Our cosy political system encourages the mediocre
HOW much should we pay Dail deputies? Should we regard their jobs as full-time or part-time? These are questions without an easy answer. But there is a third question, the answer to which springs readily to the lips.
Why should we pay them €6,400 a year for long service? Where is the rationale?
There is none. Some of them may have distinguished themselves on the back benches, though that is rare indeed in our system. Most have sat for very many years without attracting any notice outside their constituencies. They don't even need the money. They have reared their children and paid off their mortgages.
Not that they should have financial problems anyway. By international standards, Irish parliamentarians are well paid -- too well paid.
That was not always the case. I remember a time when full-time TDs received less than they could earn in outside jobs. Businessmen and successful lawyers lost money, sometimes a lot of money, from dedication to public service.
This applies, and still occasionally applies, at higher levels too. Brian Lenihan could earn more at the Bar than he does as a minister. The same was true of Michael McDowell.
But as matters stand, most deputies get more from the public purse than they would make from their previous occupations. In addition, they have a variety of perks and add-ons. They have constituency offices subsidised by the taxpayer. They get pensions and severance payments. They are paid for keeping their seats and for losing their seats.
So in the grand scheme of things, Lenihan's proposal to chop the €6,400, in the context of the worst imaginable financial crisis, seemed both reasonable and moderate.
I fancy that when he made the announcement, a majority of newspaper readers and television viewers assumed that the cut would come into operation straight away. I for one certainly did. Not so, as it turned out. Suddenly the "pain" turned from mandatory to voluntary.
The same newspaper readers and television viewers may also have assumed that the victims, if we may so call them, would rush to accept the cut. They may have been surprised at finding any reluctance. And there was good reason for surprise.
To wish to hang on to pay and perks is only natural and human; and €6,400 is a drop in the ocean by comparison with the billions that have disappeared into thin air, forcing years of sacrifices on all of us to supply an equal number of billions.
But almost nobody, aside from bankers and economists, can picture a sum in billions, much less the trillions so airily discussed nowadays.
Anybody can picture a sum of €6,400. It's the kind of money one might spend on household goods. It's similar to the annual amount lost by a middle-income family hit by the levies and all the rest. It's a fraction of the loss suffered by someone thrown out of work.
So nobody will feel sorry for a cosseted politician hit to the tune of €6,400, still less feel sympathy for one who wants to retain the perk. And almost nobody will cheer those who give it up voluntarily.
Leaving aside the moral questions -- though plenty of moral questions arise -- this affair is terrible public relations. It shows how politicians have fallen out of touch with popular opinion. This in a country where they pride themselves on their localism and their ability to keep a finger on the public pulse. What has gone wrong?
Whether elected politicians should be paid well or badly, or at all, is not the core issue. We have made a mistake by encouraging the growth of a political class whose members see election to public bodies as a career, sometimes a lifetime career and often a hereditary career.
But that would not matter so much if it was a real career as the term is generally understood. In an age of specialisation, amateurism is out of fashion and may be out of date.
In the modern world. President Jacques Chirac and the US vice-president Joe Biden are examples of successful lifelong politicians. In Britain, even backbench parliamentarians can make names for themselves by doing useful work -- like the Labour MP John McFall, whose television appearances to discuss the financial crisis have made him a star. A bigger star is Vince Cable, who sits on the Liberal Democrats' front bench but most likely will never sit in a government.
In Ireland, under our present system, such people do not and cannot exist. The system has too little place in it for either opportunity or talent. Those whom it frustrates must console themselves with the plums doled out by their masters, like chairmanships of committees which seldom do anything worthwhile.
The plums are small, but that does not make matters any better. It makes them worse, because it favours the docile and unambitious over the strong-minded.
How can we change the system, and how can we produce politicians, and especially political leaders, who can work a new system properly? New parties are no answer. We know what tends to happen to them.
There are plenty of ideas in the air, from abolishing the Seanad to bringing Peter Sutherland into the Government.
Another -- simpler and easier to achieve -- is to inflict such a hammering on Fianna Fail in June as to drive them out of office and make way for either a national government or a Fine Gael-Labour coalition.
But that will do little good if it gives us much the same kind of people and much the same kind of paralysis. In your bleaker moments, you have to wonder if we have really given ourselves the politicians we deserve.
jdowney@independent.ie
- James Downey
