Let’s not waste yet another crisis

One of the clutching-at-straws lines we used in the early stages of our economic collapse was that the calamity was too good a crisis to waste; the hope being that the failure was so great that the response, the unavoidable reform, would be on an equally dramatic scale.

That revolution in our public life has not come about and maybe we should ask ourselves why not. And preferably before we are confronted with the next, almost inevitable, catastrophe.

Maybe we should ask why such a very close brush with the collapse of this Republic — the 2008 banks’ implosion and the disastrous guarantee; the costly decision by international lenders that this tottering State was not a good bet and the eurozone crisis of 2010-2012 — all came and went without a proportionate reaction.