Resetting the Republic. How to Build a Better Ireland: an engaging analysis of how we got here, and a vision for the future

Resetting the Republic: How to Build a Better Ireland

Author: Conor Brady

ISBN-13: 9781918763089

Publisher: Full Set

Guideline Price: €22; 320pp

The theme of this book is subversive. The author Conor Brady, a former editor of The Irish Times, says so in the first sentence. The Republic, he believes, needs a reset that goes well beyond any simple change of government. He wants to take down or modify institutions and processes that are no longer fully fit for purpose.

It is written from what Brady claims is perhaps a unique perspective, because the author has observed the functioning of the State both from outside and, to a degree, from the inside.

There are now so many revolving doors accessing and exiting the State apparatus, it is not a unique perspective. But Brady is immersed in the State he sets out to reset. A former chair of the highly influential Top-Level Appointments Committee, (TLAC) where nearly all senior officials must go to be promoted or disappointed, a former commissioner of the Garda Ombudsman, and the son of a garda who joined the force in 1923, he has familial ties as well as deep experience of the State over the century he surveys, and which he now prescribes for.

Written in 22 chapters in four parts, and bookended with a preface and a conclusion, it has the depth required for its context and the plain speaking of good argument. The author holds himself to the standards of clarity and cogency he required of others as an editor.

Reflecting on where we are, he believes there is much that is good about the State, not least its stable democracy. The achievements and change he witnessed are astonishing. In a country where secondary school was once out of reach for most, in 2024 65 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds held a third-level qualification. The Belfast Agreement delivered peace, and a general consensus in Northern Ireland.

On paper at least we have gone from being one of the poorest countries in the EU to being level with the EU average. We are, relative to population, the most successful country in the EU in attracting foreign direct investment. Ireland, he says, in the abstract is rich.

In a memorable putdown, he also writes that Ireland is rich in plans. The detail he provides of those overlapping, contradictory, partially or wholly undelivered plans is chastening. Fundamental change seldom happened because of what Brady calls clientelism.

Ironically, the great Irish tradition of clientelism where politicians delivered supposed favours to individual voters is dead. The recycling of centralised power into autonomous agencies may protect politicians from responsibility for policy implementation, but it puts the intimacy of old-fashioned patronage out of reach.

Brady is ferocious and forensic about how the undertow of our proportional representation, single transferable vote system (PR-STV) pulls down the State. He calls our electoral system a grow house for clientelism. Like our Civil Service, it predates the State and was foisted on Ireland and Malta as a colonial experiment by David Lloyd George. He deserves fuller recognition for his role in shaping modern Ireland as it reaches its fullest consequences over a century later.

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The personal bonds of what Brady calls clientelism, which centred on the exchange of favours, have long dissolved. What survives enhanced is aggressive localism, and special interest. They have found in social media a velocity that, as Brady noted of the fuel protests last April, paralysed the State.

Unmoored now from personal ties to entrenched local politicians, a tipping point has arrived. Fragmenting politics and an ever-faster turnover of elected politicians means that a highly centralised government is less the font for local largesse than the undefended object of predatory, locally based, sectoral power.

The tables have turned, but this book is written from the perspective of the now past analogue era that Brady mastered as an editor and then an ex officio mandarin in the State apparatus. In the new digital context online, everyone is a publisher, and politics is turned inside out.

He is right, however, in identifying Bunreacht na Éireann, in significant part a continuation of the Free State constitution, and the operating framework of the State since 1937, as a cumbersome means of delivering change by referendum only in all instances. Arguably, referendums were overused in recent years, and with the failure of the Family and Care referendums, governments will be more cautious in future. Brady is right to say that other countries have better ways of doing things.

Reflecting on his time in TLAC from 2017 to 2023, one of the most important public bodies most people have never heard of, he asks why, with such accomplished public servants at the controls, do so many public services and bodies perform inadequately?

Few, even among the accomplished themselves, dispute that the very best, as distinct from the reasonably competent, are now less likely to be found at the top of the public service than even in the recent past. A generation after the Celtic Tiger economy began in the 1990s, talented people have other choices. No longer the cream of the crop, there is also a deepening divide between the public service and the public interest.

The constitution, the electoral system, the public service and more need to be reviewed, he believes, and he is probably right

Brady is overly deferential in my opinion to the senior public servants he has passed through the system. He is clear, however, that the system is broken. Over a century after the foundation of the State, the minister, like the king whose powers he once exercised, is still a corporation sole. This is a perpetual office, distinguished from the person of the politician who temporarily holds it, and which embodies the department they lead.

It is the minister, not personally, nor their civil servants personally, but he as a corporation sole and not them at all who exercises all power and thereby enables all to effectively evade personal responsibility. It is magnificent carry-on, in the comic tradition of Yes Minister, and for obvious reasons has never been changed.

The Irish Civil Service that survived the British empire, world war, economic crises and boundless cultural change intact, if full of honest people, is not distinguished by its institutional integrity. It may be true, as the author says, that if systems changed things would be better. It is certainly true that if well-paid public servants stepped up to the plate, things would change.

Brady is clear about systems failure, but less so on the failure of leadership and responsibility that characterises the official system now. The fact is that standards have fallen and every organisation is characterised as much by its people as its rules. Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Complexity, however, multiplies. It is not just that the world is a more complex place; the State has sprouted add-ons like lean-to extensions. Brady brings us on an informative tour through the Oireachtas, the Presidency, the Constitutional Convention, the courts and tribunals.

He quotes former president of the High Court, Justice Nicholas Kearns, saying on his retirement in 2015 that judges should never put themselves in the position of “realising too late, that a particular decision has opened a Pandora’s Box of unintended consequences ... judges should not be excessively overactive or interventionist”. In a small State we have had 34 tribunals of inquiry and 14 commissions of investigation. In 1980 we had seven Oireachtas committees and today there are 28.

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Much good was done by some tribunals, but at an enormous financial cost. Brady’s last point on this is his best, and a recurring theme. More than a year after the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, said we need to strengthen the State’s ability to get to the truth, quickly, efficiently and at less expense of the taxpayer, no plan has been announced.

In this underperforming State new issues arrive, and Brady sets them out. There has been a net inward migration of nearly 900,000 people over three decades and more than 200,000 immigrants have taken Irish citizenship since 2011. Soon an ageing population and a falling birth rate will present new challenges. But he correctly concludes that the Government has no measures in hand to address the State’s demographic challenges or to make it more advantageous for people to have more children.

Climate change, education, reunification and defence receive similarly thoughtful analysis. Since 1960, he says, there have been more than 300 reports to government on a plethora of topics.

This book is now another, and it concludes by calling for a series of reviews. The constitution, the electoral system, the public service and more need to be reviewed, he believes, and he is probably right.

Some, including changing the electoral system, is improbable politics. Revamping the Civil Service as recommended by the Devlin Report published in 1969 is plausible. Systematic change must help, but it is no substitute for personal responsibility and its enforcement.

Fifteen government ministers and 18 secretaries general mean that the State Brady wants to reset is in the hands of 33 people. These are honest, many are competent, some are especially able, others are dunces, but collectively they are less than the sum of their parts.

The subversive thing to do would be to visit responsibility upon them. Some legal but not necessarily constitutional change is required. A change of attitude would go much further, more quickly, than systems change might deliver eventually. It could begin today if those 33 people take responsibility.

Brady’s book confronts us with what afflicts our State. It is a constructive read but not subversive. It doesn’t confront the complicity of the Irish people in the conniving slyness of their own State. Morality will not be legislated for.

Gerard Howlin is a public affairs consultant, an Irish Times columnist and a former senior political adviser.

Further reading

Letters of a Successful TD and its sequel Letters of an Irish Minister of State, by John B Keane, are outstanding comic portrayals of Irish politics in its classic clientelist phase. They portray the rot in a system the structure of which remains intact, but whose application is now transformed.

Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo’s encyclical letter, sets out a vision for humanity in an era of AI. It asks profound questions about how we as human beings can thrive and seeks to answer some of the most profound questions that must be addressed in any reset of the State.

Population Ageing and The Public Finances in Ireland – Changing Demographics (Department of Finance, June 2024) is a salutary guide to the future Ireland must quicky reset for but has made little preparation for. Ireland is expected to have one of the largest proportional increases in its Old Age Dependency Ratio among EU countries by 2050.