The withdrawal of Mairead McGuinness from the presidential election campaign has injected a sudden jolt of uncertainty into what had been a pretty lethargic slow bicycle race. Although names, some familiar (Tony Holohan), others less so (Gareth Sheridan), flitted across the late-summer skies this week, the reality remains that the prospect of a 2011- or 2018-style gaggle of Independent nominees with no official links to an established party looks very unlikely.
Fine Gael has a well-stocked bench from which to pluck a replacement, with Seán Kelly and Frances Fitzgerald the front-runners. Fianna Fáil is still widely expected to put forward its own candidate. With Labour, the Social Democrats and People Before Profit all committed to Catherine Connolly– and Sinn Féin likely to back either Connolly or one of its own– the door is already shut to any outsider seeking the necessary 20 votes from the Oireachtas. That leaves the alternative route: securing nominations from four local authorities.
Virgin Media’s Gavan Reilly crunched the numbers before McGuinness’s withdrawal and concluded that only 11 of the State’s 31 councils could mathematically nominate an Independent. If Fianna Fáil does nominate someone, that number drops to zero. Nothing that happened this week changes this equation.
That realisation has prompted an outbreak of wailing and gnashing from the political margins. Conor McGregor has threatened a court challenge to the rules – a novel legal gambit, since it would require arguing that part of the Constitution is, in some mysterious way, unconstitutional. Independent Senator Sharon Keogan took to X to warn darkly that “this government will be pulled down if this is allowed to happen ... The people of Ireland will not stand for this”.
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In her replies, councillors were branded “traitors”, with one poster declaring “It’s time for them to go, and we don’t need elections to get rid of them”. But many others poured scorn on Keogan’s complaint, pointing out that elected politicians are entitled to make their own decisions. That is, after all, how representative democracy works.
Beneath the outrage is a recurring refrain: let the people decide. That’s the logic of direct democracy – the belief that the public should bypass elected representatives and vote directly on laws, policies and leaders.
The idea is superficially attractive. It is also not new, harking back to ancient Athens. But it has gained some momentum in recent years. In theory, there is no reason why it should belong to any particular ideology. But in Europe, direct democracy has become associated with the populist right, embraced by Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, France’s Rassemblement National and Italy’s Lega. Their calls for plebiscites tend to focus on flashpoint issues – immigration, national sovereignty, hostility to supranational bodies – rather than any wholesale reform of political systems. The framing is familiar and often effective: “the people” versus “the elite”, with referendums as the battering ram against parliamentary compromise.
At the risk of inviting accusations of elitism, it is worth asking: can you have too much democracy?
Plebiscites have a bad reputation in many European countries because of their enthusiastic adoption in the 1930s by fascist regimes, which used national ballots to stamp out dissent and reinforce loyalty to a dictatorial leader.
But Ireland is one of Europe’s most referendum-happy nations, with all constitutional amendments requiring approval by popular vote. That safeguard is justifiably popular but is not without its pitfalls. For example, Ireland signed up years ago to the EU’s Unified Patent Court Agreement – a relatively uncontentious piece of European legal housekeeping – but ratification still requires a referendum.
Successive governments have kicked the can down the road, worried that a dry, technical proposal could be hijacked as a proxy battle over something else entirely: Europe, housing, Gaza, whatever happens to be in the firing line at the time. Imagine multiplying that risk a hundredfold by introducing full-scale direct democracy.
Not every democratic reform produces better outcomes. The American system of party primaries was created after the turmoil of the 1960s to take power away from party bosses and give it to voters. Instead, it has spawned a money-saturated, hyper-partisan faction fight dominated by small, ideologically unrepresentative groups.
The achievement of universal suffrage in the 19th and 20th centuries was a story of gradual – and occasionally dramatic – expansion of the franchise, from property-owning men to almost all adults. Today, debates about lowering the voting age to 16 still surface from time to time. But in most mature democracies, the boundaries have been set for decades. What has changed is the growing unease about whether the institutions themselves are still fit for purpose.
That unease comes in many forms: frustration at the State’s inability to tackle glaring problems; suspicion about the influence of special interest groups; a scepticism about the daily compromises of politics that curdles into cynicism. International surveys show rising disillusionment, especially among the young and the economically insecure, with sizeable numbers saying they would prefer a “strong leader” unconstrained by parliaments or elections. That impulse exists here too, though Ireland is still far from any existential threat to the system. It will take more than a single Senator or a few hundred anonymous X accounts to “pull down” Irish democracy. But complacency would be a mistake.
For their part, our political leaders have shown little appetite for institutional change, even in modest doses. The main parties’ refusal to consider mild reforms of the Seanad or to cede more power to local government speaks volumes about their priorities. It is true that neither issue particularly excites the public, but both matter for the health and accountability of the system.
For a time, Ireland’s citizens’ assemblies seemed to offer a promising model, credited with helping to break political deadlocks on same-sex marriage and abortion. Yet their stock has fallen sharply since the emphatic public rejection of last year’s family and care amendments. Rather than reflecting on what went wrong, there now seems to be a reluctance to revisit the format or adapt it to new challenges. All such debates are of course complicated by everyone’s tendency to favour whatever system they think is most likely to deliver their preferred outcome.
In many countries, the populist surge has driven political institutions into a defensive crouch, wary of self-criticism and hostile to structural reform. The paradox is that this rigidity feeds the discontent it fears. When voters believe the system cannot or will not change, they become more willing to gamble on candidates who promise to blow it up entirely.
Ireland is not there yet. But as the presidential election draws closer – and the chorus of excluded hopefuls continues shouting from the sidelines – it’s worth remembering that how we choose our political representatives is not a fixed law of nature. It is a human invention. Like all inventions, it can be improved. Or neglected, possibly at our peril.
