Abuses have woken the sleeping dog - Protecting workers’ rights

POLITICAL catchphrases can sometimes come back to haunt the person who first uses them. Those who invent them usually just slink back into the shadows, unbruised, while they wait for their next client.

“A lot done, more to do” the self-congratulatory war cry of Bertie Ahern’s last election campaign as leader of Fianna Fáil now screams with the hollowness of an abandoned asylum. “Rise and Follow Charlie” seems beyond comment, irony-free comment at least. “The Economy Stupid” seems no more than a one-breath summation of a philosophy — Thatcherism and the veneration of the free market economy — that has destroyed or concentrated wealth. It reversed nearly a century of social progress for working-class families all around the Western world. It has, under the guise of globalisation, hit European and American middle and working classes in a way usually only seen during wartime.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s “The Best Little Country in the World to do Business” mantra is teetering on the line between valid, laudable ambition and the kind of ironic, nudge-nudge we’ll-sort-you-out chicanery that seems such an essential lubricant for the unfettered capitalism seen to such devastating affect in recent weeks.