Locking the stable door after the majority had bolted

“YOU have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

That pithy little sound-bite from slaughter-merchant Oliver Cromwell used to merely just sum up the views of the vast majority of voters – now it speaks for some of the Government’s own TDs.

So, bye-bye, Donegal North East’s finest, Jim McDaid – how well we will remember your contributions to national life.

What a dynamic figure you cut that Dáil sitting day when you announced, er, from your house on the other side of the country, that you would not be taking a solidarity pension cut while still receiving your €100,000 a year TDs’ pay out of “principle”.

But then McDaid was always considered by some colleagues to be a bit of a gloomy, glass-half-empty kind of a guy. Except, of course, for that unfortunate incident when he claimed waiters kept filling his glass full of wine at a horse racing event, resulting in him driving the wrong way down a dual carriageway and ending up with a two-year ban.

Strangely, the former junior transport minister who once lectured the nation on road safety did not consider that a resigning issue, but now he’s gone.

A departure which leaves something of a headache for Government chief whip John Curran, who always looks as if he’s about to faint at the best of times. Curran tried to put a brave face on things, saying: “82 people are committed to support this Government,” without making it quite clear whether he meant 82 people in the entire country, or just in the voting lobby of the Dáil.

Mr Curran went on to insist Brian Cowen had a “stable majority” – though it was quite clear to everybody he was desperately trying to lock the stable door after the majority had bolted.

Still, there’s always the Greens – too weak to risk triggering an election, too meek to make an impact on major policy issues.

The Greens had issued an SOS – Save Our Sandals – message over student fees, but then looked like they were about to swap said footwear for flip-flops and cave in.

The pressure is clearly telling as the party’s education spokesperson Paul ‘Go-Go’ Gogarty once again endeared himself to the country by tweeting “you know something I don’t moron?” to a voter concerned about expected Budget cuts.

And while the bond markets turned the screw from without, an early Budget to follow the release of the fabled, four-year financial plan briefly emerged as a runner from within Leinster House. A four-year plan for a Government that will be lucky to last four more months always seemed strangely ambitious, but Mr Lenihan put his foot down and crushed the Taoiseach’s push for an early Budget – again emphasising who has the whip hand in the power relationship.

And while Mr Cowen desperately clings on to every extra day in office he can as the tides of international economics and domestic opinion smash against his unravelling administration, he not only edges closer to his Waterloo, but to his Ottawa – risking the political earthquake that shook Canada in the 1990s when the governing, dominant Progressive Conservative Party was humiliatingly reduced to just two seats in the national parliament by an electorate hell bent on punishing an arrogant political elite that refused to bow out early.

To quote Cromwell once more, the tumbling Taoiseach’s plea to an electorate long since turned against him could be: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

But nobody is really listening any more, Brian. Time is running out on you – and so are your TDs.