OPINION:It's easy to score points in the blame game but highlighting the electoral process as the source of all ills is dangerous and naive, writes EOIN O'MALLEY
ED WALSH makes a large number of complaints about the Irish political system and he places the blame at the door of the Irish electoral system (Tuesday, July 6th). The obsession with the electoral system by Irish establishment figures is disturbing in its ignorance. Walsh wants ministers who are scientifically literate, but he should do what a scientist would – study the evidence or listen to reasoned arguments.
Walsh is right to point to problems in government. Power within the political system is centralised to government. It was government decisions that got us into the crisis, so we should probably think about how to improve government decision-making and government behaviour. But he fails to show why changing the electoral system is necessary to fix government.
On paper the cabinet system is a good one. Proposals are made by ministers and the elite of a state’s political system then subject the proposal to rigorous scrutiny. From their different perspectives, they poke at and punch holes in the argument until bad proposals get rejected and acceptable ones are improved.
The problem is that this does not seem to happen. Why not? One reason is ministerial overload. Ministers are busy with their own departments and do not have time to start thinking deeply about the responsibilities of their colleagues. There is also log-rolling, whereby a minister who wants to get a proposal through cabinet will refrain from questioning another minister’s proposal so they will return the favour.
Another problem, as Ed Walsh points out, is the quality of ministers. But it may not be that they have a talent deficit, rather that they lack a range of talents. In juries we think that if 12 people’s opinions converge, they are likely to converge on the truth. The same assumption can be made of a cabinet government. But if jurors and cabinet ministers’ agreement on an issue is to make it more likely that they got the right answer, their opinions should be independent of each other.
Events are independent if what happens in one situation does not affect what happens in another. We may assume that cabinet ministers (and jurors) are independent, but we would be wrong. Most ministers (like jurors) follow what goes around the table. So if a minister’s proposal appears to be gaining acceptance, sceptical ministers might remain silent. This, in public opinion theory, is known as the spiral of silence.
And why would they be independent when they are a remarkably homogenous lot? As Walsh points out, we have six school teachers in Cabinet, a couple of lawyers, but not much else. No economists, social scientists, or people with much experience of business. They are all full-time career politicians, so even the youngest Minister in the Cabinet, Mary Coughlan, at 45, has been in the Dáil for 23 years. So instead of having 15 different points of view, government is centralised into one or two particular points of view.
That these failures could happen is in part because there is not enough expertise or diversity of viewpoints in government but also because governments, particularly ones in power for a long time, get lazy. When opposition parties have few resources to challenge government research and few mechanisms to challenge government in a timely and effective manner, government can get a bit too comfortable.
But government should not be a comfortable place to be, and if we are to reform our political system it should be with this in mind. People work best if they know everything they do is open to scrutiny. Labour finance spokeswoman Joan Burton pointed out some months ago that there was a huge information deficit preventing real debate about Nama and bank bailouts. When the Minister for Finance controls all the information, and the timing and nature of its release, it is difficult for opposition parties to set the agenda. The forecasts we were given on the bank guarantee scheme now seem hopelessly optimistic. How can the cabinet do its job if it does not have access to good information? Likewise, how can the opposition do its job if the information it receives is misleading or even inaccurate?
If we want to reform the political system we need to rebalance power within the political system. We need to enable greater scrutiny of government to allow the opposition and backbenchers do their job. The public should have greater access to independent information, not spun by government departments. Government statistics could be generated by independent agencies and government policy could be independently analysed and tested against their stated objectives. The Dáil procedures should be changed to allow cabinet ministers be subjected to better oversight. At present ministers can dodge questions. Vincent Browne can ask them the same question over and over until they answer it or it is made clear to the public that it is being dodged. TDs cannot do this. A minister can answer another question and then the Ceann Comhairle will move them on. Replies to parliamentary questions should not be written to protect the minister but to enable proper accountability of the minister to the Dáil.
As it is currently structured, TDs have neither the opportunity nor the motive to provide robust oversight of government legislation. The political career path for most TDs leads to the cabinet. We could create a parliamentary class separate from the ministerial class. The two jobs are quite distinct. Some good parliamentarians make poor ministers – I would suggest Michael McDowell as an example. One way to achieve this distinction would be to make the committees independent of government by having chairs elected by the Dáil rather than being effectively appointed by the taoiseach.
If ministers were forced to resign as TDs or ministers could be appointed from outside electoral politics, as is normal throughout Europe, the cabinet system might have the plurality of views and expertise it needs to function. It would also mean that government TDs would be less attached, personally and politically, to the government.
This creation of a “parliamentary class” could be achieved without touching the electoral system. The obsession with the electoral system is an example of our attributing blame to a prominent aspect of the political system. This attribution error is dangerous because it might make us think we have fixed the problem when we have not.
Dr Eoin O’Malley lectures in political science in the school of law and government, Dublin City University.