This is the politics of a dead man walking

Sir — Hindsight is a luxury we can ill afford, facing into the next weeks and months. And who would not feel a modicum of sympathy for an exiting government, out of its depth and lacking in legitimacy?

There is no telling whether a new administration would have handled this crisis any differently. But neither should we avoid calling out the flawed thinking that has paved the road to where we are today. The fact the globe is again being savaged by a black swan is not the issue. It is to the governance of our own country we need to look.

We have a set of political parties that are a disgrace to the values that shaped their governance for so long. Two parties that have been colonised by the same “woke” culture.

Two brand names selling the spin that there is more than a ha’p’orth of difference between them — when we all know there’s not. One of them damn near ruined the country. The other has drained political governance of all reflective thought, displacing it with ever-more shrill tones of spin.

The people delivered their verdict — and for some of us a scary verdict it is.

The results of the last five years of government are all around us. The debacle of the Children’s Hospital, the nightmare of the cervical cancer debacle, the adversarial engagement with the medical and nursing professions — a sector on which we are all now so very dependent.

And on top of that, last month’s election — marked by billion-euro election pitches funded by what were clearly exceptional inflows into the exchequer from a handful of multinationals. The insistence up to a week ago on going ahead with a St Patrick’s Day parade.

It is difficult for non-medics or epidemiologists to know what should have been done differently to anticipate, manage and mitigate risk. But this much we do know. There is causality between our rotten, broken political system and trust in its capacity to get us through this “event” — not to mention the systemic damage it will inflict on our economy, our country, our people.

Who would not empathise with ministers suffering nervous exhaustion in these circumstances? But the cliches, platitudes and exhortations are the final gasps of a politics that’s a dead man walking.

I hope to heaven some good may yet come out of this awful crisis if it makes us better understand our fragility as individuals and as a country.

Ray Kinsella,

Ashford, Co Wicklow