“Hans Joachim Fuchtel was amazed to find out that while he gets paid €92,000 to represent 280,000 people in Germany, our TDs get more than €100,000 each to represent 25,000 people, plus far more generous expenses.”
Fuchtel would also be amazed at the low quality political leadership that we suffer at such high cost.
There is a lot of talk of late about leadership and the lack of it in in politics. Leadership is a difficult thing to define and different types of leadership are needed in different circumstances – in war, on the sports field, in business and of course in politics.
But we elect people in politics not only to lead but primarily to rule. While leadership is important – and it is best done in the political arena by example – our elected rulers have in the main failed us. The “vocation” of politics has become infested with people whose only expertise seems to be the ability to have themselves elected and RE-ELECTED. They have also gathered about them camp followers who largely benefit from the decisions made and of course who contribute to the coffers of the political party in power – a perpetuating cycle. These parasites – and it is the only word suitable to describe their effect on the body politic – exercise their craft without any consideration for the good of the people AS A WHOLE. Rather they pander to the base greed which is just below the surface in most of us and give no thought to wise rule, which at times means doing unpopular things. It may be facile to compare our elected rulers to parents but it used be said of old when applying sanctions “spare the rod and spoil the child” or to put it in more PC speech “its for your own good”.
And that is precisely what has happened over the past ten years or so. In a runaway economic situation our craven rulers were terrified to do anything to rein things in for fear they would not be re-elected. Thus what we get is a political class who occupy the reins of power decade after decade and becoming so insulated from the lives of those who elect them that their world becomes a parallel one to the “real” one. We need radical reform. We need to elect real experts in finance, health, management, engineering etc. Government has become too complicated and technical to be run by a bunch of amateurs. We need people who can talk to civil servant mandarins in their terms and ORDER then to carry out their instructions. Above all we need the utmost transparency and accountability in decision making and a true democratic government which is not to be as one cynic put it “of the people, by the people, and to hell with the people”