For the last twenty years, Social Partnership has been at the fore of Ireland’s economic and social policy-making process, but during the last year, it seems to have quietly died. Where once Government Buildings hosted vast private meetings of the great and powerful, in 2009, Partnership collapsed and union leaders, employers, civic and lobby groups rushed to the media and attempted to force policy through the airwaves. It’s not working.

On 24th June 2009, an Irish Times poll reported that 67% of people believed that “the era of Social Partnership is coming to an end.” There had been no formal plenary sessions of the Partners and there had been some minor industrial unrest amongst electricians and dock workers. With the Exchequer receipts in freefall as the property market collapsed, unemployment rose and commercial activity halted, the issue for Partnership has changed from ensuring the equitable allocation of resources, through to managing the orderly decline in public spending and increasing taxation.

Policy-making by consensus has been replaced since mid-2009 by policy-making through combative soundbite. This is fine if your aim is to make the headlines on Morning Ireland, but less useful if you’re trying to shape the national policy agenda. While Partnership has been credited for Ireland’s peaceful industrial relations environment and for laying the environment for economic growth, the same process seems to have proven itself incapable of coping with the downturn. The problem seems to be that as new Partners were welcomed into the policy-making process, and the range of policy areas under its remit expanded, Partnership lost its focus. During the good times, Partnership became a mechanism for sharing wealth rather than a process for seeking solutions.

In 2009, The McCarthy Report recommended massive cuts to the number of public sector workers and cuts in social welfare receipts. As Prof Bill Roach of UCD School of Business noted in an Irish Independent article entitled “Social Partnership faces its greatest challenge in eventful 22-year history” previous cuts in public service numbers were offset against small increases in wages and other “sweeteners” which allowed agreement between unions, Government and employers. However, the 2009 cuts, set as they were in the middle of a recession did not offer any such sweeteners and this made negotiations very difficult and threatened to bring any negotiations to a halt.

During what we now think of as the Celtic Tiger period of Ireland’s economic development, the task for Partnership was to distribute the winnings from economic growth as fairly as possible, while ensuring that social advancement also kept pace. Demands from community and voluntary groups were largely met thanks to the Budget surplus, and union and employer demands were met with “sweeteners” (ie cash). In July, the Sunday Tribune noted that during Bertie Ahern’s period as Taoiseach consensus could easily be reached amongst the Partners by ensuring each of them received something in the final deal: “Ahern’s way of doing business…as he fixed problems and won favours with interest groups such as the social partners was by throwing money at them.” Brian Cowen, naturally less of a fan of Partnership than Ahearn, has had no such luck.

The Partnership process - at its most simple – has been a search for consensus. First agree on what the problem is, then agree the solution. The agreement on what to do to solve problems needed the endorsement of all participants across all sectors, and during the good times, it was forthcoming. The longer-term consequence was that the process tended to erode radicalism at a point in history where radicalism was needed. In a consensus-forming process, radical solutions become watered down as controversial conclusions are avoided, difficult solutions abandoned in favour of easier answers and the finger of blame kept hidden. As the Irish Independent noted in an editorial in June 2009 entitled “Social partnership must head to the scrapheap:”

We do not need political spin, manufactured victories or bureaucratic triumphs: we need clear-headed leadership that is prepared to identify the real problems and then have the courage to deal with them. Social partnership, a bureaucratic construct designed for a different time, is part of the problem, not part of the solution (Irish Independent, 21 June 2009).

As the number of organisations involved in Partnership increased and the economy declined, so the search for consensus became more challenging. Arguably the solutions created through Partnership became less convincing. If the Partners cannot agree where the problem lies (which would necessitate some finger pointing at those sitting around the table) then it’s unlikely they can agree what the solution is and even less likely that they can agree where the cuts should be made. So Government has just cut them out of the picture.

The solution to Ireland’s fiscal crisis is unlikely to be one which all Social Partners – unions, employers, government, community and voluntary groups - can endorse, requiring as it will, that some hard-won concessions are removed and public projects shelved. Because Social Partnership groups will never agree in public to endorsing reform against the wishes of their members, the soundbite media-led policy-making process will quickly supplant deliberative, participative Social Partnership. As four firms a day go out of business and tax incomes collapse, this is a moment for the consensus-forming model of policy-making to be supplemented with genuinely radical solutions and ideas for policy.

There is the potential, in the absence of any sweeteners and in the increasingly polarised view of grassroots members of the Social Partnership organisations, for a return to quid pro quo zero-sum negotiations. This would exclude many of the newer social policy members of Partnership and would mean a return to a smaller economic policy-based form of simple bargaining. Ireland’s problems are too confusing for such a simplistic form of policy-making.

Radical solutions proposed by economists, think-tanks and outside organisations have been doing the rounds at academic and business conferences and online. Indeed, the volume of proposals has increased during the recession and as a result of normal policy-making process falling apart. Now that the consensus-building model of policy-making isn’t working, and the doors of Government Buildings seem to be shut to old-style Social Partnership, it’s time to take serious consideration to the range of ideas which are floating outside Government Buildings. Let the baton be passed from the old vested interests, to new more radical experts who are currently shouting in the darkness.