Ireland's political culture values who you know, not what you know. It's a political system built on nineteenth century model in the twenty first: "I knew your father, you play on the right sports team, sure didn't we go to school together, and wasn't your grandfather on Collin's side."
It's a great way to forge connections - and the Irish love connections - but it turns out, irrefutably, that nepotism is no basis for a system of government.
Nepotism is the system where the otherwise unqualified always land the top jobs. You're in over your head from the outset, so no one can act surprised when you sink.
Ireland clung to this old world system even as, to quote Brian Friel, it no longer matched the landscape of fact. Still we voted for the same familiar faces, over and over, without giving a thought to their fitness for the job. Magical thinking - if it feels right, it is right.
2011 has shown us - for certain and for good - that the otherwise unprepared and unqualified, no matter how personally charismatic, no matter how well you knew their Ma and Da, will not magically turn out to be otherwise, now that we need them to be.
Our nepotistic political system, where our political leaders actually inherit their jobs, and our failure to confront it, and ask ourselves if it should continue, is at the root of the current crisis, which is the most serious one to have confronted the state since Independence.
It was a long time coming, this reckoning. We were all, in major or minor ways, a part of its creation and we'll all have to be a part of its dismantling.
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Switch to the desktop site to post a comment.maloney | Jan 30, 2011, 10:38 PM EST
Delete my post again if you want. Cahir has unwittingly written the story of obama, America & it's people. From the title to the last line, it all fits.
mylesie | Jan 28, 2011, 09:40 AM EST
Worth a re-Tweet
PolinDeB | Jan 26, 2011, 06:55 PM EST
Sorry meant US senate committees.. just in case it wasn't clear. They worked very well in exposing the myths of Bush's war on what?
PolinDeB | Jan 26, 2011, 06:53 PM EST
But there is an answer - reform the Seanad as a body with power similar to the Senate Committee.. 4 year terms with maximum of two terms and no member may be of a political party.... If oversight is cheap (rather than onerous tribunals) and available, we can at least shed some light on the process.
PolinDeB | Jan 26, 2011, 06:51 PM EST
Sadly I still know a 24 year old girl from Dublin that still goes 'ah poor bertie' - even 90 billion euro's debt has not woken the sleeping from their slumber ...
olovely | Jan 26, 2011, 09:36 AM EST
I don't share your political cynicism Aoife; at least not to the point where I accept that western democracies are shills for "vested interests." I mean the recent Health Care reform here in the US, and the way in which the corporations blatantly support the GOP over the Democrats, ought to give anyone a clue who best represents corporate interests. The governed have as much responsibility as the government to protect their own economy and political structures.
AoifeNicSeáin | Jan 25, 2011, 06:53 PM EST
There's not a single country in the western hemisphere, where politicians don't do what vested interests tell them to do. And not a single one where voters prevent that. Sri - I see here the same structure as with the paedophile priests scandal: Ireland is not the country worst off because they have more structures left from the 19th century, but on the contrary, other countries have not even begun to awake, they probabely have even more problems than Ireland, but just refuse to see them. E.g. in Germany people simply paid for the mismanagement of their bankers, normal people work and work and wonder why they stay poor.
vincem13 | Jan 25, 2011, 02:19 PM EST
Spot on, Cahir! Now take that thinking across the "pond" to the USA and consider the "Magical" name of Kennedy. I am so glad that we have a chance, at least for a few years, to see if America can survive without a Kennedy in elected office.
olovely | Jan 25, 2011, 12:16 PM EST
Magical thinking means that you get the result you hoped for becuase you're nice and you really deserved it. But it's not much use when you're trying to interpret complex economic forces that you can't understand. That's what Ireland's leaders were doing (they were coasting on what they were being told by the vested interests, they couldn't rely on their own discernment). I agree that charisma and local clout has won elections for many Irish candidates, but that's the worst possible reason in the world for voting for them. Also, the Irish people have resonsibility as democrats to inform themselves what's happening in their democracy, rather than coast along when times are good and expect that the weather never changes. I agree that they shouldn't pay for the bankers mistakes, and I think they also need to take responsibility for their own political system instead of just point the finger at it.
AoifeNicSeáin | Jan 25, 2011, 10:56 AM EST
Maybe that's not that easy - nepotism might be "bad" (and I personally don't like it at all), but it ain't connected to magical thinking any more than each and every other version of democracy. The majority of voters have no chance to be experts in all branches of politics and therefore will vote according to their feelings. There are non-Irish presidents who won an election for their 'charisma', while others became presidents with promises they never meant to keep. And after all the financial crisis is not an Irish invention. The reason for the political crisis in Ireland is the unwillingness of the Irish people to pay for those greedy bankers. If that's magical thinking, than MORE of it is the solution, for Ireland and for the rest of the world.