It is an article of faith on the Irish left, the Irish centre, much of the Irish right, and indeed in almost the entirety of the Irish media, that the state funding of Irish politics is on balance a very good thing.
There was, because of this article of faith, nary a whisper of mainstream opposition, yesterday, to this objectively ridiculous use of your money:
This morning I'm announcing €215,000 split between the political parties and independent groups to support the running of more women and diverse candidates at the next local elections.https://t.co/UPYkdxoVtT pic.twitter.com/tPMM9eRiGx
— Peter Burke (@peterburkefg) December 12, 2022
When you strip everything else away – all the nonsense about diversity, and so on – what you are left with in the announcement above is a grant of over €200,000 of your own money in order to influence the way you vote. It is your own money being used against you: You pay your taxes to fund schools and hospitals and roads and teachers and the Gardaí. And, it turns out, you also pay the state to try to restrict the choices available to you at election time.
That is what this is, after all – the money is intended to influence the choices available to you when you go to vote. It is designed to encourage political parties not to select candidates based on their ideas, or qualifications, or talents, but on their gender and their skin colour. It is a system designed not to promote the candidates parties might actually want to run, but to promote the candidates that get the parties the most diversity funding. It’s no skin off the parties’ noses, but when parties start picking candidates in order to maximise state funding, it is inevitable that the quality of the candidates, and therefore the quality of the choices available to the voter, will fall. Because they are no longer selecting candidates with the voter in mind – they are selecting candidates with the diversity inspectors in mind.
Ireland’s whole rotten political edifice is built on state funding, and – I would argue strongly – it has been a disaster.
The first thing that state funding has done has been to divorce political parties entirely from their natural interest groups. Take Fine Gael – once the party of big farmers and business and the legal profession, it relied on those groups for financial support. Now, it no longer needs them for financial support, and so it has turned instead to serving those who can influence the funding it gets – NGOs and interest groups arguing for a bigger, more left wing state. Fine Gael can win the approval of the National Women’s Council by arguing for more money for “political diversity” and – in a happy coincidence – get more money for itself in the process. The big farmers, these days, stand on the outside looking in, as Fine Gael Ministers dance around the carbon reduction tree with Eamon Ryan. The idea of interest groups actually spending their own money to support candidates that will advance those interests – a cornerstone of democracy for centuries – is essentially dead, having been rendered practically illegal.
Fianna Fáil, too, once the voice of the construction industry, is also the voice of the NGO sector. Previous Fianna Fáil Governments would have been strongly arguing for the deregulation of the housing market and the planning system – but this one, no longer in need of political donations, serves the same agenda as everyone else in the political and NGO system.
The other issue is that the nationalisation of politics – which is essentially what’s happened in Ireland – has spawned and grown into a multi-billion euro taxpayer funded industry. Parties are state funded. Lobby groups are state funded. There are thousands – literally thousands – of pointless jobs in groups that are funded by the taxpayer in order to enhance the diversity and equality of candidate selection. All of these groups, in turn, promote candidates from within the ever-growing blob, committed to sustaining that blob. Politics in Ireland is not a vocation, any more – it’s one of the biggest nationalised job programmes in our history.
The other benefit of the system, for political parties, is how hard it makes life for any upstart who wishes to challenge them. With state funding has come draconian restrictions on the amounts that can be donated to candidates by private individuals. Speaking on my podcast with David Quinn, two weeks ago, former Progressive Democrat advisor Cormac Lucey openly said that it would be nigh impossible for the PDs to form today, mostly because of these funding rules.
The existing parties are funded by you through your taxes, and you are effectively banned from funding any other, privately. It is a cartel, by any definition.
So why, then, is there not more opposition to it?
The answer, of course, is that those who might be expected to write critically of it – the media – are also increasingly in on the game.
In recent years, we have had the disgraceful spectacle – and there is no other word for it – of media organisations openly begging the state for state funding of the media. The state already funds the media lavishly, if indirectly, through the ever-growing annual spend on media advertising. The media now, too, wants more direct funding.
In the coming years – just wait and see – journalists, too, will be expected to hit and meet “diversity quotas”. And if you’re reading this, and want to rake in some cash, I’d strongly suggest founding an NGO devoted to that goal – call it “equality in media” or something, and watch the grants roll in.
The whole thing is a ponzi scheme, and you, the taxpayer, are the marks. The upshot of it all is that you are now nobody’s most important audience. Not the politicians, who get their funding from the state. Not the media, who rely almost entirely on that same state to keep the show on the road. Not our armada of interest groups, who, again, get funding based not on their public support, but based on their closeness to the state. You, the voter, are a secondary thought for all of them. This system is better for everyone in it, except the voter. Money is easier to come by, because there’s much more of it. There is less work involved in getting it. Politicians can always allocate more of it. And the whole system keeps growing, relentlessly.
Bring back the Galway Tent. At least then, the corruption was in plain sight, and voters knew about it. Nowadays, the corruption is insidious. And all-pervasive. Even if we don’t call it corruption any more.