A MOTTO from football legend Roy Keane should become the “mantra” of Irish society in dealing with the current crisis, UCD history professor Diarmaid Ferriter said in Dublin last night.
The Cork soccer star's declaration that "stupidity is doing the same things and expecting different results" is cited on the first page of journalist and commentator Fintan O'Toole's new book, Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic,published by Faber and Faber of London.
Launching the book at a reception in the Gutter Bookshop in Temple Bar, Prof Ferriter said Mr O’Toole had taken the view that it was one thing to articulate the anger provoked by our current predicament but it was also necessary to come up with some solutions.
As a result, his latest book, a follow-up to the best-selling Ship of Fools, sets out a programme of "progressive and humane ideas based on fairness and decency" aimed at promoting a "creative synthesis between State and community".
These ideas might seem radical in an Irish context but that was a reflection of our “staid” political culture, because they were “already in operation in other, more civilised countries”.
Many of the ideas were already contained in the democratic programme of the first Dáil but “this was a document that was forgotten nearly as quickly as it was enunciated”.
The author shows our parliamentary democracy as “a charade” in which ministers and civil servants hid behind one another, absolving themselves with the “language of victimhood”, Prof Ferriter said.
There was a minimum wage so why not have a maximum wage and Prof Ferriter recalled Eamon de Valera’s dictum from the 1930s that no one was worth more than a thousand pounds a year.
Mr O'Toole, assistant editor and columnist with The Irish Times, said the situation should not be allowed to develop where the centenary of the 1916 Rising was marked "with a State that has been entirely stripped away, a society divided between those who can survive and those who cannot".
The work of voluntary organisations, development agencies and the GAA reflects a “real sense of public service” but the Irish people are held back by “a political culture that doesn’t work”, he said.
Neil Belton of Faber and Faber said he was “very proud” to be publishing a book by “one of the great public intellectuals of these islands”.