A moral compass for politics

Drumpot

I have had this discussion with friends before but am still undecided as to the feasibility of the following idea.

One major problem in politics is accountability (or lack of) and the complete immoral/unethical positions or actions of our politicians. I appreciate that you would want to be a billionaire philanthropist to do this on your own, but what's to stop a group of like minded individuals in trying to raise awareness or shine the light on the questionable actions of our politicians ?

Please bare with me on this. I'm talking about a credible trustworthy source, whose only agenda is to let people know exactly what politicians say and promise versus what they actually do. Critically analyse decisions they make to try and expose parish pump politics. Try and build up a fair and reasonable grading system on a national level.

I will give you a small example. A local councellor zoned land On a flood plain for building against advice from the county councel planning authority and opw. They were quoted as saying they thought the reasons givin for not zoning the land (big concerns about flooding) were ridiculous. The houses built and estate floods annually. Why can't there be a source website that makes it easy to find this information? This is an actual example because its my estate and I found this information from another poster on boards. I communicated this information to the media and its shamed the councellor and it might get my estate fixed and that councellor into trouble. If that information was easier to find it would of been alot harder for that politician to disguise their questionable reasons for zoning building where my estate is.


I appreciate this is a very difficult concept in that you would have individuals trying to corrupt it but it seems like its very difficult for an individual to change the culture of politics from within. They are forced to look out for themselves and would get isolated if they tried to do the right thing at the expense of popularity.

I personally believe that the root cause is the electorate and that education is the first step of changing how people vote. Of course the ignorant defence of the quinns says it all about how people will stupidly follow chancers, but we need to start somewhere and try something differant.

I'm not saying that this idea would work, I just don't think anythings going to change if we keep going down the same failed directions that have caused us so much!