Fergus Finlay: Our government formation system is wonky but also precious
Micheál Take, Have Likely Performances To Have Two Next And Simon Worst Harris Martin Election Give Who Looks Had, Government Ever Our Their Core Or Its Parties At
Democracy is weird and imperfect — heaven knows we can prove that beyond a doubt. It doesn’t seem to matter that fewer and fewer people have an interest in voting — or perhaps it’s just more and more people are alienated from voting. It doesn’t seem to matter that election results are getting odder and odder, to the point where they really struggle to fit into any “normal” definition of a democratic outcome.
Our imperfect democracy seems to be the best we can do. And it’s always going to be that way. Because that’s one of the fundamentals — democracy is imperfect. And precious.
Just look at the results of the recent election. I’m guessing the outcome is what most of us expected. We don’t know for sure if it is what the people really wanted, since only 60% of them voted. But if we take that 60% as a representative sample of the entire electorate, a clear majority voted not to have the government we’re going to get. Between them Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael got 43% of the vote. You can round that up to 45% if you include the share of the vote picked up by the Independents likely to join them. Which means, of course, more than half of us voted for someone else.
Maybe have a look at the seats. The very first time FF contested an Irish election, just short of a century ago, the party took a quarter of the votes and 44 seats. From that moment on they never dipped below the high 50s, until, of course, the disgrace of 2011. So their tally of seats in this election is the third worst in 97 years. That’s quite something isn’t it — at the height of his disgrace (should that be depth?) Charlie Hughey commanded 77 seats in a smaller Dáil. Imagine what he’d have to say about a mere 48 seats.
FG, of course, has never reached the heights commanded by FF. The only time they reached the high 70s was in 2011 under Enda Kenny — when FF was experiencing the sort of disgrace where one might assume there was no possibility of recovery. But under Garret Fitzgerald in the 1980s they routinely won 60 seats. In fact their tally this time — 38 seats — is the third lowest since 1948.
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Back then the party was led by a now forgotten man called Richard Mulcahy. After his miserable achievement of 31 seats, oddly enough, FG found its way back into government. That time it was a remarkable government consisting of five parties, most of whom have now ceased to exist. One of the conditions around the formation of that government was that Mulcahy couldn’t be Taoiseach (it had to do with old Civil War enmities) and he had to stand aside.
Even when you add their seats together they can’t put their hands on their hearts and insist they have a mandate. Which is why they’re making gooey eyes at enough Independents to help them over the line.
Then there’s the other hand. I worked in Leinster House for an unbroken period of fifteen years, and in that time I never met a Sinn Féin TD. Because there weren’t any. The first SF TD elected to a seat in Dáil Éireann was Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin, and that happened in 1997, the year I took a “temporary” break from the place. By the time I left the second time there were four of them.
And now would you look. In seventeen years they’ve gone from 4 to 38. They’d have had even more bang for their buck in the previous election if they’d managed their vote better. And yet, somehow or other, they’re regarded as having lost the election. That’s because — and only because — the two parties on either side of them — FF slightly more, FG slightly less — won’t talk to them.
Alongside SF in results terms are Labour and the Social Democrats, both of them gaining five seats. In Labour’s case it represents a really good recovery, and they are still some way off their best. But the Social Democrats had a magnificent election and emerged both strong and credible.
The thing is, though, if you showed the results of the election to a bunch of Professors of Politics just landed from Mars, and asked them to tell you, on the basis of the figures, who has a mandate to govern, there’s only one possible answer. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil no; Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats and Labour yes.
But it’s a racing certainty now the parties without a mandate will form a government, and the parties with a mandate will form (I hope in time) a coherent and effective opposition. We’ll all get on with it. We’ll even tolerate the bleating of some of the Independents talking about their national duty as they pocket whatever constituency goodies were used to buy their votes.
Getting on with it is what we do. It’s like we have some kind of silent pact. The system we designed for ourselves works pretty well at a constituency level. If we really want to see someone elected (or thrown out, for that matter) at a local level, there’s a reasonable chance that enough of us banding together can make it happen. Then we’re content to let the national picture sort itself out.
And yet I don’t want to diss our democracy. Imperfect, weird as it may be, what we have is precious — more precious than gold.
There are various different entities that measure the state of democracy in the world. Perhaps the most authoritative is the Economist Democracy Index, which covers 164 United Nations member states. It lists 24 countries on our planet, representing one in every thirteen of the world’s population, that it describes as full democracies. That’s all. There are many others (including the United States, for instance), seen as flawed democracies.
Ireland is one of the 24 countries described as a full democracy. That’s something to be proud of — and it’s something to fight for. Because democracy is dying all over the world. If you spent last weekend following the toppling of one of the world’s most evil dictators in Syria, you might think there is hope. But hope is the thing you have to fight for. It may be unthinkable, but it’s by no means impossible, Bashar al-Assad could be replaced with worse.
Our government formation system may be wonky — there’s no doubt about that — but we are a beacon. We have something worth treasuring. I might feel a bit despondent that we are facing five more years of the same old politics as before. But faced with the slippery slide into authoritarianism that we can see around us, we’ll carry on fighting to protect our wonky old democracy.