This State was handed to them on a silver platter

WHAT did they die for? That is the lament for the sacrifice of the 1916 rebels, since corporate greed and government incompetence pushed the State they brought into bloody being to the brink of financial meltdown.

If James Connolly had been back at the GPO, last Wednesday night, for the launch of the centenary commendations of the Easter Rising, he would have died of shame.

Not because of the ill-considered, hastily assembled, deeply underwhelming celebration plans being unveiled, but because the voices of Enda Kenny, the Taoiseach, and Joan Burton, the leader of the Labour Party that Connolly helped found, were often drowned-out by the thunderous sounds of the anti-water charge demonstrators banging against the windows on the outside.