On Tuesday of last week, Bertie Ahern announced a new project and a new taskforce. This one is on what he calls "active citizenship". He had previously referred to this in a speech on 1916 he made a few weeks before, writes Vincent Browne
He had talked of "a deep tradition of active engagement by its citizens in every aspect of our national life and culture". He said that at a time when the State "was limited by a lack of resources, it was the commitment of the Irish people that so often, formally and informally, provided social services, community leadership as well as a sporting and cultural life for our people". He said that nowadays such "active citizenship" was in decline and we need to revive that.
The new taskforce includes people who indeed have made a substantial contribution to Irish society, people such as Mary Davis (who was head of the Special Olympics, which was such a huge success), David Begg, Fr Harry Bohan, Bobby Molloy, Mary Redmond and people from a variety of voluntary bodies.
The voluntary work associated with these people is laudable. They and the organisations they represent have done a lot of work which the State could not do. They have enriched the lives of the membership of these organisations and the lives of many people who have benefited from the work and support of these organisations. Engagement by citizens in voluntary co-operative work in communities is hugely valuable and deepens a sense of community, which itself is an enrichment.
But, but . . .
These "buts" have to do with what "active citizenship" means. The idea that "active citizenship" should refer to engagement in voluntary and community work is, well, insidious. We live in a supposedly democratic society. Intrinsic to the idea of democracy is that the people, the citizens, are sovereign. Citizenship equals sovereignty. Citizens control the State - their participation as citizens is in running the State and deciding the policies and programmes the State should pursue.
Citizens are not mere adjuncts to the State, they are the sovereign power of the State.
Certainly we need active citizenship. There is a need to deepen our democracy by involving the sovereign power in a much more meaningful way in the running of democracy. Democracy has been undermined by outsourcing democratic decision-making to a political class with citizens being involved only once in every five years - and then merely to give a yes or no to a rag-bag of parties and a rag-bag of policies. In no way could it be said that in our democracy there is anything approaching real citizenship.
The "active citizenship" project can be seen as a cover for the degrading of citizenship - pretending that citizenship has some meaning through engagement in voluntary and community work. This is not citizenship, this is not partaking as sovereigns in democratic decision-making for the whole of society. This is a side-show - an important side-show but still a side-show.
There is another dimension to this. Bertie's assertion is that at a time when the State had "limited resources", voluntary and community groups looked after the poor, the infirm, the uneducated, and this was an example of "active citizenship". In fact, it was an example of the State reneging on its core functions under the guise of "limited resources".
The State is not some abstract entity that at various times can do things or can't do things. The State is the creation of citizens, who come together for collective security and agree to be bound to the rules of the State provided these rules are founded on principles on which all citizens can agree (why else should we obey the State?). Such principles must surely include the fair distribution of wealth, resources and opportunities. Of course such wealth, resources and opportunities are always "limited", but that does not frustrate the fair distribution of whatever limited wealth, resources and opportunities there are.
However, there is a mindset nowadays that the State's resources are "limited" not by the limitation of resources and wealth, but by the limitation on what it is now perceived the State can and should do.
Bertie Ahern's talk of "active citizenship" conveys not just an attempt (whether conscious or not) to divert citizenship away from the exercise of sovereign authority towards community and voluntary activity. There is a further dimension - to encourage community and voluntary bodies to do the work the State formerly did or should now be doing: raising money for the alleviation of disadvantage or the treatment of illness or disability or the education of children and adults.
This is not to say that all community and voluntary activity is diversionary for, clearly, only communities can do some things, such as the organisation of community festivals, cultural events and projects, games, support organisations, community councils and the like. But the substitution of voluntary and community effort for the alleviation of poverty, for instance, is the privatisation of such endeavour which classically has been the function of the State.
Beware of active citizenship.