Elections, Politics and a Vision for the Future of Ireland

Great leaders are characterised by this trait: they have a vision of how the world could be. Through this vision people are inspired to follow them, and through it their followers get a glimpse into the future.

A real leader knows the aspirations of his people – often more clearly than the people themselves know them. He knows how to express them in words that all can understand. He shares their hopes and fears, their joys and sorrows.

True statesmen never lack this quality.

Sadly such statesmanship is absent from Irish politics. Promises there are aplenty. But no vision!

To be fair to Irish politicians, this problem is not exclusively our own. It is universal.

In fact, it is an inherent weakness in democracy that the horizons within the political system rarely stretch beyond the next election. And nobody seems to know how to change this.

But why are statesmanship and vision lacking?

Do our political parties consider vision and idealism to be extravagant and useless indulgences?

Are they afraid of being labelled visionaries, as if that were synonymous with delusional star gazers?

Or are they just incapable of elaborating an ideal?

St. Paul was a man
with a vision - to convert
the gentiles to Christ.

Couldn’t they strive, for example, for a society in which people have the time and freedom to develop their natural God-given talents; a society in which, to the maximum degree compatible with public order and the common good, individuals, families, communities and regions would enjoy autonomy to look after their own affairs?

Couldn’t they envision the role of government as one of facilitating the life, growth and aspirations of the people, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity?

In so far as our politicians appear to have any vision, it is the opposite of the above and could be expressed thus: “We cannot trust these ignorant and dishonest people to be responsible for themselves or their neighbours. That is why they need smart people like us to create a society in which every little thing they do is regulated and controlled.”

At least they are smart enough not to put it like this in the approach to an election. Instead they hide such a vision under mountains of statistics, percentages and figures, as if the only function of government was to run the economy. But the underlying vision is still implicit in their thinking.

Either way the vision would have legislative consequences. In the first case it would be to limit the involvement of government in the lives of people to what is strictly necessary. In the second case it would be to continue to multiply laws, regulations and controls until the people are asphyxiated by the burden.

But maybe our political elite really does believe in the Marxist idea that a country is nothing more than an economy, and that each human being is no more than a cog in this great machine – thus the focus on numbers, percentages and rates.

This idea certainly doesn’t appeal to the majority of citizens. We think of ourselves as more than mere cogs with a utility function – even if our government doesn’t.

The vision, if any, that emerges from election propaganda, it is a consequence of economic policies, and not a driver of them.

That some want to get rid of USC or reduce waiting times in hospitals is great, and might even provide us with some slight hint of their ideals. But wouldn’t it be simpler to tell us what, in their minds, the future holds? From that we could deduce all their policies. They wouldn’t even need a manifesto.

Policies should follow vision; not the other way around.

The world we aspire to live in should guide our actions and our policies. What is the use of economic or social policies if we don’t know to what end they will lead us?

As man is more than a mere blob of flesh, any vision that guides his life needs to encompass more than the economy; more than just material things.

One thing that makes it so difficult for politicians to develop a vision that goes beyond the material is that their mindset is so materialist. The world they live in is too.

A vision should cover all aspects of life – the intangible ones, the imponderables, and the spiritual, as well as the material. Politicians are not accustomed to think on this level, and so they generally lack 

any real vision for the future.

The human soul needs more than monetary benefits. It needs hope. It needs sociability. It needs freedom. It needs to be able to raise itself up above the banal things of this earth.

These are messy concepts for government to have to deal with, at least compared to tax rates, public expenditures and hospital queues, all of which are quantifiable in numbers and times.

In his poem, The Fool, Padraic Pearse after referring to “a dream that was dreamed in the heart, and that only the heart could hold” goes on to ask: “What if the dream come true? And if millions unborn shall dwell in the house that I shaped in my heart, the noble house of my thought?”

We shall never get to live in the noble house of the thought of the current political leadership of Ireland – because there isn’t one!