32nd Annual MacGill Summer School & Arts Week
Sunday, July 22nd—Friday, July 27th 2012
Reforming and Rebuilding our State
The MacGill Summer School, now in its 32nd year, will continue with its agenda of reform, in particular political and administrative reform. For the fourth consecutive year, it will also focus on our economic crisis and examine the prospects for recovery.
MacGill 2012 comes in the wake of the publication of the Moriarty and Mahon Tribunal reports which have shocked the nation and have added to the prevailing sense of despondency to be encountered in towns and villages throughout the country as young people leave and retail outlets close. We have all tolerated low standards in high places for too long and it is obvious that not enough has been done by those directly involved in local and national politics, by the electorate and, indeed, by the media to call for a halt to corrupt practices, particularly in the areas of planning and rezoning. The result is that we have given the impression, at home and abroad, that the whole of our public life is quasi-corrupt which, fortunately, is very far from being the case. As we approach the 100th anniversary of the Rising, led by men and women of the highest integrity and the most noble of motives, we must undo this damage and pursue with vigour and determination a broad ranging and profound programme of reform—particularly political and administrative reform.
As An Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, himself said in Glenties in 2009, we have a political crisis as well as an economic crisis. “Our political system is broken” he said, “Our political culture is discredited. We cannot fix our economy or create a just society unless and until we also fix our politics.”
The then leader of the opposition was of course speaking in the context of the shock and anger that had followed on from the crash of our economy and for which the political system was seen to be partly to blame. We now have, as well as the huge damage done to the social and economic fabric of the country, the findings of all the tribunals at huge cost to the taxpayers. At the very least, it is obvious that all is not well in the body politic. If it were we would not have needed these tribunals in the first place. The Mahon tribunal states unambiguously that corruption has affected every level of Irish political life.
It is now obvious that all of us must take our responsibilities as citizens seriously and not accept automatically the political system and practices that we have inherited from another time in our history and development and simply turn up at polling stations every five years. Clientelist politics, which is a feature of our democratic system, has certainly contributed to the culture of ‘brown envelopes’. Doing favours for constituents in return for their votes is not that far removed from paying for votes for planning and rezoning in our council chambers. The way in which political parties have been funded since the 1960s has also contributed to a culture of corrupt practices. It is not unthinkable that the example given by this culture has had a considerable influence on at least a part of the population when they are required to pay legitimate taxes for the maintenence of services provided by national and local government. Something is wrong with our political culture. In the words of the late, highly respected political scientist, Peter Mair, speaking in Glenties last July, “We have never respected our State…..we have viewed the State as the enemy, as an oppressor, as something not to be trusted but to be taken advantage of.” And the historian, Diarmaid Ferriter, writing last month in the Irish Times, had this to say: “As we edge towards the centenary of the events that comprised the revolution of the early 20th century, we face a stark conclusion: this is a State bereft of meaningful sovereignty due to its bankruptcy and a State whose governing culture has been exposed as rotten.”
The tribunal reports and the consequences and implications thereof will be part of the deliberations at MacGill but, perhaps more importantly, so also will the need to reform our political culture and system, including our state institutions.
We must now build a democracy that suits this young, modern, multicultural, European democracy that is participative, healthy and without blemish and which serves the nation as a whole in a fair, transparent and caring way. We must decide whether or not our political system, which has as its core proportional representational and multi-seat constituencies and consequently an extreme form of localism, is best suited to providing the quality of governance which this country needs.
Whilst not forgetting that our economic crisis, the prospects for its recovery and getting our people back to work must remain the immediate and overriding concern of government and its agencies in the short term, we must at the same time remember that reform and transformation are not extraneous to the task of rebuilding the economy but rather are an integral part of it. One of the last public addresses delivered by the late Garret Fitzgerald was at the 2010 MacGill School when he stated that the present political system is at the core of many of our problems and in need of major reform. At last year’s MacGill School, the leader of Fianna Fail, Micheal Martin said that we must seize the opportunity of the forthcoming constitutional convention to address the fundamental structures of our political system.
More details of the 2012 MacGill programme will become available in the weeks ahead.
Joe Mulholland
Director, MacGill Summer School.