Stephen Donnelly: Nearly gets it right

Speaking on radio over the weekend independent TD Stephen Donnelly delivered an almost perfect analysis of Ireland 2012.

I say ‘almost’ because, with his final sentence, Donnelly demonstrated that he doesn’t really understand the reality of Ireland 2012.

The Oireachtas does not work, it’s a joke, it’s a farce. It’s a pretence of parliamentary democracy, this country is run by the Cabinet.

Fianna Fail became institutionally corrupt and that corruption spread right through the country. At the same time the civil service shut themselves off from internal oversight and from parliamentary oversight.

And so when the Tsunami came the country had become so unstable, so badly governed that we fell off a cliff. At the heart of it is institutional self-interest, weak politics because we kept voting along tribal grounds

Now that’s all gone.

It’s all gone…all the corruption is gone, all is reformed, democracy has returned…we don’t vote along tribal grounds anymore…Where…When…Who?

Feck, I must have blinked at some point.