Well, here we go again, as the country again slides towards chaos, with us all sitting around the parlour, our little fingers in the air as we nibble on the sandwiches of discontent, resolutely ignoring the elephant sitting on the piano stool, buffing his nails.
Since 1989, the private sector has lifted this economy off the ground and made it the most dynamic in the world. Now the public sector is once again locked around the ankles of enterprise, and nobody dare mention the only cure. Privatise just about everything.
We can measure the ineptitude of the State now in lives lost on hospital waiting lists or spent in endless traffic jams; in squandered billions on roads and rail projects that take decades to reach fruition; in public transport timetables that are from Gulliver's Travels; in our hideously expensive, violent penal colonies.
The failure of public enterprises in this country is endemic, pathological, and irreversible. Yet merely to utter this central and irrefutable truth is nearly the equivalent of propounding upon the virtues of condoms to a consistory of cardinals in 1956. Pious shrieks, hands to ears, and red socks stampeding for the exit in panic, before a papal crozier neatly lobotomises.
Our health services are doing two things: spending billions in order to give employment to vast armies of bureaucrats; and using morgues, canteens and corridors as hospital wards. It's bad now, but it'll get much, much worse - and the generic journalistic response has been to blame consultants, as if they're all treating private patients and chuckling as the public patients are wheeled off to the grave-diggers. The reality is that most consultants are working 12-hour days, six days a week; on the seventh, they look through the job vacancy ads for Canada.
CIÉ was formed 60 years ago and it has been an unmitigated disaster throughout. We have the worst, the most under-capitalised, inefficient and unreliable public transport system in Europe. We have tried every permutation of state-manipulation to make it work. It hasn't worked. It can't work. It won't work. Yet further follies are upon as Luas converges with the Metro and the Red Cow Roundabout open-air lunatic asylum.
Our prisons are a criminal disgrace. Our courts actually had the nerve to refuse to extradite prisoners to the North because of the "dangers" of the prison system there; yet we lose about a prisoner a week to suicide, and there is no finer market place for drugs in the world than Mountjoy Jail. I suspect incoming prisoners are met by a maître d' and a menu: would m'sieur prefer heroin, acid, ou peut-être un petit morceau de crack cocaine?
Inside those jails, there is a staff-prisoner ratio of parity. One warder for every sentenced inmate. Yet the system is so "inefficient" - though there are other words which describe the rostering methods in jails - that some prison staff are able to earn absolute fortunes in overtime, year in and year out. And what do they do? they certainly don't "rehabilitate" - ha, ha, ha - but welcome back the same recidivist illiterates who are produced by our public education system and our public housing estates: swings and roundabouts of lumpen-proletariat misery and despair, and all courtesy of taxpayers' money.
Our public failings could hardly be more spectacular or more brutal. We blight lives. We watch promise vanish. We take the ill and we lay them down in unheated corridors. We leave the poor standing at bus-stops in the rain. We despatch the helpless and stupid into prisons, maybe for happy bouts of coercive lesbian frolics and involuntary anal sex - and spare me here, please, the epithet "gay".
So, wherever the State runs things in this country, you can sample some of the joys of the Soviet Union. Contrast those areas in which the State has abandoned its monopolies. Every person who wants a phone now has one, with a vast range of services available. And since the criminal cartel against the traveller run by Aer Lingus - with the assistance of a cynical government and a corrupt and compliant press - was ended, flying has become an affordable fact of life for vast numbers of the Irish people.
Of course, mention the name Michael O'Leary, and many public service unions froth and spit. They loathe him because they despise freedom, detest enterprise, and hate workforce profit-sharing. He might indeed have the manners of a bouncer in a dockers' pub, but he's one of the great liberators of Irish life. And not because he's a nice person - I doubt even his mother said that at his christening; no doubt because he syphoned off the water from the baptismal font, and was later found selling it in Virgin Mary-shaped bottles at Knock. But he does know the power of money. It makes people work. It gets things done.
This doesn't mean that all private enterprises are efficient. That's the point. The inefficient ones go to the wall; their contracts are not renewed. We have the choice to do that. But what power have we over the publicly owned utilities if they don't perform well? None. All we can do is ask them, very politely, to do better next year. And if they don't, it really doesn't matter, because we'll ask them again anyway the year after, come what may.
Who in political life has the nerve to say "Privatise the lot"? Nobody. Absolutely nobody. The public service unions are back in the driving seat; so sit tight, everyone, and fasten your seatbelts for the white-knuckle ride back to 1979 .