Madam, – Over the past two weeks there has been a popular uproar over electricity levies, hospital closures and the despair of the unemployed. Letter writers, callers to radio programmes and media commentators invariably call for an election as a cure to all our ills.
A key question is, how realistic is it to assume the outcome of an election will be an expression of the public’s choice? When Government Ministers make unpopular decisions such as bank bailouts, Nama and health cutbacks, they retort that they are elected to make hard decisions and that the electorate has an opportunity to cast their judgment at election time.
However, this is extremely difficult to reconcile with the reality of coalition government.
At election time each party puts forward its election manifesto, but in the post-election phase where no overall Dáil majority is achieved the parties most likely to gain Dáil numerical strength enter negotiations with parties that can provide the numbers to offer the government sufficient voting fodder to marginalise the Dáil from interfering with its decisions.
The outcome of these negotiations is that a small number of party negotiators determine what they want for us, not the Irish electorate.
For instance, the now redundant Progressive Democrats, with two Dáil TDs out of 166 is a partner in Government with one of the most sensitive portfolios of Health and the Green Party, with six TDs, has two key ministries, Environment and Local Government and Energy and Natural Resources and two junior Ministers.
It is self evident that the Irish electorate did not vote for either the PDs or the Greens to be in government, imposing their policies and ideology on us and wielding disproportionate influence in the Dáil and Government.
The Programme for Government, which distributed the levers of power between Fianna Fáil, Greens and PDs and which impacts on all our lives, is predicated solely on the selfish interest of a group of politicians to hold power based on simple Dáil arithmetic as distinct from any choice of the electorate.
Is it any surprise that when we hear John Gormley talking, that he refers to decisions as “my decision”. The reality of parliamentary democracy, Irish style, is that government power and people power (ie what the electorate wants) are not reconcilable as long as the tail can wag the dog in the Dáil. – Yours, etc,