Burton’s cheap criticisms of bank guarantee have added up for her

I’VE SPENT a day reading back over Joan Burton’s speeches and I feel like Ryan Tubridy, when he begged impressionist Mario Rosenstock to stop imitating Burton: "I don’t think I can take too much more of her."

It’s not the voice. It’s the blatancy of her populism. Throughout the financial crisis, she kept up, as finance spokesperson for the Labour Party, a simplistic narrative borrowed from a fairy story.

The characters were crudely drawn. The baddies were the bankers, the bond-holders, the developers and Fianna Fáil, and some, or all of them, were sailing away on a yacht together.