SO THEY GOT THE REPUBLIC WRONG, EMILY? AH WELL, THAT’S DEMOCRACY!
Irish Daily Mail
August 3, 2013 Saturday
Edition 1; Ireland
by CORMAC LUCEY
THIS week Emily O’Reilly declared that ‘The republic that was created
from the ashes of the Rising was a perversion of the human rights
ideals of 1916.’ Is Ireland’s outgoing Ombudsman and Europe’s incoming
Ombudsman right? Is the republic we live in a perversion of 1916’s
human rights ideals? I’m not so sure. In my opinion, human rights are
better respected in Ireland than in most other places on this planet.
We have democracy. We have the vote. We have independent courts. We
have free speech. Organisations are free to set up and operate. People
are free to come and go as they please. People are generally free
from arbitrary arrest.
When the children’s charity Unicef rated the countries of the world
in terms of where was best for a child to grow up, it rated Ireland
10th in the world. That puts us ahead of both the UK and the US.
That’s not too bad for a country which perverts ‘human rights ideals’.
Every year, the US-based Freedom House organisation carries out a
survey of freedom across the globe. It rates countries on a score
of 1-7 with ‘1’ indicating maximum freedom and ‘7’ indicating North
Koreanstyle oppression. So how did Ireland score in its 2013 survey?
Under the heading ‘political rights’, Ireland scored 1, the highest
possible score. Under the heading ‘civil liberties’, Ireland also
got the top score. We were rated ‘Free’, the highest overall rating
possible.
Whatever Emily might think, outsiders don’t seem to think we’re doing
too badly on freedom and human rights.
It’s not that Ireland has just become free today or yesterday. The
Irish State has experienced continuous democracy since 1922. That
makes Ireland the fifth-oldest continuous democracy (after Switzerland,
the UK, Sweden and Finland) in a Europe which now has 50 states.
That’s not too bad for a relatively young state which is supposedly
perverting human rights ideals.
I certainly don’t agree with Emily O’Reilly that our republic is a
perversion of the human rights of 1916.
And that’s before we even consider Emily’s odd appeal to the men
of 1916.
They had no more a democratic mandate to launch an armed insurrection
in 1916 than the Real IRA had to bomb the town of Omagh in Co. Tyrone
in 1998.
And among the ‘gallant allies’ referred to in the Easter Proclamation
was the Ottoman Empire, then presiding over the genocide of around
1million Armenians.
IT is especially odd that Ms O’Reilly should genuflect before the
ghosts of 1916 while giving the John Hume lecture at this year’s
MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co. Donegal. For Hume consistently
advocated peaceful and constitutional methods of advancing political
objectives rather than the paramilitary methods of 1916 or the
Provisional IRA.
The irony is that Ireland and its people owe an enormous debt to two
of the men who went out in 1916, William T. Cosgrave and Eamon de
Valera. The two men were united in 1916. But they were later divided
by a political division that became a vicious civil war.
Cosgrave led the government that prosecuted the civil war: de Valera
was the political figurehead of those in opposition.
Hundreds were killed, some were effectively tortured to death.
Ten years later, Cosgrave’s government was defeated in the 1932 general
election by de Valera’s Fianna Fail. Some Irish Army officers urged
Cosgrave to stage a coup and to refuse to let go the reins of power.
Cosgrave turned down this tempting offer as he clung instead to the
principle for which he had fought the Civil War: the right of the
Irish people to democratically determine its political destiny.
Honouring that principle meant respecting the results of the general
election. And that meant handing over power to de Valera.
Cosgrave’s decision was a wise one, even if it condemned him to spend
the remainder of his active political life on the opposition benches.
That 1932 decision was echoed, in 1937, when de Valera came to frame
a new constitution for Ireland.
For the 1937 constitution was a fair one which was also built on
the principles of balancing powers across government institutions,
with the people exercising ultimate control through the ballot box.
When Egypt’s President Morsi crafted a new constitution which sought to
lock his own party’s institutional hold on power he took the opposite
course to de Valera.
He sought to perpetuate his power rather than share it or subject to
real democratic accountability.
He thereby provoked protests and an undemocratic military coup. So
Egypt is headed down the road of permanent political instability.
But in Ireland, thanks to key decisions of Cosgrave and de Valera,
it is we the people (we ourselves) who exercise the ultimate power of
who shall govern. Was this not the guiding objective of 1916? While
her line about ‘a perversion of the human rights ideals of 1916’
got the headlines, the central thrust of Emily O’Reilly’s speech
was a criticism ‘that parliament does not take itself seriously’
and that the Cabinet ‘is planting its boot far too firmly on the neck
of the parliament and wielding power in a manner never envisaged by
the Constitution’.
This is a preposterous proposition.
De Valera, the principal author of the 1937 Constitution, ruled
a Fianna Fail party which just a few years earlier had organised
illegal resistance to the government along military lines. He ruled a
highly disciplined party where there were no free votes and where the
party leadership decided every key question. By having the taoiseach
of the day nominate 11 members of the 60-member Seanad, de Valera
deliberately designed that institution so that, on all key questions,
it would be subordinate to the government.
It may be fashionable to argue that central government has too much
power and our parliamentarians too little. No doubt there is a strong
argument to be made along these lines. But look at the USA and see
there a system where the executive (i.e. the president) has little
or no legislative power at all.
LOOK at Barack Obama and see a president unable to push through even
limited legislation on gun control despite recent shooting outrages,
a hefty re-election margin and his party’s control of the Senate.
Do we want a system where egocentric and vain parliamentarians can hold
our government to ransom? Are we not better off with the current system
where, on election day, the people decides who will govern? And where,
with the whip system, the government has the parliamentary muscle to
give effect to its key decisions? In her speech, Ms O’Reilly reported
that ‘there is a deep-seated anti-intellectualism prevalent in Irish
public life’.
But it was the historian Joe Lee who observed that Ireland is ‘more
sub-intellectual than anti-intellectual.
Anti-intellectualism is too intellectually demanding’. I’m afraid
that Ms O’Reilly’s speech is open to this accusation. It name-checks
academics. It recounts fashionable political views.
But it seems largely devoid of historical understanding or of the
difficult analysis required in weighing up alternative models of
government.
Instead of blaming the system, it is open to the Irish people to use
it to express their will.
That’s what they did in the 1918 general election when Sinn Fein
swept the boards and British rule was rendered untenable. And they
can do it again to this government at the next election.