Last night I plugged into the Internet and went searching for the files on regionalisation. Hundreds of pages, I saw with disbelief. Scroll on down, and there's a medical study about regionalising a mouse's brain, stuff from a marketing dude in Singapore, various weird connections you couldn't begin to imagine.
All I had wanted was a simple fix on what may happen when the Cabinet finally discusses the question of partitioning Ireland. Or so some call it. We already know partition is a loaded word. We know this well. The version at play in this latest round of how to "maximise the EU take", however, introduces a new kind of spin.
This millennial partition is not so much about an imaginary east-west economic line which pits the urban poor against their rural cousins. It's more a question of how long we can continue to apply to ideas of being European the style of brinkmanship you need to win a round of Fantasy Football. The latest, leaked news that making two regions out of one would yield only a little more than £100 million over and above what the country would get anyway seemed to surprise us. That in itself is telling. We had, it seems, been lulled into believing that the whole structural funds exercise was a matter of money first, last and above all. It is not. At stake instead is a bigger and potentially more historic challenge. How the new Europe can rein in its own momentum towards becoming a new age empire, by balancing its global impulses with a system of local democracy which puts people first. Or tries to. The phrase is, of course, a turn-off. Putting people first is a slogan we've all heard before. Recently, too. The current Government was elected on exactly the same promise. But the scepticism we apply to watching how they put such policies into practice is arguably now the attitude with which the Government itself may be greeting Europe's message.
To all intents and purposes, the Minister for Finance and his Department seem to view the comments of EU leaders like Commissioner Monika Wulf-Mathies about their refusal to tolerate subsidy-shopping as only what you'd expect from ex-hippies who apply 1960s thinking to a millennial game.
The presumption seems to be that with enough late-night deals the issue of hiving off as much money as possible will be solved without recourse to all but the most cosmetic democratic change. The Cabinet meets again next Thursday, but won't get round to talking about this "economic partition" for another week or so. Although informal soundings have been positively greeted, no formal approach has yet been made to Eurostat, the first port of call in any new regionalisation deal.
Meanwhile, this weekend's informal summit at Portschach, attended by the Taoiseach, suggests the likelihood of a fairly substantial restructuring of how the EU will in future approach previously domestic concerns. Without any evidence of long-term vision from Irish political leaders, the best we can do is speculate. And in the muddied morass into which lack of detailed information propels us, not least among the many ironies which make the whole discussion even more disturbing is the fact that the Dublin and western communities share the distinction of having the worst unemployment and industrial employment rates in the country.
The real opponents in this imminent contest are more accurately the poles of bubble-up and trickle-down. The first has created the push to regionalise which is spreading almost everywhere else in EU Europe; already 206 regions, and most already building on a more devolved system of local democracy than happens here. The second is the line which so far seems the preference of the Minister for Finance. There's also a yob on the terrace we can't overlook, a use of bureaucratic language so off-putting that you need the patience of Job to keep up with it. Words like "subsidiarity" top the list. Either way the debate so far suggests an outcome that may not be a good day for democracy.
Although the EU favours bubble-up subsidiarity, the direct involvement of local communities in making decisions about themselves, in as far as that is practical, the Minister and Department seem to favour trickle-down.
Hence their leaked plans for what they rather ambiguously term "a light administrative structure", one which in effect does not disturb the overwhelmingly centralised powers of the Department of Finance.
With prejudices about culchies and jackeens, cute hoors or subsidy-rich farmers clouding the issues, the lines get even more blurred. Thus in the debate so far we've witnessed Dublin community leaders pitched against their colleagues from the putative western region, and watched a steady growth of alarm among Fianna Fail urban deputies and some rural TDs grow to a point where the party chairman, Dr Rory O'Hanlon, found it necessary to assure us last week that the party was unified and would adopt a single line. While community leaders in Dublin worry that their chance of getting favourable start-up industrial grants will be badly affected if a western region gets priority, as Objective 1 funding might put it, western leaders are increasingly between a rock and a hard place. Their communities need the money, the more so because the culture of farming faces a level of social and economic change comparable to what Britain's mining community went through under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Without Objective 1 funding there, EU pension subsidies to farmers alone will drop from a gross 50 per cent to only 25 per cent, with the national Exchequer forced to make up the balance. But watching the untenable fractures between urban rich and poor, a by-product of what happens when decisions about Objective 1 funding are made centrally, some are seriously wondering who will in practice be the long-term beneficiaries in this uniquely Irish remix if communities themselves cannot make their own choices. I used to assume that somewhere underneath this distastefully divisive debate was a clever strategy to enhance local democracy while mainlining proven good practice about community democracy into the ethos of the Department of Finance. I was wrong.
So far as I can now read it, the best the Minister and his Department will manage is a superficial finessing far removed from the kind of democratic innovation the EU seems to envisage as the core mission of its regionalisation programmes. That may make it easier to travel to holiday homes in the west, but it won't contribute much to real-life communities.
Clearly issues of marginalisation and continued exclusion are central to this debate. But for so long as groups of equal merit are pitched against each other, as lazy assumptions about an east-west contest might have it, we are condemned to apply the equivalent of a mouse's brain capacity to a political challenge of extraordinary dimensions.