I attended a lecture by an Irish psephologist which covered the neglect of national issues in Irish politics. His view was that the cause of this "chronic local

I attended a lecture by an Irish psephologist which covered the neglect of national issues in Irish politics. His view was that the cause of this "chronic localism" was a lack of effective local democracy. (I'd like to see this dealt with, because in some important respects the rest of the world has something to learn from the Irish constitution. Only Austria, Germany and Switzerland have more institutionalised checks on executive power, and all three use forms of proportional representation that I consider inferior to Ireland's.)