Suchergebnisse

In the last paragraph of his most recent work (Chubb 1975) the doyen of Irish political scientists modifies only slightly a judgement originally advanced in 1964. At that time, prompted by Professor Brian Chapman's sharp observation of British government published the previous year, Professor Basil Chubb and David Thornley (1964) cast a cold eye over the operation of democratic processes in Ireland. Irish Government Observed offered one of the earliest critical surveys of the recruitment, role and performance of the Dail deputy, the insufficiencies of Oireachtas procedures and facilities, the inadequacies of the bureaucracy and political parties in presenting real policy choices. It says much both for Chubb's perspicacity and for the inertia of Irish political life that, over a decade later, so, many of the criticisms remain valid.

As the Eighteenth Dail's life drew to a close, a major change in Irish political life was anticipated. The expectations were not confined to the national mass media, although the subsequent results tempted some politicians to suggest that the closed world of television, radio and national press had misread the mood of the nation. At the local level too, throughout the campaign, newspapers spoke of the 'Strong Desire for Change'1 and saw the contest as the promise of 'one of the great watersheds in Irish political history.'

In the politics of the Irish state only three parties have been able to maintain substantial electoral support for more than a decade. Two - Fianna Fail and Fine Gael - stem from the same Sinn Fein party which in the years immediately after 1916 became the vehicle of the Irish independence movement. Their original leaders re-established independent Irish parliamentary institutions in the first Dail of 1919.1 Their participation and disagreement in the subsequent debate on the Anglo-Irish Treaty determined the basic cleavage in the Irish political party system. These leaders and the parties they founded continued to dominate Irish politics for the next fifty years; they were the poles around which two large groupings of opinions, interest and loyalties clustered. The third, the Labour Party, has always played a subsidiary role; its activities, in Professor Chubb's phrase, have 'never seriously impaired the bi-polarism of Irish politics.'