Public debate here on the direction EU is taking is now more important than ever
LEO VARADKAR doesn’t think referendums are very democratic. He is not alone, but at least he is honest. There is a strong strain of disdain in political circles for directly consulting the public in any structured way, other than at election time.
In this view, when people elect a government they should just allow them to get on with governing. In other words, a referendum, far from being a democratic exercise, is just a damn nuisance.
In 1987, when Raymond Crotty forced the government to have a referendum on the Single European Act, and when Patricia McKenna then forced the government to present both sides of the argument in a referendum, the disgust among politicians was palpable.
It is a fact that on any given day, a government might make a better decision than the electorate.
It is one of the distinguishing features of democracy, that it allows the people as a collective to make mistakes. The people can also make better decisions, too.
Of course, there is an alternative to the exercise of democracy. It is called dictatorship. In this century, dictatorship is less likely to be an individual than an elite of one kind or another.
With the news that the proposed fiscal pact includes the threat that countries which do not sign it will not have access to the European Stability Mechanism, what else do we have but bullying by an elite?
Therefore, it is more important than ever that there be a debate on the direction the EU is taking.
Sure, referendums are messy, noisy and expensive, and are likely to be derailed into any number of other issues, such as pent-up frustration at the Government, for example, or a debate about our very membership of the EU, or the euro.
But the way to counteract this is not by banning referendums, but by improving the quality of debate, and making sure that people are as well-informed as possible of the real issues.
This fiscal pact signals the death of any form of Keynesian response to any future crisis. In very crude terms, Keynes believed that systems were prone to error, and therefore he believed in counter-cyclical measures, that is, save in a boom and spend in a crash.
(Of course, he also believed that economies should be ordered towards allowing people to live better, more human lives, but that rarely gets highlighted.)
We did the opposite, spent in a boom, and now can’t afford to spend in our crash.
But if in some future time, we recovered, and managed to make provision for any future recession, this pact locks us in to the same austerity measures that appear to be failing in the present crisis.
The social consequences of austerity without stimulus are devastating.
Look at Portugal. There has been between a 300 to 400 per cent rise in the use of soup kitchens. Youth unemployment is at 26 per cent, and tens of thousands are emigrating. Sound familiar?
This fiscal pact is not just about balanced budgets. It is about attempting belatedly to shore up a currency that was flawed from the start, with drastic consequences for the poorest in the euro zone member states.
It may seem strange at this point to say that there are strong reasons not to have a constitutional referendum on the fiscal pact.
It will not be easy to get out of this pact in any case, knowing how, as Robert Frost said, “way leads on to way”, but it will be easier if it is not in our Constitution.
However, Thomas Pringle TD has done us all a service by pointing out that a constitutional referendum is not the only option.
The proposed legislation can be put to the people. Under article 27, “a majority of the members of Seanad Éireann and not less than one-third of the members of Dáil Éireann may by a joint petition addressed to the President” ask for a Bill to be referred to the people.
The obstacles are daunting. Thomas Pringle will have grave difficulty drumming up the numbers required in the Dáil and the Seanad to have the Bill referred to the President.
However, it seems to me that the Government itself could facilitate a plebiscite on their proposed legislation to ratify the pact. It would not, therefore, have to be a referendum to amend the Constitution.
It is abundantly clear that this is the last option the Government would ever contemplate. Yet it is equally clear that no one elected Fine Gael or Labour in the expectation that they would simply continue the austerity programme started by Fianna Fáil.
The gulf between elected and electorate will only continue to widen if decisions of the magnitude of the fiscal pact are taken without proper national discussion.
During the last referendum, Lisbon II, we were told it was arrogant of us to presume that a referendum was any better than what most countries do, which is to ratify by parliamentary majority. But those voices were wrong. We have a right, and we should be allowed to exercise it.
It is even more important when a gun is being held to our head to ratify a pact.
Times are utterly grim, but they will be even more grim if our future is increasingly dictated to us, and we are forced to comply, no matter what the consequences for the Irish people.