For Heaven’s sake, just go. Get Lisbon passed, NAMA through and the Budget cutbacks in place, then go. Go, just go.  Most of us are sick to our back teeth of listening to you.  All public patience has been exhausted and the prevailing mood, darkening by the deep realisation of the fiasco we face, is edging ever closer to boiling point. You can continue lying about how it’s all just a bit of misfortune brought about by Lehmann’s collapse last year but you fool nobody.  Don’t be so stupid, we get it. The events of the past week sum it all up.

• FAS, whose board contains public sector heavyweights was allowed to engage in a mockery of public finances and remain in place even in the face of economic collapse. Mary Coughlan’s handling of her brief has been a disaster. Just how ill-suited to a senior ministry do you have to be before you’re moved? How many gaffes are you allowed? She continued to let a board spending €1 billion of our money in place despite hard evidence of gross mismanagement. She then used a boost in pension and a lump sum, this time €1,400,000 to pay off its CEO as if somehow it wasn’t real money and sat back waiting for resignations! That’s our Mary.
• Meanwhile John O’Donoghue cast about as much sunlight on his runaway expenses as a bic lighter at a vampire convention while his senior party colleagues maintained a bat-like silence, perhaps sensing that a media trawl through their areas of spending could be equally as corrosive.  The Ceann Comhairle’s credibility is in the toilet but in the great tradition of zero accountability the only thing he’ll fall on is a hug from the party collective.
• Brian Cowen’s performance on the Late Late was his last chance to front up and admit that the last Government, ceded its power, abdicated  its responsibility and committed an act of treason by allowing Ireland to become captive to a developer and banking nexus on the one hand and a public sector labour cartel on the other - one fed by the revenue from the other.
• The result is the devastation of financial stability across the taxpaying middle classes, threatened cutbacks in social supports and the requirement now to wrestle power back in what will be a prolonged and bitter confrontation with public sector unions. But who can blame them when, as Newstalk has revealed, 75% of the leaders in State and Semi-State companies have turned a deaf ear to pleas from Government to cut back salaries.

So, we get it, there isn’t any leadership. The Government is on death row. It’s a bitter summary but it’s the truth. This is Ahern’s legacy and no senior Fianna Fail politician can escape it. No coded words, no propaganda, no obfuscation can hide the truth from the public. If you needed a license to be a politician, most of Ahern’s acolytes should be facing lifetime bans for bringing Ireland to the cusp of ruin. The best thing they can do now is to do no more harm, limp through Lisbon, NAMA and the budget, then go. Just head off with their pensions into the bosom of their most ardent support, play golf, ditch any thoughts of memoirs (we want to forget them as fast as humanly possible) and don’t come back. Ever.

1. It’s a set up. Your natural, lifelong paranoia is justified – the rest of the 27 member states are out to screw us and won’t implement the guarantees they’ve agreed to at the next accession treaty. So lets stick it to them first and their poxy inferior parliamentary democracies that have passed The Lisbon Treaty. Let’s save Europe from its sovereign Governments. What do they know about functioning democracies anyway?
2. The doubting Thomas crowd are right, before you know it we’ll be flooded with abortion clinics run by workers on a Euro an hour and facing conscription into a new European army that will force the Dept of Finance at gun point to raise our corporation taxes. Just you wait.
3. We can’t have EU directives on consumer rights, worker rights, environmental rights and financial stability. We’d be far better off relying on our own natural guile and cunning just like we did before we joined the EEC. Anyway the Oireachtas trumps Brussels for intellect, wisdom, resources, vision, long term planning and implementation. Just ask at any backbencher.
4. Ireland would be far better off on the edge of Europe anyway. We could lead a new slow track EU and join up with UK right wing nationalists to frustrate the work of the world’s largest economic block. They’d eventually pay us off just to get rid of us.
5. Sick of all those multi-nationals coming in here as a springboard to Europe, let them leave to other parts and take their jobs with them. We’re far better off relying on our own home-grown wealth creators, like developers. If that doesn’t work we can always rely on the old dodge, mass emigration, less mouths to feed.
6. You really do miss the punt, the only currency on the planet called after its banking profession. We could go alone again, just like Iceland. Interest rates would be sky high and the punt would get priced against occasionally but, hey, it would make Ireland really cheap for our much wealthier European neighbours to come visit, restoring the natural balance. After all relative poverty is good for the soul, just ask any dead bishop.
7. You’ve ex-US military brass as pals in business and they sure don’t want a more cohesive Europe in case it diminishes NATO. Having launched your proposed counter measures at a US foreign affairs think tank, you’re toying the idea of running a political campaign.
8. You’d love to see Caomhin as Taoiseach and Mary Lou as Minister for Finance. Based on the Sinn Fein general election manifesto they might know as much about economics as an aardvark knows about ipods, but, hey, they couldn’t do much worse could they?
9. Joe Higgins could do Enterprise Trade and Employment, transforming the world into a socialist nirvana, just like Cuba. In time, the world would come around to our way of thinking, you know self isolation, centralisation, bigger Government, that kind of thing.  
10. We can have a raft of new national holidays, one for Mao, one for Joe Stalin and eventually for one for Fidel. Christmas Day can even be replaced with a special holiday for Nicolae Ceausescu, shot in error by his own people on December 25th 1989. 

The Commission on Taxation Report is irrelevant. The patient is on the operating table right now getting full open heart surgery and, quite apart from the ongoing rows between surgeons on the best way to avoid death, along comes a report on how the patient could best prepare for a triathlon! The Commission on Taxation Report is about as welcome as a blood test at a funeral and equally as well timed. The report was envisaged and commissioned at the time of the Tiger with its working group established in February 2008. Sure, it contains many laudable goals and aspirations with plenty of specifics on how to disassemble our Swiss cheese tax system and make it more effective in driving an entrepreneurial culture.

But, hello, that was then, this is now. The biggest and most immediate task facing this country is to reduce the gap between tax revenues and spending to avoid bankruptcy – not how we should go about collecting the poxy taxes. The Minister for Finance would be nuts to attempt to introduce any sweeping tax reform this December. Instead, he should focus his full attention on reducing the public sector pay and pensions bubble, postponing tax major tax reform until next year at the earliest. To do otherwise risks killing the patient completely.

Don’t be fooled by claims that these changes would be tax neutral. In the long run that may be true, but you can’t stuff taxpayers who aren’t changing home for property tax and then tell them it’s neutral because the total received equals the old stamp duty take. Neither can you implement any serious tax changes, especially those that involve detailed means testing, when most of the population is on its knees struggling to survive. To do so risks serious unrest. The Irish public, especially in the most recession-vulnerable parts of the economy need to first see a steady hand on the tiller, leadership prepared to take the courageous and necessary actions to stabilise, the public finances. After that, with a fair wind from a global economic uplift, comes recovery and with it, the phased introduction of tax reform. Do it any other way and you may as well, put the notice in the paper, order the roses and ring the undertaker now.