The Dáil resumes - Regulation must be part of recovery

AS our political representatives return to Leinster House after their Christmas break today, their attention will focus on our economic crisis.

Their primary objectives will be to stabilise the economy, sustain as many jobs as possible and to try to do what can be done to get to grips with our banking crisis. Given frightening job losses, collapsing tax revenues, dismal international assessments of our economy and our management of it and a workforce divided along the public/private fault-line, those concerns are pressing.

Parliamentarians must, however, consider another question. They should ask themselves if our political system, through their actions, is robust and imaginative enough to take the decisions needed to secure our future. They should ask themselves if it has the capacity to constrain powerful forces — domestic or international — when the behaviour of those institutions threatens the wellbeing of so many workers, families and businesses. They should ask themselves if it has the capacity to police the institutions we all depend on to lubricate the enterprises that keep bread on all of our tables.