore vulture funds (who do not pay tax anywhere) can re-enact the mass evictions of the late 1890s. 

Let me remind you that each and every home on this island has received State subsidy of one sort or another and thus rightly remains public responsibility; responsibility that FF and FG have both venally denied in order to sell off more State assets.

When did Labour last propose or vote for progressive measures to alleviate the suffering of the impoverished? Ireland indeed has no natural poor – Ireland’s losers have been cheated of their just inheritance by the very people who spout daily on their needs. It is a sick, vicious circle of imposed mutual dependency: Labour needs there to be an impoverished to maintain the illusion of caring about them, which they don’t. Irish Labour has moved further to the right than even Tony Blair and his crew of media spinners and war cheerleaders dared to move. Look at their voting record.

Sinn Féin – another meaningless name – what do they espouse? When it matters, what do they do?  They certainly have plenty of homework done and they certainly enjoy showing up the two larger parties’ dodgy accounting but…when it matters, they shy away from the responsibility and accountability of government. They are afraid of the power they resent the other parties enjoying. Leaving us with various independent (former/quasi party affiliated) TDs and radical leftist TDs – radical meaning they want to see change but they never define what change they mean outside of attacking a status quo that an infant could see is inherently corrupt.

Not a pretty picture, is it?  And whose fault is that? Is it the pimp or the whores we should blame?

Woe betide anyone unfortunate enough to reside within these walls that have no new tribal pillars available but they wobble with Civil war tribal loyalties, long since redundant and betrayed, and the nonsensical hatreds of past conflicts obliterating the common threats we face today. As for a roof that presses down upon those walls with constant inquiry and self-reflection as well as vaunting with ambition; nope!  It’s not even a corrugated iron sheet. There is no roof on this ruin. There is no wish for glory and achievement; progress is for other nations; solidarity is for countries safely too far away for them to ever call on us for help; our neutrality is no longer honourable but cowardly. I don’t recommend NATO but I do recommend international engagement supporting Human Rights.

Yes, this is a bawdy house; it’s the best little bawdy house in Europe because here the rich can have their wicked way with its people and not even have pay for the pleasure. All payment and charge for the service is refused by this pimp just in case an offended patron chose to get his jollies elsewhere. How is this sustainable even in the short term?  And yet, in a democracy, the only people to blame are the voters themselves. In a democracy you get what you vote for. In a PR democracy, you can’t even complain that the selection of candidates isn’t representative of you. This is the country that spawned the Healy-Raes and Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan. The fault lies with the tribal voters who vote AGAINST their own rational self-interest again again; there is no way they will have the courage to do otherwise because everything around them is a reflection of their Civil war tribal culture. Anything that doesn’t have their tribal brand is not to be trusted.  

So, yes, I blame the whores.

At the moment there is an argument raging among the US Democrats that ‘third party’ voters cost Hillary Clinton her presidency in favour of a candidate with the worst publicity ever in an election – it was wall to wall, lickspittle, lascivious publicity but ostensibly negative. No debate on any subject could be concluded over the last 18 months without the mandatory shock story on what Trump tweeted that day.  And the electorate lapped it up. What publicity did the Green or Libertarian party get?  What TV station covers their agenda? Nope. It wasn’t that tiny minority of third party voters who cost Hillary her presidency it was the assumption is was HER presidency in the first place.  Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched – everyone knows this, right?

 

Likewise, it is not the fault of people who vote for their rational self interest but the people who continuously vote for Civil war parties who have refused even to apologise for the meltdown in the economy and the bailout and the pain that was poured upon a blameless people; because it wasn’t the Irish people who ‘lost the run of themselves’ in the Tiger years but the Civil War parties. 

Proof? 

http://www.thejournal.ie/register-of-members-interests-tds-property-investments-2002567-Mar2015

Have a good look at what NAMA is doing and with whose property portfolios. Yep, they are shoring up their OWN speculative losses at the cost of everyone’s futures. So this final part of my essay is about how to rebuild the House of Solon first in Ireland and then spread the message across the rest of Europe and, hopefully, the western world. Not everyone will agree with the need for a robust democracy, favouring the certainty of their own Authoritarian regimes or favouring losing their voice in politics entirely in return for the trappings of wealth promised by an increasingly corporatist culture. But for those of us who still want a say in our lives... 

FOUNDATION:

Equality under the law is nice but equity is far more important. Equity is the fairest possible way to distribute the bounty of a nation. For equity to work then there has to be a transparent system of testing for the distribution of tax wealth into the society. Quangos and special interest groups are merely an exercise of centralising power ‘at arm’s length’. Clearly if the government has placed their cronies on the board then the quango is controlled by the government, without the responsibility of it being a government department and thus accountable to the people. This is an obfuscation; an attempt to disguise the flow of money from the public purse into private hands. It is reasonable to presume a certain level of corruption in the absence of comprehensive reporting back to the people and direct accountability to a minister charged with that portfolio.

Equity demands that what people get out from their society is in proportion to what they put in. Obviously, someone who cannot make ends meet even without the burden of general taxation cannot afford to pay extra stealth or utility taxation. Calling a flat-tax rate ‘equitable’ is a nonsense when someone on the lower level of that tax rate might be pushed into penury while someone else at the top level mightn’t even notice it in their daily spend. Equity is ensuring that every single citizen enjoys a minimum level of comfort and security to ensure that they can improve their lot without losing hope. That some people at the more prosperous end of society feel no different for these safeguards being in place is not them ‘losing out’ but simply being in the lucky position of not needing those supports in the first place. All it takes is a stock market crash with a sudden pricey and catastrophic illness and those supports may have to be called upon after all.

So all that is required for our foundation is that we decide now what the minimum standard of living in Ireland is. Obviously, someone living to minimum standard is not having a whale of a time or keeping up with the fads and fashions of clothing, technology and furnishings; our minimum living standard is there to ensure that nobody goes hungry, desperate, or homeless. Let us begin with Dr. Ernst Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. What is recognised across the board from business, to child development, to database management, to health and wellness courses is seemingly considered irrelevant by successive governments: That the basic needs, the minimum standard, satisfy both physiological and safety needs.  Anything less than satisfying the basic needs of our people qualifies Ireland to be called a ‘failed state’ by its neighbours with great justification.

  

Physiological needs are what human beings require or they will die, simple as that. These needs are: Food, Water, Shelter, Sleep, Warmth, Air, etc. Just try doing without any one of these for a couple of days…it is insane that we, as one of the top 20 richest states in the world, can refuse to provide even this meagre existence to all of our people. The next level on Maslow’s chart, also the basic requirements for someone to have a life, are the safety needs: Protection, Stability, Order, Law, Limits and Security.  For many within our society these simply do not exist for them.  

Satisfying these two base levels, base levels the animal kingdom have provided for themselves through instinct, is all I am talking about and yet…..we are currently denying our people access to shelter, heat, food, water, stability, security, and even protection. 

Some civilisation!

The Foundation needs to provide these two base levels, for human beings just to reach parity with wild animals, Physiological and Safety needs must be the business of the state as part of its base level rights.  Even Athenians living 2,500 years ago enjoyed these as a matter of course.

WALLS AND PILLARS

The walls of the House of Solon provided Athenians with their own context. They were more than just people living together but they were of a particular group or family the ancient Greek words for family and house are the same.  The walls offer people the privacy to congregate and to express love, kinship, friendship, and belonging.  It may seem like an intangible thing for a government to be dealing with when there are such important questions such as BREXIT or a diminishing US taking on a resurgent China but, really, those exterior things are of no consequence if your people are committing suicide in despair, from loneliness, over angst, because they do not see a point to life. 

We are gregarious animals, we have banded together in family and tribal groups for at least the last 40,000 years so by now it is innate in our species to enjoy company. Individualism is the ideal in our modern world and there is a lot to be said about that but, first and foremost, community matters to the individual. If you want to break a person, even a hardened criminal, solitary confinement is a very effective torture. The mind will inevitably begin to fail him or her for want of human contact. Look at how we fail to deal with dreadful loneliness in our elderly yet look at how homeless people are so quick to greet and support one another despite what they are individually going through.  

If we are to rebuild our democracy we need to do so with robust and supportive communities.  These communities can take many shapes and forms but not one of our modern new towns with flash corporate apartments featuring pointless tiny balconies have designed in an awareness of community.  Shockingly, even our most expensive apartment and condominium developments fail to plan in communal space and shared facilities, leaving it to individuals of initiative to develop and provide those. This is happening all the while as we rip the heart out of our rural communities because we cannot see an economic advantage to them in our rush to urban sprawl.

Just as with the ten new tribes of Athens; our communities need a sense of status and reputation. It is not enough for our renewed democracy to accord status just to the rich and well connected; that’s simply programming in division, envy, and hatred in our communities. Here we are in Ireland of the 21^st Century and the age old tactic of divide and rule still holds sway. Our traditional political tribes reflect this division: Fianna Fáil for the urban middle class, Fine Gael for the rural middle class, Labour for the urban working class and Sinn Féin for the rural working class and the urban poor.  As I said above, not one of these Civil War parties actually have any vision or motivation to change this sorry state of affairs one jot. It suits them just fine.

We need new tribes, just as Cleisthenes wisely provided. These pillars could take the form of geographic location just as in ancient Attica, where Cleisthenes was careful to evenly distribute people of the mountains, plains and coast among these new tribes. The new tribes of Ireland need to provide personal esteem, status, achievement, responsibilities and reputation to their cohort.  There needs to be a social gel much like Bronze Age phalanxes within these tribes to ensure that people across a wide traditional social divide feel comfortable being with one another. 

What I propose is that the five traditional provinces of Ireland (Ulster, Munster, Connaught, Leinster and Meath) be reactivated by provincial councils that handle provincial budgets and our Dáil assembly get back to just legislating. The five economic functions of our society can be evenly divided among our five provinces: Civil, Finance, Energy, Data, and Culture. The annual tax budget would be allocated with equity and each province could then provide for their own, without having to beg the Taoiseach.

ENTABLATURE AND PEDIMENT

Now for the flashy stuff that grabs everyone’s attention, if the entablature of the house is that weight that holds the pillars and walls in place then the entablature of the house of Solon must surely be the ambition in individuals and groups encouraged by their earlier needs being satisfied. Remember, the richest people in the world are actually not at the top of this hierarchy but lower down because their family or community needs remain unsatisfied.  This is why so many of the mega rich either burn up their wealth in a garish display of hyper-consumerism to compensate for what is missing from their lives or they invest their wealth into altruistic causes to win the respect and admiration they still crave despite their mega success.

By ambition, I mean that dream we all have to be what we want to be. There are a select few people in the world who enjoy a comfortable living, even great wealth by doing exactly what they are gifted to do and wish to do. None of these people got to their position easily but one can see they enjoy decades of success and personal fulfilment doing what they deem they were supposed to do. Other people crash about, failing at this and failing at that but they become fulfilled when they finally make a real difference to others in ways they never imagined they could. Then life makes sense. 

This satisfaction is the self-actualisation area of Maslow’s hierarchy; it is the apex of his pyramid. This is where our society needs to provide that outlet to the individual, not just in industry, but also in culture, in enterprise, in society, in leisure, in science, in education, no matter where, we have a big enough population to be able to provide outlets for people of all talents and ambitions.  If we haven’t thought to provide that outlet we should at least provide for the individual to forge their own outlet with our support because ultimately this entablature of successful, fulfilled, ambitious and adventurous people supports our National Pediment. 

Our triangular Parthenon style frieze showing the world our ambition and our self-actualisation represents the ultimate goal of this redevelopment of the house of Solon. Our people adorn our democracy, full of promise and ambition and they enjoy long careers and raise new generations born into a society that does not know fear, despair, poverty and helplessness. If that sounds pie-in-the- sky to you, kindly explain to me how smaller and poorer countries than ours have astronauts and opera houses and world class science labs and immense libraries and even film industries.  They choose to have those where we choose to remain the poor, raggedy man of Europe.

The Pediment with our carved marble, brightly painted and guilded figurines is not made up of our people’s ambitions and adventure but the ambitions and sense of adventure of our own democracy; unafraid to deal with thorny questions, entrusting the people with their own say and their own tax monies, providing for future generations and making sure that our older generations receive the dignity and companionship they both crave and deserve, all as part of the national design.

Why? 

Because the House of Solon is not a bordello but a temple and our national treasury. That is what the Acropolis is, the treasury of the people in plain view each day, every day. Never once being obscured from view but shining brightly and adorned with the brightest colours as a constant reminder to the people of Athens just how special and valued they were.

What is the point of greatness if you never show it, especially to the people who make you great?   

Post Partum comment: 

What else can we take from the Golden Age of Democracy?

 - The philosophy of cross party participation in our governance

 - Critical Thinking courtesy of Socrates and Plato.
 - Proportion and Balance in our architecture and planning
 - Exposing logical fallacies in our debates and discourses
 - Promoting our intellectual and creative achievements abroad

 - Giving our people a more active role in our public life 

 - Keeping a beady eye on factionalism and rising tyrants

These would be a good start. 

TWEE revisited - Irish Democratic Party Strategy for Change.

As promised, here is the post that examines the Irish Democratic Party’s ideas, strategies and policies as well as how it comes to such decisions. Just as I have dissected the core values of the four Civil War parties (Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Sinn Féin and Labour) so I will dissect the core values of the party I have chosen to join. This is not just an exercise in self-promotion but a sincere attempt to show how this party is rational, responsible, and free of historical baggage.

To begin with the Irish Democratic Party’s core value is democracy itself. The party engages in participatory democracy as its norm, as a means to come to decisions and to develop strategies.

This model of democracy reflects directly back to the original form of Athenian Greek democracy where every free man not only had the right but also the duty to engage with the decision making process for the city of Athens as a robust defence against tyranny and enslavement through poverty. The same is true today as it was in the time of Pericles and Plato – without a robust and honest public discourse our state is vulnerable to plunder and infiltration from those who seek to profit from our divided and insecure status: In this era, vulture funds, neoliberal ideologues and tax evading super-investors.

Participatory Democracy is a radical departure from the slavish copying of British parliamentary-style representative democracy that is currently the system of choice within the Oireachtas. Ireland’s challenges and conditions are alien to those of the much larger and more industrialised UK by the very nature of our history. The Irish Democratic Party’s insistence upon participatory democracy is a radical challenge to the partisan and oppositional politics style inherited from the UK’s Houses of Parliament model where two dominant parties bicker and oppose one another using the minority parties as trading cards come election time.  Fine Gael’s current minority (lame duck) government which lays claim to ‘The New Politics’ – is clearly not functional as it is trying to push square pegs (Partisan Representatives) into round holes (Consensus Groups).
 

They don’t know what they do!

As it stands today only partisan representative style party structures may be allowed to speak within the chamber of Leinster House. There is no political reason for this barrier other than that was the established political style under British Imperial Rule and the parties of the Civil War saw no reason to change it even when the war of Independence was won and the opportunity arose where an Irish Republican Democracy could actually become reality.  Sadly that opportunity was not just missed but actively rejected by Ireland’s new masters, seeing the massive challenge to their own authority it represented. This is understandable for a group of men and women who fought a costly, tragic and bloody insurrection against the world’s most powerful empire but it’s not so justifiable today.   

Participatory Democracy does away with the concept of partisan rule in favour of ‘Taoiseach CEO / Tánaiste COO’ style governance where the majority party ‘chair’ each department and working group but incorporates the voices of both the electorate and the other parties as participants to come to a more inclusive decision.  This cuts back the potential for political corruption and cronyism as the eyes of political opponents are firmly locked upon the daily workings and negotiations around government decisions. Instead of enacting bad laws and initiatives which grind progress to a halt and cost the state millions in inquiries and legal challenges, this inclusive system allows for legislation to be fully tested and work-shopped in advance of publication as opposed to being challenged in the house. By doing the homework in advance, faithfully and leaving agendas at the door, we may finally achieve effective and nimble progress towards the goal of delivering a genuine Republic.

Government should and needs to be more than just an oppositional Punch and Judy show.

To what economic end?

If you have read any of my posts on this blog you will already understand that I am fully aware of the deterioration in physical labour as a means to earn wealth. This deterioration started with the water wheel so it’s not really news that by the time I head to the wrong side of the grass the jobs and professions that currently are the goal of most ambitious parents will simply no longer exist. Work in Law, Accountancy, Education and even Medicine which are the traditional pathways to social superiority, being a professional; these will soon be the task of advanced AI software and robotics.

We’re already seeing this happen before our eyes as most entry-level positions in these industries are becoming poorly-paid internships or worse front-loaded by the need to have achieved an increasing standard of education and ‘qualification’ in lieu of actual working experience. What was once a comfortable living after an initial apprenticeship of long hours and ongoing education will now not return sufficient reward to justify the pain of becoming ‘qualified’. What then for the massed ranks of highly educated but unemployable young men and women?  More emigration?

These professions already provide the main pathways to political activism – politics is a game for professionals, that is, people who have qualified in something and thus, have proven their ability to concentrate their attention to highly specialised and detailed tasks (such as legislation) and who enjoy their choice of working conditions and hours. How will people burdened with tens of thousands of euros of student and post-graduate debt afford the twenty hours’ minimum of free time to engage effectively in politics (and what reward will they expect for such sacrifices)? Clearly, politics will either have to overcompensate its participants financially so they can let go of their professional careers or it must offer them a ‘leg-up’ with their careers in the same way that golf clubs and socio-professional organisations provide today. This is a recipe for corruption and tyranny to even the most optimistic observer. Human nature being such as it is we can expect nepotism, cronyism and secret backroom deals to proliferate like Japanese bindweed. 

The economic ramifications of this atmosphere are beyond depressing, they represent fully-fledged dystopias in the making. By continuing with a status quo that was designed for a rigid neo-feudal society of ‘landed gentry ruling over the indentured mob’ we can only expect our society to return to that past and thus, a new uprising and civil war will inevitably occur. If you doubt my words, have a look at how protest today  has changed from those protests which occurred three decades ago even at the height of ‘the troubles’.  Which electorate between the hairy beardies of the 70’s and today’s water warriors enjoy more rights and command more respect among our TDs?  ISIS, anyone?

Such a corrupt and venal society may have its cheerleaders on the neoliberal end of the political spectrum (neoliberal theory openly questions the value of government in general anyway). However those investors and businesses who are engaged in genuine productive business, companies that produce or deliver a tangible end product or service, will think twice about putting long-term investment into such an unstable society in which their mid-term to long-term projections reveal the chance of a financially destructive social unrest and civil conflict.

By democratising democracy we’re deliberately putting forward an alternative to the palpable and obvious agenda of fashioning a deeply unequal, unhappy and insecure society. By sharing access to power we are also sharing and thus imposing personal responsibility for political activity. If only there was an historical example of Participatory Democracy working….Click on the Wikipedia link above!

There are 15 points in the IDP ‘Strategy for Change’. I will TWEE-test each point fairly and openly.

On top of the long-term points I have made in favour of Participatory Democracy above I will add that introducing this supposedly radical way of doing things is simplicity itself and costs noting. The introduction of this system is happening now at party level and soon at electorate level, not through canvassing and junk mail but via face to face conversations and app assisted surveys on the work of our party. One doesn’t need to be a card carrying member of the party or even have voted for the party to be heard and to have an influence on how the party expresses its views.
  

Economically, the IDP is a far cheaper party mechanism to run than a traditional Civil War party.  The Irish Democratic Party can communicate and interact with the electorate for free via the internet and social networks without the need for posters, flyers and mail shots of junk that nobody reads.  Economically the IDP is better informed about the mood of the electorate and better informed of their needs, desires and aspirations without needing expensive marketing, media or branding consultants. 

Economically, democratising democracy means the expense and delay caused by a phalanx of middle men and ‘experts’ is no longer necessary. We simply propose a policy in response to questions posed to us by an elector and we explore it together. Even if our proposal is shot down by the rest of our electorate, at least we explored it and aired that individual’s view…..for free.

By genuinely listening and enjoying the reputation of responding to the concerns of the people who reach out to us we attract innovative and free-thinking people to our forum because they don’t need to climb a greasy pole for decades before they can hope to influence policy; thus our ideas are valid, current, and aligned to the interests of a growing active population. No need for TV ads! There’s always social media and You Tube where people don’t resent our message like junk mail or spam and we can always have instant messaging available to people who cannot travel to a Dublin HQ and make an appointment and who do not want to sit on an automated phone line at their own expense. The other wonderful thing about messaging is that the conversation and who is participating is saved for future reference; there’s no risk of ‘He said, she said’ happening.  It’s there live and accessible.

THAT’S what’s missing from Irish politics…..access. Ordinary people do not enjoy access to their elected representatives under the current system but they have to either be party members and activists who can fund-raise or they need a shed load of money and are prepared to spend it.  Compare a civil war party that operates a whip system and your TD promises you that (s)he’ll ‘look into it’ with a party that not only gives you instant feedback and are available for follow up conversations where the points made are visible and where that party can give you what legislation is the cause of the problem and, using a hashtag link to the entire party membership, can explore a solution there and then on a messaging app which costs nothing in a WiFi zone and you can see just how economically superior Participatory Democracy is over Partisan Representative Democracy.  One talks a lot and does little as opposed to one that is listening and is doing in real time, for free.

Participatory Democracy will be the political movement of the next fifty years precisely because that is how we interact with business, services and one another. Why would anyone write a letter and pay for it to be registered when they can get a superior result on the same day electronically?

Fast-track repossessions will all be overturned by the courts over the next few years because the original documentation is simply not there.  When one engages with a business to receive any service a contract is negotiated, issued, and signed before anything can happen.  Now, thanks to NAMA and the like, those contracts have been bundled together without rhyme or reason and sold in batches to vulture funds.  The problem with this approach (outside of it being precisely what Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac did to crash the US housing economy) is that the specific contract between the original lender and the home owner is no longer part of that bundle. The vulture fund is on a tight schedule (generally three years or less) to capitalise on their investment but, without all the relevant documentation, they have been sold a pup. 

Our political leaders in their ‘wisdom’ (more like desperately needing to ditch their many properties to foreign investors) pushed through the notorious Land and Conveyancing (Reform) Bill 2013 with hardly a peep out of the so called opposition. This bill sought to paper over the glaring failure of NAMA to provide sensible and substantive portfolios to genuine investors but it has failed in the courts again and again.  If the homeowner has a copy of their original agreement and can provide that as evidence to the court then the probability of overturning a repossession order is greatly increased. The vulture funds simply do not have paperwork, and have been caught providing forged documentation to the courts on occasion. 

This situation is not sustainable.  It is not sustainable for the people for whom homelessness is a very real threat and, after constant harassment by increasingly desperate banks, some have opted for suicide and worse still, murder suicide, nobody is going to do business with that bank again – this creates a legal ‘tort’ which our lenders and our governments will have to answer for in the Supreme Court and to European Courts. It is not sustainable for a government to continue along the path of being the antagonist to their own electorate, all the while looking supine and corrupt because of their individual TDs property portfolios which must be declared to the PAC year on year – the expense they must go to convince enough people to elect them is increasing sharply (pace Alan Kelly’s chest beating celebration at coming FOURTH!). It is not sustainable for the vulture funds that exist to monetise their investment by a certain date because they will have repackaged and sold those debts on to other funds and yet cannot deliver the promised percentages.  In short, the entire hedge fund sector is about to contract pulling down notorious names as well as some Irish banks. 

The sustainable solution has yet to be considered in the rush to capitalise on all the bad debts. The sustainable solution is for the state to CPO the debts and to convert those tenants into state tenants on a long-term, not-for-profit deal in which they can remain within their homes free of the spectre of homelessness and contribute directly to the economy instead of being a drain upon it.

It’s called meeting the parties in the middle; it happens all the time in business and it is how business absorbs the economic shock of a market downturn to live to fight another day. The cloak and dagger behaviour of FF/FG/NAMA and NTMA does nothing to encourage inward or internal investment.

In my open letters blog I wrote in 2011:

“Trust: it’s what the entire system of wealth and industry in the west has been built upon since the days of men in short skirts fighting over Helen of Troy. So the worst thing to lose for any system designed to generate and manage wealth is...trust.”

Financial Services need stability, not excuses. Clearly, the behaviour of our senior economic actors (Banks, Regulators, Civil Servants and Legislators) was well askew from basic commonsense. Many very smart people happily paid into the Ponzi scheme that was construction in the 1990s and early 2000s. Ponzi schemes will always occur where there’s money within any economy but, this time, it was allowed to become the culture and too many ‘important’ people were caught out by the sudden collapse of the US economy for similar obvious structural faults. 

There was fraudulent and reckless behaviour rife within our economy under Bertie Ahern and Charlie McCreevy and this culture has not been honestly and thoroughly investigated because of political alliances and social connections getting in the way of a genuine resolution.  In this atmosphere of ‘say nothing and do nothing’ the little people continue to suffer. That might be acceptable to an 80’s power-soap superbitch character but a real life legislator needs to appeal to the ‘little’ people to continue to govern. Either there is law for all or there is privilege for the few.

There can be no ‘safe harbour’ for any investor no matter who they are or what position they held in this scenario. Financial services, to salvage some credibility, need to openly and frankly reveal their system failures (not ‘systemic’ but specific failures!) and show how they have responded to close off that possibility in the future.  By the same token the Irish Administration needs to undergo the same process as too many failures have been rewarded by successive governments to the point that the tax payers are deeply cynical of political insiders and cronies with good reason.

‘Legal action taken against anyone found to have broken any laws’ – anyone means anyone.  If fraud, criminal behaviour or false accounting has been perpetrated than those people who have been found to have done so with malice of forethought need to face prosecution and even imprisonment no matter who they are – TDs, Ministers and Taoisigh, all need to obey the laws of the land.

When we look at the situation in Ireland (and some other states in the EU) we see that Irish money is being taken out of our economy and placed directly in the hands of the very same actors who caused the crash to buy Irish properties, resources, and assets to denude the country of the means to climb out from our current economic hole.  This is compounding the problem.  This is precisely the vicious spiral that Zimbabwe is currently in. 

This is a con.

If a state is found to have enacted a con upon its own people, it has become a kleptocracy and cannot therefore raise the funds in international loans. Irish bonds would rightly be considered ‘junk bonds’ and not worth investing in. Therefore the economic end of this third strategy isn’t simply vengeance but the correct platform to ensure a professionally regulated economy which can adapt to future economic shocks and provides a level playing field for all investors.   

The economic end of this Strategy should be clear to all.  We have traced the monies that have been taken from Irish people, collected and redistributed via the ECB from the time of the bailout to today and not one cent was given back to the German saver but it has flowed with alarming speed to tax-havens only to be used to buy up more assets and properties from distressed countries in the EU. This negligence (if it is indeed not a deliberate con) undermines the Euro itself and needs to be tackled head on.  Right now Deutsche Bank (a major beneficiary in ‘Irish’ bailout subsidy) is under severe pressure as they still cannot provide the cash they claim to possess. If Deutsche Bank does fail and goes the way of Lehman Brothers not one cent that was funneled out of Ireland into its coffers will be returned to the people from whom it had been demanded with malice by the president of the European Commission and the Troika.

All bets are off. Ireland must stand firm against an obvious false accounting regime and demand that each cent collected thus far be fully and honestly accounted for. The debt is odious by definition as the people forced to pay this debt had no hand or part in the collapse of the Irish Economy.  An odious debt cannot be enforced in any court that wishes to retain its credibility; that is not just Irish law but also European and International law. 

Any economist, irrespective of political bent and ideology, will agree that 1% of Europe’s population being forced to pay 42% of its overall banking debt is not sustainable or justifiable. This is doubly true when the debt itself is palpably odious and unenforceable legally. The current situation not only undermines Ireland’s credibility as a business investment offer but also Europe’s credibility too.  Those who, for their own selfish reasons, enforced this massive injustice and fraudulent collective punishment upon Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy must be brought to account and their influence upon Europe’s future economic strategy must be immediately curtailed.

As long as our political parties and European power blocks respect and protect the ‘reputation’ of proven fraudsters at the core of Europe’s economic engine, there will be no recovery or stability for the Euro.  Choose, Europeans, between a single currency and a group of rich old men in grey suits.

Right now Ireland is being shamelessly used as a pawn in the economic game of ‘Risk’ between the EU and the US.  Both sides of this tug of war over International Trade are equally exploitative and guilty of economic warfare against my country.  For every Apple tax scandal (of course we wouldn’t be allowed to keep one cent of that theoretical €13bn) there is a Deutsche Bank, a Volkswagen, a Braun scandal waiting to emerge from Germany. 

   

Ireland did not enter the EEC to be used so shabbily by a bunch of unelected, tax-avoiding ‘insiders’ and so that promissory note issued by Michael Noonan in a blind panic after sitting at the Bielderberg top table (he aged ten years in one day) is null and void.  No agreement can be accepted or enforced without its terms and conditions being made clear to one and all – otherwise the signatories must be deemed to be ‘under duress’ which renders the note null and void.

No policy that impacts upon so many people may be implemented under a veil of secrecy and stand.

This strategy for change leads on from the last. Before the Troika ever darkened our shores with their technocratic hocus-pocus, when our economy was doing very well indeed and was modelled on the Asian Tiger economies, we had ministers busily selling us down the river for personal gain. 

Ray Burke sold off between €125 to €155 billion of Irish coastal oil and gas reserves to Royal Dutch Shell and Statoil for a pittance of its value just so the ‘books would balance’.  Again, without full disclosure of the negotiations or even a bidding process worthy of the name, this deal cannot be honoured or allowed to stand.  Mr Burke has helpfully provided us with plenty of previous evidence of financial impropriety to the point that he was imprisoned for tax fraud, this was after three consecutive tax amnesties introduced by his own party.  

On the same vein, the victims of systematic sexual, physical, and psychological abuse as well as illegal imprisonment are limited to an overall fund of €128 million at the taxpayer’s expense thanks to a deal negotiated by that spiritually impartial Knight of Columbanus, Dr. Michael Woods (He of the farcical Blasphemy Law imposed upon the Irish people in 2003 without any mandate or debate) in return for lands ceded to the state (and their pet developers, presumably) by the Orders and hierarchy of the Irish Catholic Church.  Breaking News: That land hasn’t been handed over to the state twenty years later.  I move that these deals have lapsed and we let the professionals in to renegotiate.  According to Dr. Woods in 2009, most of the compensation had been paid anyway.

With regards to a particular deal of this type, The Corrib Gas pipeline, we discovered that the mission of the Garda Síochána had subtly changed from being guardians of the peace to being agents provocateurs and brutalisers of any community protesting the wholesale selling off of Ireland’s resources (despite the fact that revenues being alienated is unconstitutional). How a deal that benefited so few could be enforced by publicly funded police against the rational best interests of so many still stands as a major destabilising factor in law and governance in Ireland’s society.  If the people, with good cause, deem that their rights are no longer enshrined in the constitution but are up for grabs to the highest bidder then we can all forget about long term strategic planning and revenue planning as there will be no respect for the state.

I am not arguing for the rescinding or overturning of the will of the Irish people, if a government puts the question out to the people by referendum or places a policy on their manifesto for government and they get elected on that manifesto then they have the mandate for better or for worse and we just have to suck it up; that’s democracy.  

The deals and contracts we are describing here had no mandate and no oversight by the Dáil, the judiciary or the people. This is insider dealing with assets and resources that are not and never have been the legal property of any party or government to dispose of and therefore these deals and their enforcement by our policing services must be considered state sponsored theft. 

These deals provide the proof that Ireland is a kleptocracy no better than the Russia of Vladimir Putin’s oligarchs. Economically we cannot allow such a state of affairs to continue because this is a direct and unnecessary threat to the wealth and potential of future Irish generations.

In political circles there is a phrase even more pernicious than ‘Bed blockers’.  This phrase is used to recommend a candidate for whatever publicly funded position is being considered by whatever minister or senior civil servant; it could be a regulatory body; it could be a Supreme Court Judge; it could be a holding vote on a public initiative; it could be a seat on the Arts Council, it doesn’t matter.  This phrase will get you that candidate appointed faster than a CV stuffed full of relevant experience, a Nobel prize for that area of expertise; a wad of cash in a dimly-lit car park, or even the guarantee of thousands of votes in your redrawn constituency. This phrase is ‘a safe pair of hands’. 

Like all Orwellian newspeak it means the polar opposite of what it sounds like.  The safe pair of hands doesn’t refer to competency, it doesn’t refer to expertise, talent or experience in the field.  No, ‘safe pair of hands’ refers to efficient and reliable goalkeeping – the candidate can be relied upon not to let in a ‘soft goal’.  It means that the party line will be stoutly defended and that, no matter what the party is up to, legal or illegal, the ‘safe pair of hands’ will continue to obfuscate and block any attempt to expose a genuine flaw or deliberate wrongdoing by the party and its cronies.

A safe pair of hands can lie smoothly and shamelessly in the face of overwhelming evidence against what they have been told to say.  A safe pair of hands doesn’t even need to be a party loyalist who believes in the message at all. The safe pair of hands can know the truth, be fully aware of the truth, and even can have been a champion of the truth in the past. Once appointed, the safe pair of hands can be relied upon (for the right fee) to ensure that whatever the status quo is, that is what he or she will defend to the last and only step down under a hail of opprobrium when it suits the party. 

All the civil war parties seek out and promote their ‘safe pair of hands’ into whatever area and committee they wish to control. 

It is a power game as opposed to any vestige of governance.  It is simply occupying power and the budgets that come with power for the party’s own use. The safe pair of hands will ensure that, if things go awry, if scandal happens, they can be the scapegoat for the media brouhaha, satisfying the Montrose commentariat that something is being done and then things settle down allowing the party to get back to claiming more and more turf.

This is how every cent that is collected from you annually in income tax, service charges, VAT, utility taxes and whatever other payments you are obliged to make to the government for living in Ireland is handled.  Every single cent has flowed through the fingers of ‘a safe pair of hands’ at some stage.

Economically, it is naive and detrimental to growth to allow any party or coalition of parties to rule unquestioned, unaccountable and unsupervised. Growth cannot happen where investment may or may not go where it is targeted and we have no way of getting to the truth. The Irish Water fiasco is the perfect case in point. Money was siphoned off to consultants (party selected, of course) and advisors before a single kerb was sprayed with paint. Costs were cut where equipment and basic materials were sourced ‘second hand’ even when it was clearly faulty and not fit for use – top dollar was paid for these junk meters according to the books – paid to a ‘safe pair of hands’ by a ‘safe pair of hands’.  Both ‘safe pairs of hands’ have since been promoted to other party business at great public expense, even though Irish Water was an unmitigated disaster for the government. 

     

Actual failure is being rewarded by our civil war parties because doing the job right, even doing the job to completion – no matter how shoddy – was never the point. The ‘safe pair of hands’ isn’t supposed to achieve anything other than to keep the money flowing into whatever white elephant project or tax con the party has come up with. 

It’s not just the parties, either. Senior civil servants and administrators are getting in on the act and, you can rely on this, they are equally comfortable doing the bidding of any one of the civil war parties because in Ireland, there really isn’t an alternative. The money gets collected and the money gets spent (with some slipping off the table under the glare of the white elephant to pay for a nice property abroad or a portfolio of investments managed and recommended by Goldman Sachs). 

Nobody in Leinster House is as stupid or as cack-handed as they appear to you and me. In a universe of only two factions capable of wielding majority power and with a continuing budgetary lenience when it comes to public accounts and how they have been mis-managed there is no reason on Earth to actually strive to improve the economy or to make any long-term investment into the country because the people will eventually get sick of the sight of a Taoiseach, good or bad, and simply opt for someone else out of sheer boredom. 

The system is set up to continue whether the parties bother to attend the Dáil to debate or not. This was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt during the prolonged puppet-show we endured at the formation of this Dáil.  Fianna Fáil decided against being the lame duck, Labour got hammered, Sinn Féin ran away from any real responsibility as fast as they could leaving Fine Gael to wade further into the slime using Shane Ross’ Endapendents and some single issue protest votes as their galoshes.  No wonder Michael Noonan looks ready for the morgue. 

Continuing with ‘more of the same austerity’ when it has clearly been exposed as fraudulent, cruel, venal and downright criminal; even the IMF have been moved to decry the constant austerity as threatening the global recovery. Recovery from what?  What happened in 2007 was the inevitable result of some very clever (and richly rewarded) insiders doing the dumbest possible thing when faced with an overheated market and property bubble. Instead of turning the heat down, they burst the bubble and followed up with the sharpest of cuts; creating the PIIGS ‘crisis’ and pulling the rug out from under the BRIC nations just as they were about to tip the scales.  

Was that stupid or was that deliberate?  It doesn’t matter. 

The main actors in this global transfer of value from property owner to aggressive share holder, the infamous vampire squid, are still running everyone’s show.

Internationally, we have absolutely no chance of bringing anyone remotely responsible for all our woes to justice.  We may be presented by some ‘safe pair of hands’ scapegoats if we dig too close to where the money actually went but that’s about all.  Within Ireland we are all sick to the back teeth hearing about how ‘we lost the run of ourselves’ – the Fine Gael Ard Fheis 2011 must have seemed like Day One on Lough Derg for all the self-flagellation that went on – only it was us they were whipping, not themselves. 

The only solution for the ‘safe pair of hands’ and the continuing immobility of our economy is to drive a coach and horses through the ‘closed oireachtas’ once and for all pulling out from their cosy niches any number of ‘safe pair of hands’, cronies, soon to retire civil servants just marking time and fattening up the pension fund and even TD and Taoisigh if necessary. Giving the people the power to unplug the system, pull out all the stops and pull the chocks away is the only path to true economic growth.

Let’s look at finance.  Money is collected via direct and indirect taxation from the general population and then brought to the Dept. of Finance to be allocated via a yearly budget. Every month leading up to that budget we have a spate of industrial actions and street protests by interest groups and unions vying with one another for a slice of that money and it appears whoever shouts the loudest gets the pot. 

That’s how it appears. 

What we have seen over the recent Apple scandal, Brexit threats, Leprechaun economics, and the precarity of Deutsche Bank’s current position is that the above impression is naïve and that the truth is much more frightening: Far too few people are handling far too much money. 

The previous government only afforded four people oversight of the entire business and workings of the state: The Taoiseach, the Tánaiste, the Minister for Finance and the Junior Minister for Finance. Now that Labour is no longer at the top table, that figure has fallen to two people: Enda Kenny and Michael Noonan. This state of affairs is about as far from a robust democratic economic plan as is possible this side of totalitarianism.

Political parties should never be given complete control over the business of running a country.  This may seem anti-intuitive but, when you think about it, all it needs is for one party to gain overall control over the country’s finances without a check and balance against their own ambitions and you can wave bye-bye to a free democracy forever because that party holds an effective monopoly over people’s livelihoods. 

Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.

Clearly, for our money to be accountable to us we need to break up that amount into manageable packets.  The mania for quangoising national utilities, industries and functions while populating those quangos with ‘safe pairs of hands’ cronies who have no competence in that area is a recipe for precisely the disastrous insider culture which dispossessed Ireland of its resources and assets.  Let’s not repeat these mistakes.  The money needs to be allocated not to departments but to provincial budgets, otherwise large cities like Dublin, Cork, Galway and Limerick will continue to dominate the needed revenue and planning required for our secondary cities, large towns and rural communities. Ireland will cease to be a viable country but we’ll be back to the days of ‘living within the pale’ and dying beyond the pale.

The political independence of provincial administration is essential if money that has been collected from the people for investment in the people is to actually get back to the people.  Too much money has been siphoned off, repackaged and handed in no questions asked subsidy to tax evading individuals and corporations.  It’s not enough to punish those who have done this in the past, economically it is essential to make it very difficult indeed for this to happen in the future. No system is foolproof especially when one includes political parties in the mix but spreading the responsibility (as in legal responsibility) among as many expert people as possible is a start.

Given that Ireland’s problems are many faceted and challenging it is a nonsense to imagine that a man, already well beyond retirement age, utilising theories which have long been discredited as precursors to asset stripping and anti-democratic regimes, can solve them all on his own.

Here is where TWEE comes up against the wall of ‘What if…?’

Before I said that, economically, Ireland needs a process through which a bad or misguided regime needs stopping in their tracks and a newer, better system to be installed in their place.  Stopping a government mid-flow is no mean feat and it does come with ramifications economically, namely, what happens during periods of groupthink or mob rule?

This is a risk, admittedly, as any system that allows a break in the five year cycle for-better-or-for-worse politics will inevitably cause consternation among economic actors, knowing that their carefully calibrated bets could be null and void with a sufficient amount of dissenters throwing their oars in and stopping proceedings all at once.

We have all witnessed what happened to Italy in the 70’s and 80’s to understand how economically destructive rapidly resetting governments can be. Looking at Italy, a nation of tens of millions with an industrial infrastructure comparable to those of France and Germany, with flair and established cachet in the marketplace and a handy population of cheap labour at hand to the south of the country and you can see the damage that has been done to an economy that should be robust.

This is why the Irish Democratic Party has come up with the recall system to handle such situations. Instead of causing constitutional crises and hanging active administrations, mid-policy, recall allows the public to arrest actions or provoke actions of individual ministers and portfolios.  The elected party retains the position and the seat but the failing individual is held legally responsible for their decisions while in power. There are people who will argue that such a measure would provoke temerity among our politicians but, in business – which every politician lays claim to wish to emulate – a failing manager is replaced without ceremony before his or her faulty decisions cost the overall enterprise its working capital and ability to continue to produce and trade and sued if necessary.

So too it can be with our government. 

After all, to govern isn’t ‘to rule over’ or ‘to control’ but ‘to guide’. Government is an endeavour funded by the people, for the benefit of the people and populated by the people; anything else is fraud.

When one considers the various white elephants and abandoned five-year plans we have witnessed over the last forty years; when one considers the naked lies and betrayal of mandate that all the civil war governments have enacted; when one considers the expert manipulation of our ministers by unelected senior civil servants over the decades; we do need a means to arrest ridiculous quangos and insider deals once they become revealed in the public domain. 

Think about our most recent ‘crise nationale’ the non-existent housing shortage; there is no shortage of housing but a shortage of available housing to the state. There are plenty of viable housing units built and connected to our utilities lying unoccupied because the owner is waiting for the price to rise sufficiently to make it economic to bring them to the market. Our previous housing minister suggested people live in degrading temporary housing at a tune of €220,000 per unit.
  

But for the last election, we would be looking at trailer-parks introduced into Ireland at huge expense to the State where year-on-year depreciation and physical degradation would return no economic benefit whatsoever. Thankfully, we didn’t go down the route of trailer-parks but we still have a crisis to deal with. Had the government or the minister in question been more secure, Irish people would have been powerless to stop a very bad idea, done for ‘optics’ sake, and profiting a blood relative of that minister from siphoning off even more investment capital and provoking some profoundly awful social problems into communities that have, frankly, suffered enough.

Recall would have put a stop to that quickly without collapsing the entire government.  Yes, it is draconian to take someone who has worked diligently for many years and sacrificed many evenings to get to the position of government, even with the best intentions, and then to toss them aside when they have done something or said something that displeases the people but the authority must lie with either one or the other. Either the administration and ‘establishment’ have the power or the people do. In a Republic, democratically ratified by constitution, I say that the power and responsibility lies with the people. 

Offering a poor choice of old-lags, party hacks, and just-graduated politicos once every five years isn’t democracy; nor is abdicating the responsibility of maintaining the position of arguing the best possible outcome for the people against aggressive foreign agendas simply because some economist in New York derided our financial results. That is not being a democratic republic but the satrap of a bigger economic system.  On that question I will examine another strategy for change later.

We deem it to be essential that the current system of forming a government on one mandate and then enacting another mandate altogether without recourse to the people who have been betrayed is corrosive of people’s trust and will ensure that less and less people exercise their democratic right to select government which inevitably leads to dystopian regimes chipping away at our rights until we are all Winston Smith being coerced into loving Big Brother. 

It may sound alarmist but would YOU want to live in some States of the USA and be black? Would you want to be Polish or Czech and have to work in post-Brexit Southern England? Would you choose to practise your Islamic faith anywhere in France looking so similar to the Bataclan murderers?  See how quickly freedoms can be eroded? 

This is happening today, all across the West because of media editors, economic planners and elected representatives maliciously misguiding the public in order to retain power and earn that extra ‘bump’ to their pensions. Whether our current batch of representatives is aware of how close they are to this possibility in Ireland (hello, Corrib gas protestors) is moot; I can see it and so can you therefore it is reasonable to presume they can too.

What have they done to shore up our constitutional, democratic, and legal rights against such an outrage?  

Nothing.

Well this Strategy for Change is our stab at resolving the eternal struggle between power and responsibility and it doesn’t involve purges, firing lines or guillotines.

Here is a question: What company or investor seeks to invest in a country over the long term where they know for a fact that the judiciary is the ‘yes man’ or the ‘antagonist’ to a sitting government?

Our international economic systems are predicated along accepted rules and laws which influence how trade and industry flows across the markets and economies of the world. If there is the case that one company can be kept from an opportunity in favour of a preferred company, even the suspicion of that case, where does that leave inward investment? I’m not just talking about capital investment but investment of time, effort, education and care. Clearly, if your company doesn’t enjoy the same quality of judgement as the next company or if you as a citizen cannot count on having the same legal rights as another citizen simply because of the name of the judge presiding over your case then you are not going to remain under that legal imbalance at your own expense.

The separation of powers principle is there to ensure that there is a lasting continuity to our lives across several governments and administrations. No matter what the ideology of the Taoiseach, the senior ministers or any other elected representatives, the judge must adhere to and be seen to adhere to the tradition of judging each case as it is presented to them using the established legal precedent and relevant legislation as their only guide without fear or favour.

That simply doesn’t happen, even with the most Pollyanna outlook, in a country where a minister, his or her, party colleagues, or his or her party seniors namely the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste can seek to influence or control an appointment to the judiciary. Once a judge can even be seen to have come under undue influence then their entire career of judgements is open to question. There is a case in the United States where a judge was proven to have deliberately sent minors to prison for the benefit of a private prison company. Not only is this man experiencing prison for himself but each one of his judgements must now be reviewed and retried.  The cost to that state is enormous before we even factor in the damage that has been done to those young people and what legal redress they will inevitably seek from the state for its criminal negligence.

Think about how much the State has provisioned for the historical sexual abuse of minors in Catholic Church run institutions and consider how the figure of IR£128 million was considered a ‘bargain’ by both the Catholic hierarchy and the Fianna Fáil government of the day. The cost in cash alone of having a compromised, supine judiciary is astronomical and, here is the problem, the judiciary in Ireland  already toil under the suspicion of being an ‘Old Schoolboy’s Network’ where many correct and fair judgements are decried and queried because of who was the plaintiff and who presided over the case. Whatever about fixing that established and embedded monoculture, allowing political interference would make our legal system a laughing stock.

The problem is exacerbated by our continuing obligations under EU law where, a judgement that can be credibly argued to have been biased or flawed based upon that judge’s connections or otherwise to a particular political party within Ireland can be overturned by the superior European Courts of Justice or Human Rights. This undermines Ireland’s international credibility of being an open and fair economy as well as acting as a barrier to any inward investment decisions in the particular area of that case. It’s clear that stand-alone, independent judiciary is economically essential.   

   

As with our judiciary so it is with our Gardaí. Who invests in Columbia? Who invests in Pakistan? Who invested in Iraq under Saddam Hussein? The answer is nobody outside of the CIA who wanted to run a drugs for money laundering operation.

Our police force is populated by rare creatures indeed. They are people who are courageous enough to face violence and criminality on a daily basis using only a hat and a uniform. Police in other countries have firearms, they have superior investment in their infrastructure and they enjoy a working atmosphere free of political interference and yet, they dread ever having to even brandish their firearm because of the effect that will have on their paperwork load, their careers, and if something goes horribly wrong, their lives and their personal freedom. 

We can’t afford the many differing levels and tiers of policing that States of tens of millions of people can. We can’t afford to kit out or police force with the ultimate in high tech equipment and gadgets to ensure they can maintain an upper hand against organised, well funded, and fearless criminals. We can’t even provide many of our police with the counselling and administrative supports they need to continue to face the hazards and challenges they must face to uphold the law and protect Ireland’s people from harm and exploitation. We can’t even afford to pay them what they need to live, day to day in our costly cities and remote villages whatever about what they deserve to be paid.

So, given all of that, is it too much to ask that the Gardaí aren’t constantly messed around for the sake of a party’s policy mix or made into the ‘bad guy’ just to push through a policy that clearly enriches one person and impoverishes everyone else (including them)?

For the last five or six years, our police service has been used abysmally by political opportunists to enforce what Americans call ‘ordinances’ these are regulations and guidelines that do not appear in the statute book and non-compliance are not to be considered acts of criminality.  When a party in power enacts a new piece of legislation that clearly has not been thought through or has been imposed upon them by an outside influence say, for instance, something called the Troika, and this legislation makes it a crime not to comply with it even though the people may not be financially capable to do so than that party has, with the swipe of a pen, criminalised their own population.

Who is asked to enforce that injustice and present the citizen for prosecution? Is it a private company paid well by the party at its own expense? No, it is the publically (poorly) funded Gardaí who probably are well known to the people they arrest in their home towns. 

Economically, who is going to start a business and be legally responsible for their employees when the Gardaí can close that business down and present that person for prosecution because of a deal agreed offshore over lines of cocaine and tequila shots?  Adjusting penalty points on driving licenses is hardly trading in weapons grade plutonium and yet, let’s all reflect on how Sgt. Gerry McCabe was treated by his colleagues, his superiors and his Minister for Justice. Let’s also reflect on how those chickens are coming home to roost for the current Minister for Justice and the current Senior Garda commissioner, appointed by Fine Gael. 

Enough said?

  

Mr McCabe will retire on a better pension than Mr. Callinan, fact!

This should be a no-brainer. Nearly every other state on Earth has removed this substance from their water supply. The exceptions are famed for their dysfunctional social contract (like the US and Ireland). The body of evidence is building that the dental benefits of hydroflourocillicic acid suspended in water are far outweighed by the long-term damage caused by it on the human body. Irish people consume about a tenth of the sugary fizzy drinks that people in the US do and have no reason to shore up their teeth against decay to the same degree.

Hydroflourocillicic Acid is the by-product of the aluminium industry; it is contained in bauxite (which is the remainder impurities left after processing metal into aluminium). This substance costs a lot of money to extract from bauxite, a lot of expertise to suspend in water to such a degree that it is not visible and that supply comes into Ireland from abroad. We pay for this to be added to our water. 

Once Hydroflourocillicic acid is added to our water, it ceases to be water but is a chemical solution. We are being coerced to pay (yet again) for our water and yet, we’re getting a chemical solution out from our taps. We brush our teeth with fluoride enriched toothpaste and experts recommend that the dosage should be no more than a pea-sized amount to protect our teeth and that the solution in our mouths should never be ingested. Think about that for a minute.  Look at your toothpaste tube – it has a health warning against ingesting the solution that contains this chemical.  

Even if you are not sure whether this is a toxin or just an addition, do you really believe that pure water, H₂O, can rot your teeth?

If you are not convinced that this is a simple fix, try this experiment: 

1 - Take a tumbler of tap water from the Irish water supply.
2 - Put in a simple two prong electrode and connect it to a battery.
3 – Wait less than two minutes.
4 – Now do the same with distilled or bottled water from a natural source.
5 – Compare the two tumblers.  One is cloudy and murky, one remains clear. 

Still not convinced? OK. 

1 - Take that tumbler of tap water, enriched with hydroflourocillicic acid again.
2 - This time weigh a small lump of lead or copper and take a note of the amount to at least two decimal places.
3 – Place that lump of lead or copper in the tumbler of water and leave it alone for say a week end.
4 – Remove the metal and, after thoroughly drying it, weigh it again writing down the amount to at least two decimal places.
5 – Compare the two measurements you have recorded. 
6 - If they’re sufficiently similar for you to believe nothing happened to the metal suspended in the hydroflourocillicic acid solution, please, drink the water.

Ireland still has a lot of copper and lead piping in the supply chain.    

Economically, it is very clear that the current cheap price of crude oil is synthetically held down by the Alaskan tar sands dividend and the US fracking on a greater scale than we could accept in Europe. Once these dividends begin to fail, the price of oil will rise again. The price fixing that we are seeing is the oil industry’s closing down sale – a desperate effort to keep people investing in the internal combustion engine in their cars, busses, vans, lorries, trains, air, and sea transports – in the hope that they can eke out another decade of the West burning up oil and gas at the rate of the 1970’s and 1980s. 

But the message about climate change and global temperature events is getting through and the evidence is mounting that we are, for better or for worse, facing up to a transitional period of weather, seasonal and tidal events; random bacterial, pest, plague, weed and spore proliferation; an increased demand for heating and cooling solutions in the developing (nearly developed) world; all supposed to hang on a dwindling stock of hydrocarbon fuel that we can access with no redundant nodes inbuilt to our systems to protect us from black outs and fuel crises. 

It’s not a pretty medium term picture, and it is a disastrous long term picture….called Mad Max.

  

What are the genuine alternatives?  What risks do they contain?  What challenges do they present? Are they going to bring limitations to how we live today?  Over the long term, what effect will they have on our natural world and our domestic spaces?  Will they expose us to more or new diseases?

Guess what? – Nobody really knows.

Nobody knows because nobody has been commissioned to explore these scenarios and questions. The only money going into researching these questions is money from the petrochemical industry or money from ‘ecological movement’ – both sources clearly harbour an agenda that doesn’t involve examining what is best for you and me. They are pre-calibrated to come to the desired conclusion.

Since I started banging on about energy tech and smart applications (hereinafter known as ‘internet of things’ – ugh!) in 2009 an entire industry has sprung up on the fringe of western and Asian nations and is now the fastest growing industrial sector in the world. Isn’t it time we looked carefully and intelligently at what is on offer, what may come down the line, and what pitfalls to avoid now? 

Do we really want to repeat the ISDN vs ADSL fiasco, windfarms for the boys scandals of today and end up betting the house on what turns out to be the energy version of the Betamax recorder?

We say no.  

Without fear or favour, the Irish Democratic Party is not going to roll out the red carpet for every ‘hey wow, gee whizz, bells and whistles’ tech solution that comes to our shores but act as a political ‘Dragon’s Den’ demanding some evidence and practical demonstration of the benefits of the tech solution while keeping a beady eye on the bottom line, the quality of our environment, our right to privacy, and how these technologies may change us as people for better or for worse. 

(If only we went through this exercise back in 2006 at the introduction of the iPhone, right?)   

 

I will let my arguments in Strategy 11 stand on the Water Charges: If it’s not water, what are we paying for and why should we? 

When we look at the cost to the economy of stealth taxes such as Property Tax, Household charges (updated bin tax which is still being paid) we very quickly see that, for the sake of ticking some bureaucratic boxes (not ALL Europe’s fault) we are prolonging ‘Austerity’ even though it has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to have done us no good at all.

This leads me to question where these charges are calculated, and to whom are the monies paid.

What is done with this money and where can we see the accounts?

Failure to disclose these necessary answers renders these ‘death by 1,000 cuts taxes’ null and void.

Would you continue to pay a doctor or a mechanic for vague charges not already agreed in your contract with them?  What’s so different about government? 

Economically speaking, these taxes not only have a dampening effect on people’s spending within the economy but they also have a corrosive effect upon public confidence in the efficiency of government to wisely spend tax income for the benefit of the society and that throws all sorts of spectres out into the light. 

Taxation needn’t be complex, burdensome or time consuming and arguing that ‘that’s just the way it is and has always been’ is an historically illiterate view and one that holds no water in any other jurisdiction. Even in the land of bureaucracy, France, the tax regime is clear and easy to follow and the monies taken in are (sometimes too) flamboyantly spent on the quality of life of its citizens. 

Tax collection, collation and management is the function of the Revenue Commissioners, not of councils, committees, quangos or any other non statutory body devoted to that function. It is an unjust and costly nonsense to have people, citizens or denizens, being threatened with or actually entering the prison system at huge cost per person to the state over an inability to pay what is effectively an ordinance as opposed to a legal, calibrated, fair state tax. 

Finally, given the secretive nature of our super landlords, many of whom are elected representatives in the Oireachtas and at local government, there cannot be an amnesty for one group of tax avoiders and throwing the book at another group of tax defaulters due to poverty.

“Let them eat cake” can only lead to the one end.

It has been proven again and again all over continental Europe and in the Baltic (where we’re from mostly) that people are content to pay higher taxes if they are fair and the investment into the country’s infrastructure is obvious. When the smell of a scam tax hits anyone’s nostrils, rich or poor, they are less inclined to pay what they owe no matter how little is being demanded. 

And yet the economic geniuses of the civil war parties keep trying to play the same three card trick: taxing those who have already paid, blaming those who can't pay and covering for those who WON'T pay.

Ireland is a Republic, the founders of the state deemed this and nobody has tried to change that status over the last eighty years.  In a Republic, the citizen is among equals and enjoys equal rights and duties as enshrined (don’t politicians just love that word?) in the constitution. 

Well here’s the problem: That’s simply not true.

If a citizen has left Ireland’s shores voluntarily or involuntarily or if a citizen is simply incarcerated (even before facing trial) that citizen is instantly disenfranchised – They do not have a mechanism to vote. That’s bad enough, morally and ethically but it is even cosmetically embarrassing when we witness Romanian citizens (including Roma) who live in Ireland queuing outside their embassy to cast their votes on Romanian elections. 

Is that to say that Romanians (including Roma) enjoy superior rights and privileges to Irish citizens?  

Yes.

Economically it is also incredibly blinkered by our so-called ‘policy makers’; seeing as Ireland’s reach abroad traverses national, continental, ethnic, cultural, religious, and economic frontiers.  There are Irish citizens living and working in every country in the world with the possible exception of North Korea (although I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an Irish Bar there too).  Only the Jewish culture boasts a similar reach and their immersion in that host culture is limited by their religious standards and tragic history.  Ireland truly has a treasure trove of insider knowledge, working experience and active good will to mine but….the paperwork is too hard for our civil servants apparently.

What the Irish Democratic Party proposes isn’t just a postal vote from abroad but also the possibility of overseas constituencies being set up in our government with TDs who represent their constituency of say, the UK and continental Europe, the Antipodes, North America etc. These TDs aren’t there to fly about on jollies to their constituency countries but to seek out the concerns and the ideas of our millions (yes, millions!) of Irish citizens and to bring those questions to our assembly to debate and, hopefully, to radically improve our legislative performance which is currently so dismal we took months to form a government and we currently can’t even agree on who is the main opposition party. 

Utilising our Irish expertise from abroad would also cause us to enjoy greater influence and reach to emerging and established markets, resulting in Ireland enjoying more success at trade negotiations simply by getting in there ahead of everyone else. 

This is the most efficient, cost-effective and profitable way to deal with the recurring humiliation of being that ‘white country that can’t even keep its own kids’. Let’s turn this very shameful neglect into a source of pride, and, in doing so, open the door to our children to return to start businesses, have their children and send them to Irish schools and colleges, enrich our culture, our cuisine, our town centres, repopulate our midlands, and to bring our population up to a level where we, as a nation, cross over the threshold leaving economic backwater and ‘dodgy tax haven’ and becoming a robust and mature economy that easily attracts long term inward investment from our own people. 

  

All this for the price of a few new TDs.  Finally! A job for the boys that’s actually a good bet! 

  

Brexit means Irexit unless we actively decide otherwise.  Let’s face facts; there is no plan possible where Ireland’s international trade, our internal economics, and the make-up of our society remains unaffected. Clearly, Ireland now lies between its great trading markets of the UK, Europe, and the US, like a helpless child watching parents going through a messy divorce. Without fully informing ourselves of all the options and all the pitfalls we may end up with no significant trading partner whatsoever. 

This is not the time for the Ross O’Carroll-Kellys of Irish finance to pull on the green jersey but we need a broader, more representative body of people to look critically at what we will be facing. We need people who are actuarial in their focus and cinemascope in their range of issues showing clearly to us so that we, as a free people, may make the most informed decision possible.

Nobody can make a plan without an overview of the situation. We in the Irish Democratic Party are determined that our engagement with this question doesn’t descend to the fraudulent depths of the Brexit debate. The question of what Ireland does now isn’t a simple binary IN/OUT debate as Brexit was but a more nuanced and strategic discussion on how Ireland’s position in Europe can be recalibrated so that our voice in the parliament and among the commission is listened to and attended to. The end goal is obviously to keep as many trading links as we possibly can without having our internal market overwhelmed by scaled-up, state subsidised competition.

There are superior alternatives to being a member of a Eurozone if that membership comes at the punishing cost of shoring up the bad banking decisions and outright corruption of central European economic actors. For my personal recommendation please click on this link to my blog on the future of Europe’s economy called “Horses for Courses”. If the economic plan doesn’t reflect a positive outcome for our people, then we should counter with one that does. Tactics is the science of choosing your target whereas strategy is the art of choosing the targets of your opponents.  

Let’s do strategy, for once.

This is probably the most important strategy for change that we have because it deals with the wider world on a confident footing, reclaiming the right to hold referenda on questions of arbitrary power handed over to the unelected European Commission; something no republic’s government should ever do on its watch. This strategy asserts Ireland’s autonomy and, if we choose to continue with the Euro it is because we have freely chosen to do so and not because we were compelled to by a pair of drunks who had no care for our long term outcomes whatsoever. 

Let’s look at the mechanics of a confidence trick. For a confidence trick to happen there needs to be three elements present: the con artist, the victim (or mark) and the value.  Without the value, the con artist has no reason to target the victim. We must always keep an eye on the actual value (the difference between deciding one way or the other).  In terms of Brexit, the British government and people got what they wanted but lost what they had. The value of their status as the second largest economy within the European Union was forgotten by them and they ended up losing not just influence they once enjoyed but also the understanding they could have negotiated. Ireland now has the potential of elevated value but we need to keep a beady eye on the value we possess today. 

No matter how we may feel about the current EU setup being, dominated by a centralised EC regime, we must not lose sight of what we currently enjoy and how difficult and time consuming it would be to replace that with something else. The conclusions of our feasibility study will be bulleted and delivered with full fact checking so that the Irish electorate have the facts to hand as they enter a referendum that defines Ireland’s economics over the next twenty-five years. 

 

No matter whether Ireland stays within or leaves the Eurozone the decision of the people must be fully and honestly informed; there is no place for rhetoric or spin in such an important debate. Once the people have spoken, that outcome will encourage investment from one or other of the external actors to establish their influence over our economy. However, being aware of this possibility means that our governments are capable of choosing those areas and sectors that are state critical and those sectors where we can freely trade without great negative impacts upon our environment, society and economy.

It is astonishing that no civil war party even the famously ‘eurocritical’ Sinn Féin have thought to mention this very important step before any decision could possibly be made.

Yes, I am a very biased witness as I have personally had a hand in shaping some of these strategies but, that is precisely what the Irish Democratic Party offers: access and influence to anyone prepared to engage in the glorious cacophony and chaos of robust democratic debate. This party has no time for embedded political elites, nor does it care for agents provocateurs of the left revolution. We as a party of ordinary people have no time for the echo chamber árd fheiseanna of the civil war parties, nor do we seek out focus group thinking but prefer the real world perspectives of the people who actually make up this country, free from the separation of demographics.

To what economic end the Irish Democratic Party’s strategy for change?

To a century of progress no matter what happens economically elsewhere.