Recovering The Promise Of A Real Republic

When I first stood for election in 1969 I was leaving an academic world on which I had expended a great deal of anxiety in order to secure entry. People from backgrounds such as mine did not go to university, did not qualify in other universities and certainly did not teach in universities.

I left that world to participate in public life, which was part of the tradition of my family. I wish people from all walks of life took part in politics and in public life. It is very important to act in the public space with, as Connolly would put it, whatever are the gifts of hand or brain one has, and to deliver it for one’s fellow citizens. I was conscious in 1969, however, of the great failure of a country that then called itself a Republic.
I believe no real republic has been created in Ireland. The failure has been of three kinds. There has been a failure in making political power republican; a failure in making republican any kind of administrative power; and a failure with regard to communicative power.
I think that those who wanted Ireland to be independent would have envisaged a country in which there would be far greater distribution of power, that it would not be confined solely to the exercise of parliamentary democracy.
Parliamentary democracy is incredibly important. For many years, people in Ireland struggled to have their own parliament and struggled to participate in it. But there is more to political power than voting once every four or five years; there is the exercise of power in every dimension of life. If a real republic had been founded, we should have been spending decades extending and deepening political power. To the credit of the Labour Party, that has been its intention and aspiration since it was founded in 1912.
With regard to administrative power, it is quite appalling that there was no real change in the hand-over of primacy to the Department of Finance from the time the Treasury dominated in the olden days. As a political scientist, I find it quite extraordinary that so much attention has focused on changing the electoral system and so little on the structure of Cabinet power. There is no constitutional basis for the hegemony of the Department of Finance; it was a practice that flowed seamlessly from the British Treasury and was adopted without question.
If one wanted to effect radical change, one would break the monopoly enjoyed by the Government of the day and the stranglehold they wield on parliament. One would allow the establishment of a fully-fledged committee system with the right to initiate and change legislation. If one wanted to go further, as they do in the Scandinavian model, it would be to allow committees to have limited budgetary powers, thus ensuring that people who become involved in politics could achieve things even if they were not members of the front bench or the Cabinet.
Even though the Labour Party has produced 140 proposals which I strongly support, including in particular its proposals on citizenship, there is an element of fright in what our elected representatives are suggesting. They are offering themselves for reform, as if that was the major problem. It is not.
One need only watch television and listen to radio to know what is happening internationally. A significant price is already being paid for the broken connection between the aspirations of the people of this planet and those who take decisions on their behalf. The distinguished political scientist, Jürgen Habermas, has suggested that people can only reasonably be invited to be bound by rules and by decisions in which they have had a chance to consciously participate. He is right.
In one part of the world after another, we have the assumption that rational parliaments will be able to solve global problems such as the food crisis, the environmental crisis or the energy crisis or whatever.
At the same time, very serious people are suggesting that parliament is what is irrational and that markets are rational – when in fact all of the evidence shows that it is the flow of international market capital which is completely unaccountable and irrational. There is no evidence whatsoever, since the crash in the 1920s in the United States, that the markets are rational.
People have put their trust in parliaments and, all over the world, parliament is losing. In the European Union, for instance, we are in the gravest danger of sinking back to a common market, rather than realising the vision of a Europe beyond wars, a Europe of all of the citizens. The citizen deficit in Europe is its most serious failure. That is why those who want to defend their own national banks, be they French Presidents or German Chancellors, are defending their francs and marks rather than the possibilities of Europe.
I listen to those speaking about the clash between being a legislator and being a representative and the consequences of clientelism about which I wrote as far back as the 1970s. This is because of an authoritarian administrative system that never understood the concept of the citizen, in the French republican sense of being an equal.
There is currently no connection between the vulnerability, the struggle and the agony of ordinary people and the assumptions regarding what is news, or what is happening in the world these same people inhabit. They do not have equal access to the story, which is shaped by certain vested interests in the media.
This, of course, is not solely an Irish phenomenon. But it is widening an excluded underclass in Ireland. It is creating a cohort of people who are primed to move quickly to conflict, essentially because there are no properly functioning mediating institutions. Not that we are alone. In one country after another across Africa and Asia, as people overthrow dictatorships, they place their trust first in representative institutions and then, if they are let down, they are into a straight conflict with what are regarded as the forces of law and order. The result is war and the shocking waste of human lives and resources in the terrible tasks of war.
Since I was a child in County Clare I have had a belief in the power of education and in the power of ideas. This is why I believe that an enormously high price has been paid for the anti-intellectualism and the authoritarianism that have been dominant in Irish culture.
There is no point in suggesting that that which has failed us should or can be repaired. We need, instead, to go back and recover the promise of a real republic that would be built on citizenship and that would reject as outrageous the kind of radical individualism epitomised in that ugly statement of Michael McDowell’s: that inequality is needed for the stability of society. It ranks with the mad Margaret Thatcher’s view that there is no such thing as society.
This is why it is incredibly important that the Labour Party should lead the next government. In the old politics, instead of speaking about the republic that might be created, people focussed on getting a bit of the action. Suddenly it was no longer important to have just one house for shelter or to have another for pension purposes, in case a family split up or somebody retired. One needed a string of houses – and thus our property bubble was created within a bigger bubble of speculative capitalism.
I believe that as Ireland moves into a time when we can celebrate the founding of my party, the great lockout of 1913 and subsequently the rising of 1916, we need to think about an entirely different kind of society. I am immensely practical about this. I suggest that if we wanted to deliver what I am describing in terms of political participation, administrative fairness and the equality of the right to communicate, we must speak first about a floor of citizenship below which people would not be allowed to fall.
One would make children secure from the time of birth till they are very old. One would make it possible for children from all strata of society to share the same classrooms – and for that period of their lives at least be equal with regard to education. In addition to this, we would ensure that people would have decent housing.
This was the agenda when Sean O’Casey wrote about disparity. James Connolly took the Irish Citizen Army, with its egalitarian agenda, and placed it side by side with nationalism. The lesson we learned from this was that when the egalitarian socialist agenda was placed side by side with the nationalist agenda the socialist agenda would lose.
Those of us in favour of a version of Ireland where no one will fall below the floor must declare this, not only to ourselves but also to Europe. In addition, a highly participative, inclusive republic was the vision of those who made the case for Irish independence at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. It was this which was stolen from the people after the foundation of the State, when the conservatives marched into all the principal professorships including and especially in education and philosophy. UCD itself became a stable for conservatism which went on to dominate Irish administrative life.
Philosophers, Slavoj Žižek among them, have said that what is needed is a form of terror that would sweep everything away so that we might start all over again. I disagree. One must put one’s faith in representative democracy and having done so make it work. If one wants it to work one must be open to making the type of institutional changes that I am describing. There is, therefore, a need for a discourse in which we are able to speak about the vulnerabilities that matter, and where there is not a huge gulf between what we say, here in Dáil Éireann, and what is happening on the street.
People wonder why poverty has to reproduce itself in the same family from one generation to another or from one area to another; and they wonder why there is a difference between the quality of schools in one place and the quality in another. God did not make it like that. Nature did not make it like that. The people in the so-called Irish republic made it like that – and they maintained it like that.
I remember in County Clare when one could point to the two or three people in the Labour Party because they lived in a galvanised house. People would explain that they were Labour in the same way as they would say they were on the margins of society – and they were. We need now to bring the people on the margin in from the cold and afford them full and proper citizenship.
Whatever its hue, the new Government must realise that the model which has been broken should not be stuck back together. The first priority must be jobs. It must be getting people back to work. In this light, citizens are wondering can we now create institutions where the concept of interdependency is accepted and where it would be regarded as obscene to state that radical individualism is what is important and what must drive us. All that radical individualism – with its privileged view of professions and its side of the mouth politics with regard to benefit and privilege – is what must be rejected.
If we could do this here, Ireland would become a powerful moral voice in the world with regard to having alternatives to war and allowing people their own paths to development.
Before going to the polls, people should remember this: in September 2008 the Labour Party was left alone in opposing the blanket guarantee for banks. The vote was 124 votes to 18 votes. We were the 18. Fine Gael, the Greens, Sinn Féin and various independents joined Fianna Fáil in voting that bill through. And in doing so they made a terrible mistake, the price of which is being extracted from the Irish people now and will be for years to come. With all due respect to everyone who voted in favour of that crazily rushed piece of legislation, it was a disaster.
So I will say what I believe citizens in a republic want: they want more political power and they want administrative power. They want to communicate their vulnerability and want to be able to respond to each other’s independency. The very last thing they want is more of the policies that have brought this country to its knees.
That is why I am proud to be president of the Labour Party. If we have failed from time to time, what was never in doubt is that we were speaking about a real republic – one that sadly has yet to be built in this State.

Michael D Higgins is the Labour President and is seeking the Party’s nomination to run for President of Ireland this year. This article is based on his final speech to Dáil Éireann following the announcement of the upcoming General Election. To access his speeches follow him on Facebook or Twitter, or look him up on www.michaeldhiggins.ie