Enough is enough: it’s time for us to take back our country

WE, the plain (in some cases very plain) people of Ireland have reached a crossroads in our history.

Our tiger is dead. The people who credit themselves with our fast-evaporating economic miracle are still at the helm, but showing themselves as incapable of managing a crisis as they were at wisely investing the fruits of the boom.

Our fingers are worn raw with dialling Joe Duffy to weep about our pension levies and worthless investment properties.

Last night, we sat down en mass with pencils and the backs of envelopes to work out our own budgets in the time-honoured fashion we’ve learned from our leaders. We railed, we moaned. We rang Pat Kenny to tell the minister our personal woes.

Enough, already.

We voted for these people. Again and again. In 2007, when it was becoming clear that “soft landing” was the economic equivalent of “friendly fire”, we gave them another chance.

We kicked the PDs to the kerb, so there is some hope for us, but we invited the “natural party of government” back for a third go round. Because they’d been doing such a good job of reforming the health system and managing the property boom in the best interests of the nation…

We let them back in. We invited them back in.

They continued to behave in the manner they always have, with their winning combination of arrogance and incompetence.

And we’re surprised?

So now, we have a country: where we pay a health levy, private health insurance premiums and cash-up-front every time we visit a medical practitioner — payment in triplicate for a health service whose only claim to equality is that it provides overpriced, inadequate healthcare to public and private patients alike; where TDs who were once ministers get to draw their ministerial pensions while still sitting in the Dáil; where EU commissioners and heads of international financial institutions who were once TDs get to draw their pension while working on their more lucrative new careers; where senators are paid handsomely for a job that taxes them so little that the majority of them retain parallel full-time careers; where the Minister for Finance can, without apparent shame, blame the opposition for the fall in Irish banks’ share prices that followed his own inadequately thought-through “plan” to cleanse the banks of their bad debts.

These are just three examples of the entrenched incompetence with which we are dealing.

It’s time we all stopped frowning at the figures on the back of our envelopes, and whinging about how much money they’ve taken from our pockets.

We gave these people carte blanche to run the country for the last 12 years, and now it’s time we cried halt.

We need to take the country back. On Easter Monday, lunchtime, we should have a nice relaxed taking to the streets of Cork, Limerick, Galway, Dublin to show our political class that they do not have a divine right to rule stemming from the fact that their fathers and grandfathers ruled before them, but that their mandate comes from the people and we have decided to take it back.

Otherwise, we’re stuck with the government we deserve.

Ellen Dillon

Ardpatrick

Co Limerick