Sir, – Michael McDowell asks “How is it that our planning, approval and construction of major national infrastructure projects always takes so very long compared with the early Victorian Great Southern railway to Cork?” (“Why is our capacity to deliver infrastructure projects worse now than it was in the 19th century?”, Opinion & Analysis, August 28th).
I suggest that the essential answer is that our parliamentary electoral system in the period of which Michael McDowell writes (1847-1855), albeit with a restricted franchise, was more conducive of good infrastructure development than the one adopted by the independent treaty-based State in 1922 and employed by its subsequent iterations.
The political dynamics of multiseat territorial constituencies are not conducive to optimal “outputs” on the part of the legislature on the metric of national level infrastructure.
For an Irish national-level politician, the territorially defined multiseat constituency is the primary field of operations.
Multiseat constituency politics makes the constituency rather than the parliament the premier theatre of political effort.
The fact of needing to be elected in a multiseat constituency directs the focus of the would-be legislator away from the national, the strategic, the infrastructural. It establishes national infrastructure as a “second order” political priority, behind the local or " parish pump” concerns.
National issues are not resolved, nor national challenges strategised for, at constituency level, the level that multiseating elevates to primacy in the legislator’s centres of interest.
“Constituency” TDs have enjoyed long parliamentary careers without ever making an impression on the statute book, safe as whip-directed “lobby fodder”, as uncompromising champions of micro-party positions or as “colourful” Independents.
In many ways, these three categories of “legislator” represent the parliamentary electoral system more than they do the electorate and the amount of “parliamentary real estate” allocated to these legislatively agnostic “legislators” looks set to increase markedly in the forthcoming general election, thanks to the implementation of reforms originating with the the Electoral Commission.
In the absence of a prescribed threshold (effectively, a “party list”) form of single transferable vote proportional representation, poor infrastructure is the price we pay – and seem determined to pay in perpetuity – for the excess we have afforded ourselves in representative proportionality. – Yours, etc,
DES GUNNING,
Phibsborough,
Dublin 7.