Irish politicians, when in opposition, love little more than they love calling for referenda on things. Quite often, these things are matters that have no proper place in a country’s constitution.
For example, the purpose of a referendum on “a right to housing” is to insert into the constitution a legal provision that would bind the hands of Irish voters for generations thereafter, or until it was removed. Governments of all stripes would in effect be committed to following the same policy, whether it was working or not. The same goes for a referendum on neutrality, which would bind the hands of Irish voters and policymakers for generations: Even if your grandchildren felt they had just cause to change the policy, they would still be bound by your decision. That’s what a constitution does – it forces politicians to do things even if and when those things become unpopular.
This of course was one of the primary arguments – and probably the only really decent one – for removing the 8th amendment from the Irish constitution: Opponents of the 8th amendment said that it was improper that Irish policymakers in 2018 should be bound by the opinions on abortion of voters from the early 1980s. And they pointed out correctly that removing abortion from the constitution would not prevent a future government from banning it anyway, should it feel that it is politically popular to do so.
Nevertheless, hypocrisy is the most important currency in all of politics, which is why so many of those politicians who demanded that binding amendments on policy issues had no place in the constitution when they disagreed with the policy now argue that their own policies should be made binding on future generations.
What Irish politicians are generally less interested in, however, is in putting major decisions before the voters for their imput.
It is often forgotten that the Brexit referendum of 2016 in the United Kingdom was not a constitutional vote, but a consultative vote. Technically, the Brexit referendum had no legal power – the Government of the day could simply have ignored it with no legal consequences.
They did not ignore it, because they had promised not to do so: They had said to the British voter “we are asking for your opinion on this major decision, and we will abide by your verdict”.
There is nothing stopping Irish politicians from doing the same. Which is what they should do, on various topics of national importance. Irish neutrality or an EU army might be one of those topics. But climate policy certainly should be.
We learned yesterday that the Republic is facing potential fines of up to €26billion if it does not meet the climate targets it has signed up to by 2030. I say “potential” fines but this word is only technical, because the fines are a rock-solid certainty. Ireland will not meet those climate targets, because the present government does not want to pay the political price of implementing the economically ruinous agenda that would be necessary to meet them.
Yesterday, in the Dáil, Ireland’s wokester-in-chief (there are a few candidates for that position, but only one surefire winner) Ivana Bacik declared to Simon Harris that if the latter was “furious” over the cost of a printer for the national gallery, he would be “incandescent” when he heard about the fines.
There is a solution to this: Put it to the people. Put both sides to the people.
One argument is clear, and it is the one that Bacik will be on: We need to do this because if we don’t do it the planet will burn and we’ll have to pay billions in fines.
Another argument is also clear, and it is the side this writer will be on: We shouldn’t ever have committed to these policies in the first place, and there should be a decisive public rejection both of the policies themselves, and, by implication, the outrageous decision to sign up to potential fines, which was never put before the electorate.
If Bacik’s side wins, then we should all agree to abide by the result and see the climate policies implemented in full. If the other side wins, then the Climate Change Act should be repealed.
I am not writing about this as some kind of gambit, but because we are told constantly by those who demand these policies that Climate Action is a collective problem that requires a collective response. Yet the problem is that the public has never formally endorsed a collective response. Instead, policies have been dictated to us by the 11% or so of voters who managed to leverage the Green Party into Government and impose their price on the rest of the electorate.
You cannot have collective action without collective will. That is very clear: 11% of the electorate can endorse an agenda, but even they cannot impose it on everyone else. That is why we might have to pay the fines – because the Green strategy of doing this with the shoehorn of a fragment of the electorate has failed.
A full national debate on what we might call “net zero” is long overdue. Let us spell out the costs: Exactly what sectors of the economy would we have to hamstring or shutter? The Government, like the British, should set a full course of action before us – here is what we would do to hit the targets.
I suspect that the result of the referendum would be overwhelming.
I also suspect that Ivana Bacik knows that it would be overwhelming.
And that, my friends, is why we shall never have one.