Change comes dropping so slowly you might not have noticed it

Those up the ranks know they shafted new colleagues all the better to preserve their own entitlements, writes Gerard Howlin.

It’s a consequence which will arrive soon if it’s coming at all. Ultimately the significance of the hiatus over forming a government, will be about how government is done. Expectations of ‘new politics’ now, as for a ‘democratic revolution’ before, will be overdone and disappointed. Whatever its form, it will overwhelmingly resemble what went before, except there will be a great deal of gyration, day-to-day, issue-to-issue. That, however, will be froth. The bigger issue is whether, in terms of governance, much will change. I think a little can.

The obsession with outward form — the horse trading — obscures already accomplished changes in function. Simply put, politics was already changing incrementally even during the apparently immutable tenure of the former two-and-a-half-party system, now disappeared. Electoral results are a symptom of that, not their cause per se, though they do give momentum. The continuing change in function is evidenced by the social transformation of a conservative, hierarchical society over 40 years, within essentially the same structures.