Culture of seeing no evil

Almost exactly a month ago, a Fianna Fáil councillor and general election candidate for Galway West, Michael Crowe, issued a …

Almost exactly a month ago, a Fianna Fáil councillor and general election candidate for Galway West, Michael Crowe, issued a press release about a threat to the quality of water in Lough Corrib, writes Fintan O'Toole. The threat was not, as you might think, cryptosporidium, but phosphates in dishwater tablets.

He was making a valid point and he was not to know that a week later we would be in the grotesque situation of having no safe tap water in a city where it is always either raining or going to rain.

What was interesting about Michael Crowe's statement, however, was his confident belief that the Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche, was the very man to save Lough Corrib from this threat: "I conveyed my concerns about this to Minister Dick Roche when he visited Galway city last year, and again two weeks ago when he was in the city . . . Minister Roche assured me that he would investigate the matter."

So let's get this clear: dishwasher tablets in the drinking water supply are Dick Roche's problem, but sewage, slurry and all their attendant bugs and parasites are not. That, at least, is what Dick Roche seemed to suggest when he effectively blamed the local authorities in Galway for the problem. It may be no consolation to the people of Galway, but their plight could hardly be a better illustration of the two impulses which make our democracy so dysfunctional.

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The constant principles of power in Ireland are: (a) nothing is a problem until it is a crisis; (b) when the crisis happens, somebody else is responsible. As the Ombudsman, Emily O'Reilly, put it last week at the launching of tasc's audit of Irish democracy, Power to the People? (to declare an interest: I chair tasc's advisory council), our system of government often boils down to one question: "how did that happen?"

It would be untrue to say that the Galway water crisis was predictable. It was, rather, inevitable. And that inevitability has been persistently flagged by local angling groups. You could say that two bits of the democratic system worked very well. At the bottom, active citizens showed immense public spirit in analysing and highlighting the problem. At the top, the European Court of Justice examined complaints by these groups and found five years ago that the State was failing to protect the supplies of drinking water. But in the middle layers of the democratic process - local and national government - the culture of seeing no evil prevailed.

The active citizenship that the Taoiseach was calling for the other week was superbly demonstrated in this case. As far back as 1995, the environmental scientist Roderick O'Sullivan conducted a painstaking study of water quality in Lough Corrib. He found that the lake was in a state of "advanced pollution".

The official response, as Dr O'Sullivan told Morning Ireland last week, was "derision and silence". When he met Dick Roche two years ago, he was told, he says, that "the local authorities were perfectly well handling Lough Corrib" and there were "no voices of the people" being raised on the issue.

Attempts to raise the issue in the Dáil got no further. In October 1999, for example, Emmet Stagg asked the then environment minister, Noel Dempsey, "the plans, if any, he has to introduce new legislation or regulations to deal with this threat to the drinking water supply of the greater part of counties Mayo and Galway". The reply was that "the overall water quality situation in Lough Mask and Lough Corrib is satisfactory at present" and that "Loughs Corrib and Mask would also fall within the highest quality classification for lakes in the proposed EU framework directive on water policy".

The local activists continued to point out that the water in the lakes was anything but "satisfactory". They formed the Carra Mask Corrib Water Protection Group. On its website you can see pictures, put up long before the present crisis, of sewage running into the lakes. They asked: "If these waters can no longer sustain the indigenous aquatic and fish life, as they have done for generations, how then can they be regarded as fit for human consumption?" They put up information stands at shopping centres in Galway and Castlebar. But the response was still derision and silence.

Fianna Fáil must take most of the blame for the culture of arrogance and indolence that stopped these democratic mechanisms from working simply because it has been in power for all but two of the last 20 years. But if they are to convince the public that real change is possible, the Opposition parties have to articulate not just policies and values, but a sense of urgency about fixing our broken democracy.

The National Economic and Social Forum recently published a fine report arguing that "the priority for government action should be on early intervention/prevention to avoid problems becoming more chronic and costly to address", and showing how this can be done. If the system does not change, the perennial question of Irish governance will still be: how did that happen?