‘Politicians can be terrorised for half a dozen votes’: Conor Brady’s plan to reset Ireland

“I never saw a bad candidate,” says Conor Brady. “Really bright people. Great public service values. Hard-working. Full of integrity.” For several years Brady sat on, and eventually chaired, the Top Level Appointments Committee (TLAC), the body that interviews the men and women who want to run Government departments. The experience left him with a question he couldn’t shake. “Why is it, with such gifted, talented, good people at the levers of power, that so many things don’t work?”

This is not a new question. Diagnosing what ails the State, and prescribing the cure, has been a thriving cottage industry for decades. The trade tends to boom during a crisis, as the flood of manifestos and reform blueprints after the crash showed. But it never really goes quiet. Even in the good times, a bassline of unease is always audible despite the growth figures and budget surpluses. Why does it take so long to fix glaring problems? Where is the accountability? Where is the vision?

Right now that bassline is unusually loud. Ireland finds itself in the odd position of being awash with money and deeply anxious about what comes next. Corporation tax keeps pouring in from a handful of American multinationals, while housing, health and infrastructure refuse to improve at anything like the pace the funds might suggest. A darkening international landscape makes the whole arrangement look rickety and fragile.

Brady’s new book, Resetting the Republic, is the latest attempt to work out what is to be done. Its author is still often introduced as a former editor of The Irish Times, even though he left the paper 24 years ago. Since then he has been one of the three founding members of the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission, chaired the British-Irish Association, sat briefly on the Commission on the Future of Policing and, most recently, chaired TLAC. He’s been a newspaper columnist and a digital entrepreneur and now chairs the board of regional broadcaster Midlands 103. He has also written two histories of the Garda, a memoir of his Irish Times years and four detective novels set in Victorian Dublin.

When we meet in a Dublin hotel, Brady describes the new book as the product of an unusual vantage point. “I felt I’d seen the State from both sides,” he says. He was a journalist for 30 years, 22 of them in editing roles, before two decades inside the system.

Can the editor of The Irish Times really claim to have been an outsider? Brady laughs. “The last man who asked me that was PJ Mara,” he says, citing the former government press secretary who died in 2016. Journalist Vincent Browne, he recalls, used to make the same point more bluntly, casting himself as the dog barking at the gate and Brady as the poodle inside. “Looking back now, I wish I was as wise then as I am now, having gone around the other side to see what was going on.”

The book took nearly three years. Brady conducted more than 50 interviews and worked through about 150 White Papers, Green Papers and reports of commissions and committees. Most of the people who helped him preferred not to be named, which he regards as telling in itself about the instinct for self-preservation in public life. “I don’t want to be dogmatic about it,” he says. “What I want to do is start a debate.”

That debate has three main strands. The first is the electoral system. One chapter title calls the proportional representation-single transferable vote (PR-STV) “a grow house for clientelism”. Brady argues that multi-seat constituencies, where party colleagues compete for the same votes, leave TDs at the mercy of tiny blocs of voters and turn them into fixers rather than legislators. He cites Dick Spring, the former Labour leader who held his Kerry North seat by four votes in 1987. “Politicians can be terrorised for half a dozen votes.”

[ Conor Brady: back on the crime beatOpens in new window ]

He offers an example close to his home in east Galway. When a road flooded and children couldn’t cycle to school, nobody thought of ringing the county engineer. “It was, ‘We’ll get Fianna Fáil on it. We’ll get Fine Gael. We’ll get Sinn Féin on it.’”

Fianna Fáil twice tried to replace PR-STV with first past the post voting, in 1959 and 1968, and Brady thinks voters were right to refuse both times. The problem, he says, is that they were offered a false choice. He favours a list system along German lines, which keeps a constituency link but lets a TD who falls out of favour locally return on the party list. Isn’t that a hard sell, I suggest, at a time when any reform will be portrayed as taking power away from voters and giving it to elites? He accepts it would be difficult. Those who have mastered a system are rarely keen to change it.

The second strand is accountability in the public service, and here Brady goes back to the foundation of the State. The Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924 made every act of a civil servant, in law, the act of the minister. It was devised, he says, by a government under siege, a group of young men newly installed in power with, in Kevin O’Higgins’s phrase, wild men screaming through the keyhole. A century later the effect is that nobody below the minister is answerable for anything.

He recalls David Moloney, secretary general of the Department of Public Expenditure, telling an Oireachtas committee in 2022 that there was no clear answer to where accountability lay. “If the secretary general of the Department of Public Expenditure doesn’t know where accountability lies, where are we?” Brady wants the Act replaced with something closer to the Swedish model, where civil servants enjoy security but can be removed for failing to deliver.

The third strand is the courts. Since the 1960s, he argues, politicians have been happy to let judges settle questions they were afraid to touch, from contraception to planning. He quotes a friend, a former Supreme Court judge. “Why should I be the man who is asked to judge whether a farmer in Roscommon is entitled to put up a gate on to the public roadway?”

Beyond those three, the book ranges across health, housing, migration, the media, the multinationals, foreign policy and what Brady regards as the State’s neglect of defence, which he calls “a cowardly abandonment of responsibility”.

Reading the book, I tell him, I was struck that almost every problem he describes has already been identified in some report or other, often more than once. The Devlin report of 1969 proposed separating policy from administration. The Kenny report of 1973 proposed controlling the price of building land. Both were shelved. Isn’t that a cause for despair? He prefers to call it realism. The State has never lacked plans. Decisive action is another matter.

There is a certain form of Irish negative exceptionalism, I suggest, that takes a perverse pleasure in how bad we are at things. One can make a counterargument that the current difficulties are due as much to rapid economic growth and having to compensate for decades of underinvestment in infrastructure and services. Brady points out that the book also sets out at length what Ireland does well. Its opening chapter runs through achievements from peacekeeping to life expectancy to the arts.

But he says that in the public sector there is now “a cultural acceptance that targets will not be met, timelines will not be met, budgets will be overrun”. He describes the annual ritual in which a department asks for X, the Department of Public Expenditure offers X minus Y, and everybody knows the department will be back before the year is out for the rest. “It’s madness.”

What about deeper cultural reasons? Brady agrees that the postcolonial experience plays a part, particularly in clientelism. It goes back, he says, to O’Connell and the rising Catholic middle class of the 19th century, for whom the state was something to be got around rather than trusted.

There is another theory sometimes offered, that the class which took power after independence came through Catholic schools that prized the professions over enterprise. He doesn’t dispute it. At a recent reunion for his own boarding school, he says, the room was nearly all doctors, wealthy farmers and a few accountants. “No business people.”

And what about the “cui bono?” argument, that the current arrangements suit a great many comfortable people very well? Ireland taxes income heavily and wealth lightly, and much of the State’s effort goes on compensating for inequality rather than addressing its causes.

Brady’s answer is that the bodies meant to hold the system to account have been deliberately starved. He served on GSOC and says it never had enough people, money or legal powers. The same is true, he argues, of Tusla and of the Road Safety Authority, which has “a wonderful mission statement” and “nicely designed logos” but neither the staff nor the powers required. “It’s a conscious policy.”

He sees the treatment of Travellers as the starkest case, less a matter of money than of deep prejudice among the settled community, which shows up in councils failing to spend the funds they are given for Traveller accommodation.

For most of our conversation Brady is measured. The one time real anger comes through is when he talks about the environment. “I think what we’re doing to the environment is shocking beyond words,” he says. Rivers and lakes are being poisoned and wildlife decimated, largely by intensive agriculture, and he believes no government will stand up to the farm lobby.

The fines handed down in court, he says, are derisory. Somebody told him that the penalty imposed on one large co-op “wouldn’t pay for the pre-dinner drinks at the staff Christmas party”. If Ireland doesn’t get serious, he warns, it risks its tourism, its food industry and its own people’s health.

Is he optimistic? He says he has to be. Ireland, he argues, has shown before that it can grasp a vision, in the struggle for independence, in the peace process and even in 2020, when Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael finally went into government together. Perhaps, he says, people will come to the point of saying there are better ways of doing things.

The book is also critical of the failure to take seriously the possibility of a united Ireland and the challenge that would pose. If any single moment could force the kind of reset he wants, I suggest, it might be unification, which would oblige the State to decide what kind of country it really wants to be. “I think you’re right,” he says. “It would be a catalytic event.”

Resetting the Republic: How to Build a Better Ireland is published by Full Set