Delivering reform - The courage to embrace real change

TAOISEACH Enda Kenny’s Government was elected with a stronger mandate for reform than any of its predecessors and though no one expected anything much to change overnight the pace of change, or more accurately the lack of it, is becoming dispiriting.

It is hard not to think — yet again — that the innate, marrow-deep conservatism of our public life is a real barrier to the kind of reform urgently needed to rescue, reshape and rebuild this society.

This culture of self-serving stasis manifests itself in so many, almost uniquely Irish ways, that it is far, far easier to talk about reform than it is to deliver it. We pretend that opposition to property taxes and water charges, an official veto on redundancies or pay cuts in our public service, the unquestioning expectation that politicians act as messengers rather than legislators and a community-wide sense of entitlement unmatched by any real commitment to social responsibility characterise a modern European democracy.