Is it undemocratic that a person with fewer votes than another can become Taoiseach

To be fair, the US system has proven itself to be a complete joke. I wouldn’t want to see elements of it introduced here. If you look at something like the appointment of cabinet by the president, just look at how it was abused under Trump.

It also seems to spend an ever increasing amount of time in “shutdowns” locked up and incapable of delivering simple, normal governance. I’m seeing growing parallels with NI politics - where you’ve two sides that are so entrenched an identity war that they can’t cooperate on anything. Compromise positions are a struggle. At least NI has proportional representation and mechanisms that try to make them work together. The US increasingly is just two bunkers shouting abuse at each other while nothing gets done.

If you had the US style appointed cabinet system here you’d end up with Fianna Fáil directly appointing property developers as the minister for housing and all the cronies getting appointed … which is often what happens in the US.

I think the system we have is pretty top notch and there’s nothing to stop a minister or a committee bringing in an expert opinion in a transparent way without appointing them to office. You can also bring in expertise though the Seanad appointments, but that’s almost been used like that, so is a bit of a pointless mechanism. It’s mostly used to rearward party politicians.

There’s always room for improvement and analysis. Where we are weakest is on the functioning of government, which is largely about things like our over centralised administration and exceptionally weak local government. We’re the most centralised country in the EU, even more so than microstates like Luxembourg!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

There's actual research to back this up. We're quite literally the most centralised country in the EU and by a wide margin. The fact that certain countries might have complicated or somewhat dysfunctional local administration doesn't really take away from that fact, nor is it a problem with the concept of decentralisation / subsidiarity. If you look at some of the Scandinavian countries, Finland, The Netherlands, Germany etc local government is done extremely well and serves a purpose. It also tends to be what drives proper city / town development. Irish cities are largely directionless due to the way things are administered. Most people don't know who their local councillors or the Lord Mayor of Dublin or Cork is because they've no power and are perceived as irrelevant, which is a total indictment of Irish local government.

If you look at say Dublin City Council or Cork City Council they've less power than many continental villages and small towns. Things like having no authority over or ability to organise and finance their own transit systems etc is absolutely bizarre by European or North American standards.

Great towns and cities don't happen by accident on the continent. Ours have no powers, no ability to plan and deliver transit networks, no budgets that are independent of national politics and so on. They don't even have the power to collect the bins anymore!

As it stands we've local authorities and various national bodies that are basically just state bodies without much responsibility to anyone. The councils are run by a chief executive in reality with the elected councillors seen more as an advisory service and many of the key services like transit are run by semi-state companies or state agencies like TFI who've no accountability to anyone other than a line minister.