Gerard Howlin: Governing on a wing and a prayer

If you need to know the costings of the Programme for Government agreed on Monday, you can’t afford it. Gone are the days when politicians campaigned in poetry but governed in prose. What is intended now brings the Government to lyrical heights. We are on the cusp of the Ireland de Valera spoke of in his 1943 Saint Patrick’s Day address: “The home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living".

We are a people “satisfied with frugal comfort” who “devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit". The Programme for Government makes perfect sense if read as a spiritual aid, not an economic plan.