“I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces”
Thus spoke Henry Ford, inventor of the Model T, which – just as he envisaged – became the world’s first mass-market automobile. To say that his vision transformed human society would be an understatement – the advances in human society brought about by the car, both economic and in terms of quality of life, are too endless to list. Paramount amongst them, though, is the freedom delivered by the car. The ability to live one’s own life on one’s own schedule – to go where you please, when you please, at minimal cost. There is no train or bus or aeroplane which will take you, on a random Saturday afternoon, directly to that small beach you discovered in Connemara. There is no other mode of transport (besides perhaps a private helicopter) which has permitted families to live hundreds of miles apart, and be at each other’s bedsides in the event of a midnight emergency with just a few hours’ notice. The car made the world smaller, and more accessible, and more free.
It was a good hundred years or so, I guess: We are lucky to have lived through it. Because if the Irish Times’ star columnist gets her way, the era of the car is coming to a close, and you have no say in the matter:
“But we need to think bigger. Most cars have to go. People can fight this all they want, but it has to happen…. Cars are parked 95 per cent of the time. They clutter streets, paths and roads. Get rid of them. The bad faith, hairsplitting arguments and selfish hysteria of middle-class drivers in particular carries no weight in a climate emergency. Of course, there should be exceptions for those who genuinely need their cars on the road. Positive change needs to be logical change. But if you want to keep your car in the city centre out of personal convenience, that simply does not, should not and cannot override public health, or Ireland’s embarrassing languishing on emissions targets. We need to skip the phoney, predictable, cynical “debates”, radio phone-in outrage and populist “push back”, and just do it.”
Of all the arguments that Una Mullally makes in that piece, the bits in bold are the most fascinating to me. Who, dear reader, is “we”?
This is, after all, a direct argument against democracy. Mullally is very clear on that point: “People can fight this all they want, but it has to happen”, and “We need to skip the phoney (sic), predictable, cynical debates…. and just do it”
In other words, it does not really matter, in Mullally’s view, whether 60 or 70 or 80% of the public disagree with her. They do not get a say, and “we” must do this. So who is “we”?
“We”, clearly, are powerful, because “we” have the power to simply do things without necessarily needing to worry about public opinion. In that respect, “we” clearly are not politicians – for even the most radical of those still has to get elected. A clue to the identity of “we” is provided in this passage:
“Whoever takes over from Owen Keegan as chief executive of Dublin City Council in September, while the Government drags its heels on local Government reform, should arrive with a huge vision for the city. The first part of that vision needs to be about how people navigate the city centre. That means removing as many cars as possible. Fossil-fuelled SUVs, in particular, should be taxed into oblivion, or just banned outright.”
Whoever takes over from Owen Keegan will of course be the new Dublin City Manager – a position within the civil service that is unelected and only technically accountable to the City Councillors elected by the public. Mullally is placing her faith not in the public, but in technocratic civil servants with the power to ignore political concerns and allow the elected branches to take the rap.
This is a consistent pattern in Una’s writing: She does not, particularly, have great time for democracy. She has written repeatedly, for example, that she considers debates tiresome. Indeed, in this very piece, she puts the word “debate” in inverted commas, and calls debates “phoney” and “predictable”. She is well known in media circles for simply refusing to take part in them – you will never hear her on the radio discussing an issue with somebody who takes the opposing view to her on a particular issue because of her conviction that such engagement with those who differ from her is pointless.
But what is a debate if not simply the airing of two contradictory opinions in order to allow the listener to clarify their own thinking? Debates can, indeed, be occasionally tiresome and sometimes they produce more heat than light – but the format has endured for thousands of years precisely because when you hear two people arguing on a topic you generally learn more about it in the process, even if by accident.
By eschewing debate and, indeed, democracy itself, Una is effectively arguing that the opinions of the little people should not matter: She knows how to fix the world, and it is too important and urgent to fix it now for piddling little things like trying to take the public with you in what you are doing.
This mode of thinking, to be fair to Una, is not unique to her: It is an attitude that broadly infests the set of people with whom she is most aligned – “we need to do this and not worry about debate” is how, for example, we got the gender recognition act. It is how most climate laws are made. It is, effectively, what taxpayer funded NGOs are for – the state pays for lobbyists to lobby itself to do things that the public may or may not want, but Una’s “we” certainly do.
The problem really is that this approach – objectively appalling as it is – works reasonably well when it is kept quiet. I am not sure it is the best approach for a columnist. It being a free country, Una is entitled to hold her views and to publish them. But if she does not believe in the democratic process, or the rule of the majority, she should probably find another line of work.
As for banning cars? Well, it’s telling that she doesn’t want a debate about that. It’s one she would lose, and she knows it as well as you do.