The price of freedom
The Ceann Comhairle, Dr Rory O'Hanlon presides over a debate in the Dáil.
When things go well we take democracy for granted, writes
Fintan O'Toole
One of the reasons we take democracy for granted is that we are often assured that it is very old. At least in the West, democracy is imagined as a form of government that stretches back 2,500 years to the Greek city-state of Athens. But, in the sense that we use the word today, Athens was nothing like a democracy. A large majority of its population, made up of women, slaves, and those who were born elsewhere, were not allowed to be citizens.
In fact, the very things that make Athenian "democracy" so attractive - the way decisions were debated in public and arrived at by the citizens as a group - were possible only because the free men had women and slaves at home to do the work.
In reality, democracy is a new idea - so new that it is still emerging.
The system that began to develop after the French and American Revolutions of the late 18th century is certainly founded on the entitlement of every adult citizen to vote. But it also includes an independent judiciary to protect individual rights, the protection of minorities, a system of checks and balances in which the different arms of government (the executive, the judiciary and the legislature) can prevent each other from abusing power, and a free media to ensure that citizens have the information they need to exercise their choice.
Even in the developed West, it is really only in the last 50 years that this system has been in operation.
In the first country to be founded on democratic principles, the United States, slaves were excluded from citizenship, and it was only in the 1960s that black people in the southern states got the right to vote.
Women were universally excluded from the right to vote until very recently. Sweden moved towards equal rights for women in 1861 and Australia in 1902, but most western countries only began the process after the first World War in 1918, and in many - including France and Italy - women only got the vote in 1944 or 1945 after the defeat of fascism. Women in one of Europe's most sophisticated countries, Switzerland, only got the vote in 1971.
Irish women over 30 got the right to vote in 1918, and the Irish Free State gave women the right to vote on equal terms with men in 1921, while those in Northern Ireland had to wait for this change until 1928. But full and equal female participation in democracy is still a long way off. Just 17 per cent of the seats in elected parliaments worldwide are held by women and in Ireland the figure is still a miserable 13 per cent. It is difficult to see how such an imbalance in representation can be compatible with a completely democratic system.
Even now, democracy in the proper sense is relatively rare. The latest index of democracy compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit (which takes personal freedom, functioning government and participation, as well as voting rights, into account) suggests that although almost half of the world's countries can be considered to be democracies, the number of "full democracies" is relatively low (only 28).
Almost twice as many (54) are rated as "flawed democracies". Of the remaining 85 states, 55 are authoritarian and 30 are considered to be "hybrid regimes" with some elements of both authoritarianism and democracy.
Only 13 per cent of the global population lives in a full democracy, compared to 40 per cent living under some form of authoritarian rule.
So democracy is new, raw and relatively rare. It is also fragile. Even within the European Union, almost half of the 27 member states were not democratic in the recent past. Some (Greece, Spain, Portugal) were military dictatorships until the 1970s. Many (the recently arrived former Communist states) were subjected to failed experiments in "people's democracy" that never earned consistent popular consent.
Indeed, only three of the 27 states - Ireland, the UK and Sweden - have been self-governing democracies for all of the last 70 years. During that period, dozens of democratic regimes have been overthrown by internal subversion, military coups or external force. Again and again, we have been reminded that there is nothing inevitable about democracy.
Yet in spite of the evidence, we tend increasingly to take democracy for granted. The Irish Republic has, on the surface, more reason for complacency than most countries. Mass participation in democratic organisations was pioneered here, by Daniel O'Connell's huge popular movements for Catholic Emancipation and repeal of the Act of Union in the 19th century.
The achievement of the Irish State in establishing a stable democracy from a period of chaotic violence is, by international standards, utterly remarkable. It says a great deal for the depth of our democratic culture that, less than 10 years after the end of a civil war and in a period when democracy was in crisis throughout Europe, the party that lost that war could achieve power in a peaceful and orderly way. Ireland, moreover, remained relatively immune from the forces of left- or right-wing extremism that threatened or overthrew democracies in many of our European neighbours.
Our electoral system is, by international standards, fair and free.
Compared to the UK's voting system, where in recent elections different parties have received as much as 22 per cent more seats than votes or as much as 19 per cent fewer seats than votes, Ireland's PR system tends to produce a relatively good match between the number of votes a party gets and the number of seats it wins. The Dáil may not be representative in terms of gender, age and social class, but in fulfilling the basic democratic function of distributing power in accordance with the wishes expressed by the voters, ours is a reasonably robust system.
It was, however, an Irishman, John Philpot Curran, who uttered the much-quoted truth that "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance". Irish democracy has always needed vigilance, and it has often paid the price for complacency.
Since its establishment, it has been challenged in different ways by armed subversion, by the excessive influence of one church, and by corruption. It still has serious deficiencies in the flow of information that citizens need if they are to make informed choices. The ability of parliament to hold the government to account remains severely limited. The balance of power between the legislators who make the laws and the judges who apply them is still unclear.
Government activities are increasingly outsourced to public bodies - they now number at least 500 - which are not directly accountable to elected representatives. Above all, it is hard to square the increasing inequality of Irish society with the fundamental democratic principle that every citizen counts equally.
Democracy is a system that can solve its own problems but for that to happen, citizens need to be aware of their own power. The evidence suggests that significant numbers of Irish citizens feel either too complacent and self-satisfied or too powerless and marginalised to be connected to the democratic system.
A poll conducted for the Democratic Audit Project in 2005 found that a quarter of respondents were unhappy with the way Irish democracy is developing. While 70 per cent of those in the highest socio-economic group expressed satisfaction, just 53 per cent of those in the lowest did so. Just over half the respondents agreed that it is worthwhile to be active in politics.
A Eurobarometer survey in 2006 found that just half of Irish people trust the justice system, 44 per cent trust parliament, 42 per cent trust government and 32 per cent trust political parties.
These findings are reflected in both voting and political participation.
As in other western democracies, voter turnout has been declining steadily here over the last 30 years, from 76.3 per cent in 1977 to 62.7 in 2002.
(Turnout in local elections follows a broadly similar pattern.) The trend is even more marked among young people. The Democratic Audit survey found that only half of 15-24 year-olds believed that "ordinary people could influence decisions when they made an effort", which may explain why only half of those under 24 voted in the 2002 election.
Likewise, membership of political parties, which are vital to the democratic process, is relatively low and has been declining. Michael Marsh has estimated that fewer than 3 per cent of electors - 80,000 people - are members of parties, a figure that is well below the EU average.
People can be politically active in many other ways, of course, but if the long-term decline of parties were to continue, it would raise serious doubts about the sustainability of the current democratic system.
Perhaps the most dangerous irony of democracy is that when it is ticking over, it hardly seems to matter. Ours works well enough to give us a free and prosperous society in which most citizens don't have to think too often about their hard-won rights and duties. We can forget that if we made it work better, all our lives could be improved. And forget too that if we think of democracy as someone else's business, we will sooner or later receive unpleasant reminders that it is ours.
