“And now it’s too late…”

Ireland is a pioneer in a new form of IAA governance: after incurring financial losses unprecedented in world history, it is a state no one wants.

And these losses were only made possible by a compulsive infantilism that infuses and informs so much in Irish life.

No matter: the fiction of an independent nursery is now over. The governesses from Brussels and Berlin have arrived. The Irish people are in their playpen.

They can bash their rattles against the cot, but they do not decide when the lights go out or what they get for breakfast.

Readers sometimes complain about how much I go on about 1916. I agree. It was stupid for me. The witless, historically illiterate reverential jumbo-jumbo that has surrounded that event, and which – quite appallingly – has been revived by Fianna Fail, is not the underlying problem of the Republic.

It is the sheer infantilism with which the affairs of the state are managed, meaning the iron law of consequence is endlessly ignored, like children scrambling up an electricity pylon.

So 1916 is like the conch of the marooned schoolboys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies – it is the focus of reverence in an undeveloped society, where infantilism is so commonplace that it is no longer perceived as such.

Do read the whole thing.