Ireland and the Politics of Change

William J. Crotty, David A. Schmitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317881179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Ireland and the Politics of Change provides a timely assessment of the fundamental changes that have occurred in Irish society over the last several decades from the standpoint of their political significance. There is a particular concern with the leadership role of government and other political institutions in stimulating, managing and responding to the changes taking place that are of fundamental importance to understanding contemporary politics and today's Ireland in the world community.Considerable social, economic, demographic and international change has taken place within Ireland (and Northern Ireland) and without in relation to the rest of the world, and particularly in response to the association with the European Union. Ireland and the Politics of Change examines institutional developments, economic forces, demographic and attitudinal profiles and group-based (religious, gender, class) concerns as they have evolved and assesses their significance for policy enactment and political representation.

Chapter 1

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Democratisation and Political Development in Ireland

William Crotty

Introduction

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Substantial, even radical, change has occurred in the Republic of Ireland. Few if any, a few short decades ago, would have envisioned how far-ranging the changes underway would take the nation; internally in terms of its social attitudes and economic revitalisation and externally in its relations with others in the world community. The distinctive Irish culture and the nation’s unique history remain, providing a context and background for the transformation in progress. They also provide a marking point for measuring the extent of what has taken place. In some areas, the evolution has been transformative; in others, more subtle and constrained. Overall, the process, while making substantial gains, has been uneven. Its ramifications and, in particular, its political implications are the focal point for the assessments in this book.

In the economic sphere, Ireland is moving from being one of Europe’s ‘poor cousins’ to a position of equality and, should it continue (and there is little reason to expect otherwise) economic leadership, even relative affluence, in comparison to its European neighbours. Such a prospect after Independence in a rural, resource-poor and farm-based, non-industrial economy would have seemed unimaginable. Economic development along the scale experienced within the time frame realised and with the consequences for individual lifestyles and the nation’s psyche sets the Irish experience apart among established democracies in the western world.¹

The ramifications of the changes underway vary for different sectors of the society. Social attitudes and the corresponding societal structure – the family, views on religion and the proper role of the Church (Whyte 1980; Kenny 1997; Fahey 1994; Hornsby-Smith 1994), a recognition of the full partnership of women in the nation’s life – more often than not have undergone a slow, uncertain and frequently painful reassessment. A few key referenda over the years serve to mark the changes underway. Domestically, there have been the successful efforts in 1972 to amend the Constitution to remove reference to the ‘special position’ of the Roman Catholic Church in the nation’s political and cultural affairs (84 per cent approving), the legalisation of divorce in 1995 by the slimmest of margins 50.3 per cent in favour to 49.7 per cent against (after another referendum on the issue had been convincingly defeated in 1986, 68 per cent disapproving) (Girvin 1996). A referendum in 1992 to restrict abortion failed (65 per cent against). Related issues growing out of an abortion controversy that split the nation, guaranteeing a right to travel (a court had denied a raped woman travel to England for an abortion) and a right to information (on contraception and abortions) passed by respective majorities of 62 and 60 per cent, introducing a new era in Ireland in an area of particular contentiousness. Less than a decade earlier (1983), 67 per cent had voted in favour of a resolution to prohibit abortion’s legalisation.²

In international affairs, the nation had voted overwhelmingly in 1972 to join the European Community (83 per cent), a rejection of Ireland’s traditional insularity and a key to its future economic growth; in 1987 to endorse the signing of the Single European Act (70 per cent); and in 1992 to favour ratification of the Maastricht Treaty (69 per cent). These votes, reflecting a more cohesive national will than in domestic areas, helped recast Ireland’s role in the European market and the world economy.

Ireland, while aggressively entering the global marketplace, has continued to demonstrate a sensitivity to the concerns of the Third World and a willingness to actively participate in international peacekeeping and relief efforts on a scale matched on a per capita basis by few if any other nations. It has done this while keeping its own military forces small (approximately 12,000). And it has evidenced a new sense of equality and self-confidence in dealing with its neighbour and old adversary, Great Britain, and it has replaced its economic dependence on Britain with trade with its European partners.

The Republic has entered a new phase of cooperation with Britain, symbolised by the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, in dealing with the issue of Northern Ireland. Actively supported by the United States, the two governments have shown a resolve to settle the Northern Ireland problem, instituting processes for the peaceful resolution of the conflict. All sides of the dispute willing to forego violence have been incorporated into the deliberations. A more open and conciliatory relationship built on mutual trust with its once dominant neighbour and oppressor for centuries would have, as in many other areas, seemed most unlikely a few short decades ago. Equally so, the prospect of an acceptable resolution to the Northern Ireland question as well as an end to ‘some of the most serious and sustained intercommunal violence experienced anywhere in the industrialised world’ (Hayes and McAllister 1996: 61), violence that has claimed over 3,200 lives since 1969. While this has yet to be realised, it would have appeared equally unattainable a generation ago.

Less obvious have been changes in, and pressures on, the structuring and representational capacities of Ireland’s political institutions. As examined by David Schmitt in his conclusion and by others in this volume, Ireland’s governing machinery and its delivery of services have been challenged by pressures generated from, in particular, associations with the European Union and the demands this has made on the organisational capacity of the Irish government. Basically, it has required a degree of restructuring in the government’s ability to deliver services, administer an increasing volume of domestic and cross-national programmes and manage the social transformations underway. The institutions of government are much the same as they have been, not significantly expanded beyond the forms of an earlier age. Governing structures as a consequence are experiencing something of a performance overload, one that calls for attention.

The extent to which a restructuring of the society’s institutions has taken place, moving these in the directions of a more rationalised delivery of services, is difficult to measure. In some areas, there are few indications of institutional modernisation – especially in relation to many of the formal agencies of the government – to better meet the demands of a changing society. In others, there is evidence that such a process is underway. These appear to be particularly significant in the development of what could be called the organisation of the civil society, the intermediate agencies of representation within the society, those non-governmental groups and associations positioned between the mass public and the nation’s official institutions of policy making, and in the articulation of its political agenda. Such intermediate agencies of group representation are taken to be an indication of the sophistication and continued maturation of a society’s democratic impulses.

The least change may be evident in the political parties and the party system, built on issues that divided the nation at its founding (Garvin 1996). Political parties in democratic societies pride themselves on their flexibility and survival instincts, their ability to adapt to changing social conditions and political demands. The major Irish parties (Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael) have demonstrated impressive survival skills; less impressive has been their ability to represent competing class and economic interests or to organise the politics of a newly evolving social order, defining the major issues confronting the nation and providing the leadership needed to address these. Rather, the principal parties have tended to coalesce near the centre of the political spectrum and to compete on the basis of personalism and traditional loyalties. Flexibility, pragmatism, parochialism and patronage have characterised the politics of the parties. Whether this represents a suitable response to more recent domestic and international challenges is an open question.

Democratisation: assessing the evolution of democratic impulses

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In the beginning there was the Irish nation as envisioned by its founders, most notably Eamon de Valera, architect of the Constitution and a force in developing Ireland and its political institutions from the birth of the Republic until his retirement in 1959. Addressing the nation by radio on St Patrick’s Day 1943, de Valera gave his vision of an the ‘ideal Ireland’:

That Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youth and the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. It would, in a word, be the home of a people living the life that God desires that man should live. (McLoughlin 1996: 206)

Such a vision may have related to Ireland in the past. However, it appears well removed from contemporary realities; in fact, today’s Ireland may well be a virtual reversal of what de Valera intended. Still, the Ireland de Valera struggled to realise gives insight into the country’s culture and early goals and provides a background for assessing current developments.

There are many ways of examining processes of political and social change in the Irish Republic and their domestic and international implications, as the chapters in this book make clear. One possibility is to approach Ireland as a case study in democratisation, albeit an unusual and even unique one. The continued maturation of democratic institutions and in the evolution of a more open and modernised democratic culture within the nation are attractive points of focus for such an analysis.³

Clearly, the Irish Republic is a democracy of long standing, with established democratic structures, free elections, majority rule, open and inclusive political competition and public discourse, individual rights, government accountability, the rule of law and an equity in resource distribution that would meet any criteria of democratic performance. In effect, this is one reason that Ireland is of such unusual interest. All democracies (all governments for that matter) are in a state of evolution; change (or degrees of change) is a constant. Among the established democracies in the world, Ireland may well have experienced the most accelerated evolution in the shortest time period. The point is arguable given developments in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and in relation to German unification, all fundamentally affected by World War II and the Cold War. This is not the case with the Republic. The evolution, while rapid, was simulated by internal forces in an independent democracy freed of external pressures or control and responding to its own developmental needs. The insular, sectarian, peasant nation once overshadowed and economically dependent on its powerful neighbour and colonial oppressor has emerged in a matter of decades to become an open, prosperous and self-confident world citizen.

Irish society has changed more in the two decades leading up to the 1990s than in the whole of the previous one hundred years, going back to the Great Famine of the mid nineteenth century. An inward-looking, rural, deeply conservative, nearly 100 per cent Roman Catholic and impoverished country has become urbanized, industrialized, and Europeanized. (Hussey 1995: 1; see also Coakley 1993)

Compare this depiction of Ireland with de Valera’s vision. This development constitutes the processes and outcomes we wish to explore, and to do so employing standards familiar to the broader study of democratic development. Among such criteria of democratisation, four have been chosen for analysis in the Irish context. These are:

1 Economic self-sufficiency and well-being. A stable economic base in line with a productive economy and a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth is considered by many as critical to democratic longevity. The relationship between economic development/liberalisation (associated in the literature with a free-market, capitalistic economy and the evolution of increasingly democratic form of political representation) has received more attention than any other in the literature as well as from governments and international lending agencies promoting democratic ends. The contrast evoked is between free-market capitalism and a centrally controlled, state-centred economy, the first argued as being crucial in maintaining a democratic state, the second as inimical to democratic freedoms. The point can be argued, but-the debate clearly favours free-market economic emphases.⁴

2 A strong civil society. The concept of civil society consists of ‘areas of social life – the domestic world, social activities, economic interchange and political interaction – which are organised by private or voluntary arrangements between individuals and groups outside of the direct control of the state’ (Held 1995: 181; see also Putnam 1993; Almond and Verba 1965, 1989). Basically, these would include intermediate groups and structures (between the mass public and government decision-makers) that coalesce and focus demands for political representation: trade unions, professional and economic associations, social clubs, women’s groups, grassroots and community organisations, among others, wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Democratisation and political development in Ireland
• 2 The dynamics of economic change
• 3 Progress or decline? Demographic change in political context
• 4 Changing values
• 5 Religion, ethnic identity and the Protestant minority in the Republic
• 6 The changing role of women
• 7 Inequality and the representation of interests
• 8 Patriots and republicans: an Irish evolution
• 9 Ireland and the growth of international governance
• 10 Peace processes and communalism in Northern Ireland
• 11 Northern Ireland: international and north/south issues
• 12 Conclusion: continuity, change and challenge
• Select bibliography
• Index