We, the voters, are just as much to blame for the rot at the top

How do we restore trust in and credibility to our institutions, asks Gerard Howlin?

THIS is the exact question also exercising the MacGill Summer School this week. It addresses a need and opens up a danger. The need, which I believe in, to reform our institutions, also continues perhaps dangerously the rhetoric, which our State is founded on. If only we could be free, of an alien apparatus, all will be well. It is the same assumption, that someone is to blame; but not ourselves.

But someone else is not to blame; we are. We the people are responsible, because we are sovereign. Industrial schools, Magdalene laundries; Mother and Baby homes; bigger mortgages based on ever-higher multiples of wages; a relentless demand for higher wages to fund them and ever-greater levels of public spending to sustain the lot, were founded on popular demand.