Conservatives should be looking at the structure of NGO power and making their own argument for saving democracy from this rigged and falsified civil society.
Charlie Flanagan TD, the longtime Fine Gael representative, has given something of an exit interview to the Irish Times. His father was the notoriously conservative Catholic legislator Oliver J Flanagan, who had many memorable quotations, my favorite being “Let us hope and trust that there are sufficient proud and ignorant people left in this country to stand up to the intellectuals who are out to destroy faith and fatherland.”
Son Charlie was a liberalizer even before his father exited politics. They were on opposite sides of the legal-divorce debate in the 1980s. He voted for all the liberalizing social changes Ireland has experienced the past few years, but he has found himself stopped short.
“The liberal agenda has accelerated in recent years in a way that causes me discomfort,” he says. “It is about euthanasia, a very radical ideological transgender agenda, commercial surrogacy and a move towards liberalised abortion, completely different from that for which I voted five years ago.”
But far more intriguingly, Flanagan talks about the withering of real parliamentary democracy and debate in the face of NGO-led social change. Ireland and other European nations are notable for having the government fund nongovernmental organizations to manage and represent certain problems or constituencies. These organizations then lobby the government directly, and government treats their reports as the deliberations of citizens themselves. It’s a kind of subsidized and hermetic progressive civil society that has been stitched over the real social fabric of the nation. Ireland, lacking the civil society that the government would rather govern, builds a Potemkin one and then governs according to those institutions’ priorities.
“I don’t want to get into specific names,” he replies. “But I have said to colleagues that I would have more influence on Government policy if I was a middle-ranking official with an NGO than I have as a Government backbencher, and I regret that.”
His argument is that the centre ground is losing authority in Irish politics and the space for reasonable discourse has narrowed. He then claims that the long-standing parliamentary approach to politics in Ireland has been upended and manipulated.
“In Leinster House if there is an issue of controversy, an all-party committee is set up. The all-party committee is handpicked. It holds hearings. The hearings are preordained. The hearings are often one-sided. The report can be written before the committee actually sits, with the greatest of respect to all involved, and I’m speaking in general terms,” Flanagan says.
“Then a report is published. The Taoiseach or Tánaiste is asked about it and say a committee has reported and we accept the recommendations. That is the way that legislation is being put forward.”
Exactly, right. As Conor Fitzgerald wrote in Unherd last year, the Irish state spends nearly 8 percent of its budget funding 33,000 NGOs. By comparison, the health service takes up 21 percent of the budget.
Whenever internationalist liberals talk about the “threat” to democracy, they mean something like democratic publics voting for governments that disrupt these cozy liberal fiefdoms. Conservatives should be looking at the structure of NGO power and making their own argument for saving democracy from this rigged and falsified civil society.