An article in The Irish Times this week on Shannon, a town of 10,000 people – the size of Castlebar or Wicklow and badly lacking local amenities – illustrates many of the pathologies affecting government in Ireland. These problems are partly identified in the Government’s response to the report of the Local Democracy Taskforce it set up last year. The failure to meet the infrastructural needs of a growing and more diverse population is exacerbated by the highly centralised way those needs are addressed.

Ireland shares many of these governance problems with the UK. Andy Burnham has spent the first month of his prime ministership setting his domestic agenda and putting devolution of power from London to English regions, mayors and localities firmly on it. He speaks about the need for a written constitution to codify the UK’s intergovernmental relations.

While he has been criticised for double standards by nationalists in Scotland and Northern Ireland for saying referendums on independence and Irish unity are “off-limits” or “off the table”, his decentralising plans for England are seen as progressive but incomplete without greater fiscal and decision-making powers to implement them.

That echoes long-standing critiques of local government reforms in Ireland, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Ireland inherited its centralised state structures from the departing colonial power in 1922 and then reinforced them through the zeal........

© The Irish Times