I, along with many others, have made much of the fact that it is 21 years since the Belfast Agreement. That’s almost generation difference, and a lot has changed in that time. One of them being the general assumptions around democracy.

For our benefit Dan O’Brien states the otherwise bleedin’ obvious right out loud:

The Agreement, signed just over 21 years ago, was negotiated at a time of global decline in non-democracies and the emergence of a belief that democracy was inevitable. This was best encapsulated by the ‘End of History’ thesis of political scientist Francis Fukuyama. The Irish version of this at the time was the captured in the phrase “politics works”. The intervening two decades have shown that politics does not always work, in the North, in Bosnia and in the dozens of countries around the world where democratisation processes and democratic institutions have not brought well-functioning democracies.

Politics does work, but not always in the positive ways that are compatible with democracy. Furthermore it is a model of democracy that is is in trouble right across Europe. O’Brien is right to think outside the Northern Irish box.

All across Europe voters are in a flux on scale not seen since the end of the second world war. And electorates are more volatile than ever requiring much more time and effort to spent on engaging, through canvassing, research and grindingly hard policy development.

In many respects the hiatus has done our local parties no good. Taking yourself out of the business for two years only takes the sharpness off your game. One of the obstacles that canvassers in the locals are facing is the idea that even the councils have closed along with Assembly.

Added to the voter volatility issue is the fact that most of our local parties are burdened with a rather quaint idea of what democracy is. In his speech on Sunday Micheál Martin noted we have normalised a mentality which:

…which says that the existence of parliament or government is negotiable. What they don’t seem to understand is that for democrats, a parliament is a place you go to solve problems – not a place you refuse to go unless your problems are sorted in advance.

Also, we take the electoral process far more seriously than examining what sort of politics we are being offered can actually do. Into this vacuum the negatives flow. O’Brien lists them: Brexit, border poll, the DUP role in Westminster, and a new culture war.

Today Martin’s suggestion that marriage equality could be put out to a referendum caused pandamonium on Twitter when he suggested it could be taken out of the political sphere and dealt with publicly with the sort of campaign that won in the Republic and more recently in Australia.

Almost as though we would actually really like our wounds to remain painfully political: as though it were the only way to win votes.

The irony is that already (with the eviction of Saoradh from their offices in Derry) Eamonn McCann is speculating that the shockwaves of Lyra’s tragic and needless death is causing the breakup of the New IRA but that:

…the conditions which have cast thousands of young people beyond the reach of respectable society haven’t gone away.

Quite.

Responsibility for tackling this unsustainable position resiles directly to those elected to the councils, the Assembly and ultimately Westminster. It’s up to the voters (and the media) to stress test all promises of future best behaviour in terms of what they will do, not just what they won’t.

“The human mind is incapable of rest, what it needs is change.”

-Winston Churchill

Photo by Randy Colas is licensed under CC0