Empowering the People

national | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Monday November 15, 2004 16:14 by Justin Moran - Sinn Fein (Personal Capacity)

An unpublished feature article submitted to An Phoblacht dealing with the need to expand the democratic process in the 26 Counties in order to allow people to take ownership of pushing political change.

The Constitution of the Irish Free State is generally, and rightly, not seen as a radical document by republicans. Any document that vests the executive authority of the State in the hands of the British monarch is unlikely to be viewed by republicans as a revolutionary blueprint.

But one section of the Free State Constitution was unique in an Irish context for its potential, quickly stifled by Cumann na nGaedheal, for the people to have real power in Ireland.

Article 48 of the Constitution stated that, “The Oireachtas may provide for the initiation by the people of proposals for laws or constitutional amendments.” It went on to say that the if the Oireachtas failed to introduce the legislation necessary for this the people could petition to force them to do.

As designed in the Free State Constitution a petition required 75,000 signatures, of whom not more than 15,000 could be from any one constituency.

In 1928 Fianna Fáil attempted to use Article 48 by compiling a petition calling for a referendum to first oblige the Government to legislate for the setting up of the structures necessary to hold such referenda, and secondly to hold such a vote to abolish the Oath of Allegiance.

Despite having campaigned on a platform of protecting their own Constitution and though the requisite number of signatures was obtained the Free State Government decided this section of it was undesirable and unworkable.

Cumann na nGaedheal Ministers described the notion that the people could initiate constitutional or legislative changes as ‘undesirable and dangerous’. They further claimed that if the country debated a referendum to remove the Oath it would lead to a resumption of the Civil War. Free State Minister Ernest Blythe also decried the proposition saying that such a referendum could cost as much as £80,000 and was a waste of money.

The Cosgrave Government then deleted Article 48 of the Constitution as the Oireachtas was empowered to do at the time without the need to hold a referendum.

In truth, the Free State government, having committed itself to the Treaty and the Oath was running scared of the people and of the notion of direct democracy. In this it was not alone. Governments around the world have vested in them enormous powers crossing economic, military, social, moral and religious boundaries. The political establishments are always reluctant to allow the people a greater say in how the country is run.

Examples of this can be seen in the way attempts to expand the right to vote to include women and working class people were consistently resisted. The extension of the right to vote has always been resisted by those people who have a vested interest in the maintenance of the status quo.

But once the right to vote is obtained, the political establishment then decides when the vote takes place, on what issues, who can be a candidate and who can put a proposal forward. Representative democracy as it exists in Ireland is inherently disempowering.

Every five years or so the people are consulted as to their opinion as to which party they prefer to implement policy for them. But the people have no power to initiate change. We are allowed to vote on and decide on questions and issues put to us, but have no say as to which questions, which issues and which motions we vote on.

Rather we must wait for elections held on a date chosen by the Government and debates framed by the media and political establishment elites and their priorities.

This encourages passivity, an attitude that the only role the people are to play in politics is through an occasional exercise of their right to vote. Outside of this, the people are disconnected from the formulation and implementation of political decisionmaking and their views can be safely ignored if there is no election on the horizon.

A key problem for the elites in devolving such powers to the people is that they might use them. Sinn Féin has consistently campaigned for amendments to the 1937 Constitution including enshrining neutrality in the Constitution and a right to housing. The current political system precludes any of these proposals going to the people without a majority in the Dáil, as the defeat of Bills introduced by Sinn Féin in Leinster House proves. Yet both of these proposals could command widespread support among the Irish people and the commitment to Irish neutrality expressed in numerous opinion polls could be given real expression if such a referendum could be put forward.

Giving people the right to set laws or amend the Constitution as they wish reduces the power of the middlemen and women in Leinster House. It allows the electorate to attempt to set their own agenda and resist the one dictated to them by elected representatives and business and media interests. In effect, it gives the people the power to bypass the Government when they feel the Government is not representing their best interest. Even the threat of such a referendum could be enough to alter Government policy.

One such recent notable victory was achieved in Uruguay. As recently reported in An Phoblacht the people of Uruguay voted to support a constitutional amendment, the first of its kind in the world, to prevent water privatisation. What was not reported was that this referendum was the result of a petition organised by unions and civic society. Under the Uruguayan Constitution the signatures of 10% of the electorate were enough to trigger such a referendum and campaigners worked for over a year to get the necessary million signatures.

The campaign was driven by a broad coalition of NGOs, community activists and trade unions, especially the FFOSE, the Uruguayan union for workers in the water sector. The campaign was a response to repeated attempts by the IMF and the World Bank to open water services for privatisation in South America, a proposal that has been met forcefully in several other Latin American countries including Bolivia, Colombia and Brazil.

The petition process has also been used elsewhere by progressive forces. Unions is Switzerland used this method in 2003 to block the sale of their public energy companies. Uruguayans had previously used it to stop the privatisation of their oil industry. In the West it was used in Hamburg, Germany, again to protect public water and in New Orleans, in the US, to oblige the State government to hold a referendum in advance of any attempt to privatise water supply.

It is hardly surprising that the response to the fundamentally undemocratic neo-liberal capitalist agenda has been one rooted in democratic ownership by the people of the legislative process.

In Ireland there has been a good deal of recent media attention on the process for nominating candidates for the Presidency with critics suggesting that requiring either the backing of 20 members of the Oireachtas or four local authorities makes it too difficult to obtain the nomination and realistically, leaves it in the hands of the major political parties.

As a response to this the All-Party Committee on the Constitution recommended a number of years ago that people be permitted to obtain nominations through a petition process if they obtain a specified number of signatures. Arguably this establishes a precedent worth further exploration. If the major parties admit the right of the people to petition for Presidential candidates, surely the logical progression of this is to admit the right of people to petition for legislative of constitutional reform.

The United States has perhaps the most developed procedures for initiatives and referendums at state level, though efforts to put similar procedures in place at a national level have consistently failed.

The requirements vary from state to state but generally a proportion of the electorate, or of the number of voters at the last election, ranging from 5% to 20% is required to sign a petition calling for a constitutional referendum or a change in State law over a period of 90 – 180 days depending on the state. Reformers in Ireland could examine the procedures existing, and used quite extensively, in the US to serve as the basis for practical and proven mechanisms in Ireland.

Of the almost 30 European countries which adopted new constitutions since 1989, only three did not include instruments of direct democracy such as the right to petition for referenda. Attempts to introduce such rights have also recently been made in Germany and while they failed at a national level due to the entrenched opposition of the political elites, reformers are having increasing success at a state and local government level.

Sinn Féin should be at the forefront of campaigning to empower the people, supporting their right to be initiators of change and to be at the forefront of political struggle. Moving decisionmaking power away from the political establishment and giving the people the right to push change themselves would be a revolutionary change in the Irish system, one of the most conservative and closed systems to popular participation in Europe.

Amending the Constitution of the state to allow the people to petition for constitutional amendments, or perhaps even changes in the law, is neither far-fetched, nor extreme, but part of a growing international move towards more open and participative forms of direct democracy. Many of the other campaigns for constitutional reform favoured by progressive forces could be given a new lease of life if such constitutional change was brought about. And regardless of whether progressives favoured every such proposal, more power would be shifted to rest with the people, surely a proposal difficult for anyone describing themselves as republican to argue against.