A useful principle for evaluating any plan for reform is to ask who will be discommoded, inconvenienced or annoyed by it. If the answer is “nobody”, then it usually means that nothing will really change.
Governments are scared of offending vocal and determined groups of people. So successive administrations constantly produce all sorts of plans for reforms which won’t upset anyone. This is one of the main reasons why the basics of the Irish system remain more or less the same. Powerful interests —business, public sector unions, the professions, the semi-State sector and a few others — guard their patches and privileges, secure in the knowledge that governments and ministers come and go but their abiding interest remains.
My favourite example is the largely trivial and yet illustrative case of civil servants’ parking. In the budget of 2000, then minister for finance Charlie McCreevy promised to tax the free parking for thousands of civil servants in central Dublin; it didn’t get anywhere. When Brian Lenihan was minister for finance during the financial crash, he revisited the proposal as a revenue-raising measure; it ran into the sand. Now I see Minister for the Environment Eamon Ryan recently proposed to reduce the number of car park spaces reserved for civil servants as part of the Government’s climate-action agenda. “I’m confident civil service unions and the departments will lead by example,” said Ryan.
Let’s see how he gets on with that one, shall we? (Full disclosure: like many people who work at Leinster House, I occasionally use an Oireachtas car park space) My guess is that Ryan’s plan will follow the predictable pattern. Everyone will agree that car park spaces should be reduced — just not their car park space. I might very well be in favour of the principle of reducing car parking in the city centre; simultaneously, I might hold the view that the actual practice of removing my car park space would be wholly undesirable.
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Look at the two issues which dominate politics right now for bigger and more important examples of this double-think.
If there’s one thing that everyone agrees on, it’s that we are in the middle of a deeply socially damaging housing crisis. Everyone also agrees that the solution to the housing crisis is to build more houses and apartments. Right? Right … just not near me.
Sure you’d want to see the queues for the deli counter in Donnybrook Fair. You can hardly get in the gate of Herbert Park
Every major housing development attracts an inevitable objection. Many end up the subject of judicial reviews, which can delay the process by years, and significantly add to their cost. This week, a random perusal of the pages of The Irish Times informs us that objections have been lodged to plans for nearly 700 apartments on land adjoining the RTÉ campus in Donnybrook (second time round) and for nearly 500 apartments in Monkstown (second time round for this one, too).
The Donnybrook residents objected, inter alia, to the introduction of nearly 2,000 new local residents. Local amenities wouldn’t stand the strain, apparently. Sure you’d want to see the queues for the deli counter in Donnybrook Fair. You can hardly get in the gate of Herbert Park.
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In Monkstown — not a shoddy address either, by the way — locals were concerned about the loss of the largest surviving 19th-century garden in the area. People Before Profit — I’m not making this up — fretted that the scale of the development was “out of character with preserving the Victorian ambience of Monkstown”. Our friends in PBP, as you might have noticed, are not exactly shy when it comes to lambasting the Government for its failure to provide housing. Their commitment to preserving Victorian ambiences is less well known.
Of course, not every housing development is suitable for its proposed location. But is every single one unsuitable? Building more high-end apartments for rent might not make an immediate difference to people struggling to rent properties at the bottom of the market. But there is no solution to the shortage of housing supply without building more houses and apartments. Even in Donnybrook and Monkstown.
We have a health service, meanwhile, that condemns many patients to degrading and inhumane conditions that would not be out of place in Dante’s Inferno, as a person with a loved one in an emergency unit this week described it to me. Yet plans for reform seem to observe an unwritten rule that nobody should be forced to change the way they work if they don’t want to.
The health service needs to grow its capacity and it will get more expensive. But money alone won’t solve the problems
But after years of being told it wouldn’t work or would make no difference, we saw last weekend that changes in work practices led to a sharp reduction in the number of people on trolleys. Of course, many doctors and nurses do heroic work in appaling conditions. But they also need to be ready to change the way they work if necessary, even if that’s inconvenient.
The health service needs to grow its capacity and it will get more expensive. But money alone won’t solve the problems. It needs to change in more ways than one.
As long as we pretend that we can solve the housing crisis with some hitherto magical solution that involves simultaneously building and not building houses, as long we insist that we can reform the health service without asking people to change, then we won’t make much headway on these two pressing social crises.
The motto of modern Ireland seems to be that if we want things to change, we have to keep them as they are
We seem to have inverted the famous political dictum of Tancredi in Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, who insisted that if we want things to stay as they are, everything will have to change. The motto of modern Ireland seems to be that if we want things to change, we have to keep them as they are.
The challenge of political leadership is to secure buy-in from all sides for reforms which may inconvenience individuals but serve the general good. It seems to me to be lacking right across the political spectrum.