Events of last week demonstrate the political system works beautifully

THE consensus arising from the departure of George Lee, contributed to in a minor way by the exit of Déirdre de Búrca, is that the political system has failed. Never was a consensus more wrong. The events of the last week demonstrate the political system working beautifully.

It’s a bit like when a job applicant, asked why they left their last post, explains their departure by reference to office politics. As if office politics was a weird symptom of a rotten company. Office politics are a natural, nay, inevitable and necessary expression of the human dynamic at all ages and in all situations. A lovely experiment, a few years ago, examined how different groups of toddlers decide who gets to share a bit of technology. The technology was one of those old-fashioned viewing yokes into which gets fitted a circular card incorporating coloured slides. Each click of the gadget advances a new slide into the viewfinder. The researchers handed one viewer to a group of little girls, another to a group of little boys, and, clipboards in hand, observed what happened.

The little girls had a discussion and came to an agreement: turn and turn about. Each of them would get to see, say, three of the slides before handing on the viewer to the next in line.