Local Government in Ireland

Abstract

There is an old joke that an Irishman can never answer a simple question without delving deeply into history; but it is difficult to understand the present predicament of Irish local government without a rapid survey as to how that predicament has come about. The task is not made easier (or more interesting) in that the story has no dramatic climaxes, just the steady working out of the logic of a set of values, implicit and explicit, in what is largely an intellectual vacuum, in conditions not of dialectic but of drift. These values are the acceptance of a substantial role for government in a highly centralised parliamentary democracy, the tolerance of considerable incompetence in the consequential structures and performance, the growth of bureaucracy, and indifference to the place of local democracy in the modern nation state, itself as in many European countries under pressure both from above and below, without and within. In short, as a perceptive present-day critic has put it, there is no real discussion of the nature of the Irish State. Hence the difficulties this commentator has in objectively addressing the general questions with which this book is concerned.