Comments on: All politics is local

By: James Lawless – View from the Tracks » Blog Archive » (Mostly) all politics are local

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:42:33 +0000

[...] post stems from a discussion in the comments section under ‘All politics is local’. We were comparing and contrasting the UK and Irish systems in terms of how rooted politicians must [...]

By: Keith Gaughan

Keith Gaughan — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:44:41 +0000

@P O’Neill: that’s possible in the UK because of FPTP, PR makes things too tight between the candidates to do safe seats for national heavy hitters who aren’t also local heavy hitters. We’d need to adjust our electoral system to explicitly allow for such candidates, e.g. by having a pool of non-constituency seats in the Dail or something similar such as making the Seanad a relevant body and having a fair proportion of its seats filled by national elections.

By: steve white

steve white — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:09:49 +0000

prop joe, are the state and community totally divorced from each other, they can never be the same thing? we as society agree to pay taxes so people will get looked after.

By: Irish Election » All constituencies are equal (but some are more equal than others)

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:29:24 +0000

[...] All politics is local [...]

By: James Lawless

James Lawless — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:20:13 +0000

@P’ONeill Yes I think this is an important point which is sometimes missed in the debate.

@Joanna I don’t know how you can say this would never happen when it clearly does right across the water and likely in many other jurisdictions the world over. It is still democratic as the people ultimately have the last veto.

All. I’m actually going to write a post on this as my further comments are looking very wordy! And I think it deserves a discussion in own right.

By: Veronica

Veronica — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:03:54 +0000

Good heavens Joanna! Surely you cannot be suggesting that elites are a bad thing? We have elites in all branches of academia, sport, medicine, science, business and just about every other area of human endeavour, even politics. By definition, elites are comprised of our greatest experts or champions of excellence in any particular area and naturally emerge within every society that functions to any degree of normality. Elitism becomes a dirty word only within political cultures where mediocrity is prized over meritocracy and attaining the highest standards of performance for the good of all. Now that I think of it, that probably accounts for the fact that we’re in such a mess!

By: Joanna Tuffy T.D.

Joanna Tuffy T.D. — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:58:26 +0000

Sorry P.

That should have been.

By: Joanna Tuffy T.D.

Joanna Tuffy T.D. — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:44:37 +0000

James,

No system would generate such a utopian and elitist concept.

By: P O'Neill

P O'Neill — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:08:51 +0000

James, your point about the difficulties of sustaining a national and local viable political career is worth emphasis. In our closest relative political system i.e. UK, the big parties find a way to plant some national heavy hitters in safe seats and have an apparatus to support them in terms of local work to keep the seat that way. But this is not a model that gets used much in Ireland, notwithstanding the occasional parachuting in of a “big beast” from the world of media or sport. Perhaps there’s a an alternative model of the Senate where it gets used for better engagement from the more cerebal figures who don’t want to get involved in the nitty-gritty of a Dail campaign. But anyway the point is that our current system is not set up to generate a “government of all the talents”.

By: Joanna Tuffy T.D.

Joanna Tuffy T.D. — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:27:47 +0000

Thanks Veronica,

There will be plenty of material for Irish Election in that case.

To you and the other bloggers on this site, keep up the good work of initiating interesting political debates.