GSOC/Garda crisis - Mindset at the top is worrying

The greatest enemy a besieged city, a disdainful, ring-fenced establishment or a past-his-sell-by-date tyrant face — as the ousted and fugitive Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich will confirm — is time.

As it passes, the encircled, starved population or the autocrat losing power have fewer and fewer options. The inevitable collapse becomes ever more imminent. Conversely, the greatest ally of a people determined to change their society, and how the ideals they wish to live their lives by are made real, is also time.

If those who wish to instigate deep change have the stamina of character needed to persist in the face of a stonewalling status quo, then they and their ideas — reforms, initiatives, rebalancing, social equity, accountability, justice or just a change for the better, call them what you will — more often than not prevail. Those who outlast, just as war horse England did on Saturday at Twickenham, win the day and the future.