Please bear with me while I generalise about the Irish persona. What is it about us, as a people, that allows us to get distracted from the big picture on almost every issue. More often than not we tend to focus on some irrelevant detail and usually, generally speaking anyway, it’s the personalities of the protagonists involved rather than the points they are trying to make.
Last week’s ding-dong over the Web Summit is an excellent example. There were serious issues raised by the release of emails between Paddy Cosgrave, the cofounder of the technology conference, and the Department of the Taoiseach, but for many — if not most of us — it all came down to which of the two irritated us the most.
Mr Cosgrave, in his jeans and T-shirt, with his Bono-led pub crawls and his inability to hide his own self-assuredness, activated the inbuilt “the notions of your man” reaction of many Irish people. Enda Kenny is a politician and, for many, fell into the “useless, the lot of them, couldn’t organise a hashtag at a tweet-up” category. It didn’t matter that the emails were actually sent to officials in his office and not the taoiseach himself, as hardly anyone bothered to actually read them, or so it seemed.
I jest, of course, but I am not far off the truth. If we ignored the swinging of e-handbags and actually considered the key issues at the centre of the row we might actually have learned something useful about ourselves and our country.
Like the fact, as pointed out by Mr Cosgrave and his team, that most Irish politicians have only a vague photo-op level of interest in any sort of big, complex project. We all recall the junior minister who had to be asked to stop bringing constituents on tours of the construction of the Dublin Port Tunnel as he was slowing down the actual completion of it.
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Irish politicians, the ones in power especially, only go where the votes are and they do not believe that there are any to be lost over an issue like the Web Summit.
They’re probably right, depressing as that is. Dublin voters seem incapable of connecting the loss of 30,000 spending visitors to a decision on how they should cast their first preferences in the upcoming election.
In the US, when Boeing is going in for a government contract, the unions lobby for the company as well, because they make the link between the firm getting the contract and their workers. Do we think the unions representing Dublin hotel workers were banging down the doors of Labour ministers to get progress on the Web Summit?
As a country, when we actually do see the big picture we immediately think not of opportunity, but how heavy it looks to move. Better let one of those fellas with notions do the lifting.
The Web Summit emails also underlined the refusal of the Irish political system to allocate decision-making responsibility to accountable people. There seemed to be an awful lot of “that is a matter for x” followed by shrugging of shoulders. As if the organisation of Dublin municipal government and transport planning had been handed down on marble tablets by Jesus riding on the back of Gay Byrne’s motorbike, and was frozen ever since.
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Picture how this would have been handled in, say, Chicago under Richard Daley, the city’s former mayor.
“Thirty thousand delegates spending money in my city? I’ll be having some of that. Get me Paddy Cosgrave, the head of the transport authority, the chief of police, the chief executive of O’Hare airport and the head of the tourist board in my office now. And get some sandwiches in: nobody’s leaving ‘til we have this thing hammered out.”
In Ireland, however, we get the political equivalent of “that would be an ecumenical matter”.
The reason is very simple. Nobody is in charge in the capital who can be directly got at by the voters. Fine Gael and Labour both promised to create an elected Dublin mayor who surely would have acted as the point-person on issues such as this. A mayor’s job would have been to bang heads together and just get things sorted; but, of course, we didn’t get a mayor because local politicians voted against the move.
Frustratingly, whenever the idea of a Dublin mayor is mentioned, people complain that we already have enough politicians and you can’t believe a word they say, sure they can’t even organise a. . . and so on. But again the big picture is being missed here.
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Yes, we have no shortage of politicians, but what we do lack is executive decision-making politicians, whom we can fire directly. All we elect are people who “call for” and “urge” other people to make decisions, from county managers to quango chief executives to cabinet ministers.
That’s why an elected Dublin mayor with executive powers would be so revolutionary. A mayor directly chosen by the people of the greater Dublin region would surely have regarded the Web Summit as a major priority. A mayor with the power to sack the head of other quangos and agencies would certainly have been able to ensure a prompt and joined-up response if they really wanted the event’s business for Dublin.
At its heart, the issue is that although as a country we have 21st-century businesspeople, doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs and artists, our politicians are still trapped — by their own choice — in a 1920s political system not fit for modern purpose. The sort of short-term personality suited to getting elected to the county council and then the Dail is often fundamentally different from the long-term one needed to run a large complex organisation.
In short, Irish politics is not built to make well thought-out decisions and achieve tangible results, but rather it responds in piecemeal from one issue to the next, usually fobbing them off or passing them along the line. There is no impetus to get things done or to respond promptly and no one is held accountable when it all goes wrong, because nobody is accountable. I’m generalising again, but surely this is precisely what stops a grand little country becoming a great little country.
@jasonomahony