Shane Ross is helping to fight against fascism

It is very tempting to simply dismiss Shane Ross as some sort of a joke politician. His particular brand of naked opportunism was on full display this week with the promise of more money for women’s hockey following hot on the heels of last week’s granny grant nonsense.

The Minister for Transport’s brazenness is tempered somewhat by the faux self-deprecation that is one of the more appealing aspects of an English public school education. But underneath the patina of sophistication beats the heart of a politician of the old school.

Hard to believe then that Ross and the motley crew of Independents he appears to speak for should turn out to actually be Ireland’s best defence against the wave of proto-fascism and big-man politics sweeping the globe.

Over in the United States at the moment there is a great deal of hand-wringing in certain quarters about how the country managed to elect Donald Trump as their president and de facto leader of the free world. There are a great many theories and most of them centre on his ability to garner support from disparate groups who often hold contradictory world views; devout evangelical Christians and Wall Street venture capitalists both favoured him with their votes and money.

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Local political power

One theory currently in vogue lays the blame on the demise of local political power. Historically local Republican and Democratic political machines had much more say in who got elected to the US Congress and Senate or became a state governor – the traditional springboards for a run at the presidency.

And local politics being local politics this meant that your chances of advancement depended much more on what you had done or could do for your constituents than any ideology or policy position you might espouse.

This in turn meant that the two national parties – the Republicans and the Democrats – overlapped. The Senate and the Congress were full of politicians who would have been comfortable in either party. The one they actually ended up in was as much a function of geography and pragmatism as anything else. Sounds a bit familiar.

This all began to change in the 1950s, according to Daniel Hopkins, an American political scientist who has just published a book, The Increasingly United States:. How and Why American Political Behaviour Nationalized. He argues that as the two big parties began to organise more on a national level it resulted in more ideological coherence and a much greater focus by voters on what is going on in Washington.

Your chances of being elected here still depend on your local track record

Americans now vote for parties and their policies. Despite their obvious distaste for Trump and his penchant for Playboy models, evangelical Christians voted for him to ensure conservative judges are appointed to the Supreme Court. Like wise country club republicans get their tax breaks.

So what does this have to do with Shane Ross and battle against fascism? Quite a lot. Irish politics still revolves around the two large national parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. And like the Republicans and Democrats of old they may have some minor ideological differences but ultimately they overlap hugely. If anything they are getting closer to each other as their ability to forge a confidence-and-supply deal testifies.

Track record

The intensely local nature of Irish politics underpins all this. Your chances of being elected here still depend on your local track record, as the large number of Independents elected to the current Dáil shows. Incidentally, the election also saw the decimation of the country’s most ideologically cohesive party, Labour.

There is an expectation that many of the Independents in the current Dáil will get dumped by voters in the next election but their replacements will just be Independents in party colours. Given this trend it’s hard to see either of the two big parties hardening their ideological stance. The positive side of all this is that we are unlikely to see a populist strong man elected in Ireland anytime soon.

The downside is that it makes running the country a tad difficult. The lack of any appetite for big ideas among voters or indeed the parties has given us the Irish Water shambles and now potentially the Sláintecare shambles.

Sláintecare may be a cross-party creature, born out of an all-party committee but everybody is fully aware of the difficulties of implementing its recommendations in the face of local and sectional interests.

And as long as national political power is a function of local political power this will continue to be the case. As will the frankly alarming prospect of Shane Ross continuing to hold ministerial office.

But as we look at the consequences of ideologically driven politics in US, or closer to home in Hungary and Turkey – never mind the catastrophe that is Brexit – then reopening Stepaside Garda station is perhaps a small price to pay in order to safeguard our democracy.