Last week I had dinner with a writer who was visiting Dublin for a story he was working on for an American magazine. He was attempting to get to grips with Ireland’s political culture, and with the country’s strange sclerotic incapacity, despite the great windfalls of corporation tax continually gusting into a supposedly overflowing treasury, to deal with the problems affecting public life. Not least among these is an increasingly grave housing situation.

At points during the conversation, I found myself struggling to articulate what exactly I felt was going on with Ireland, with the continuous failure of the Coalition parties to – as the popular saying goes – “tackle the housing crisis”. And with the electorate’s apparently unshakeable insistence on voting them back in regardless. The best I could offer was a somewhat lame diagnosis of a national malaise, characterised by a toxic admixture of complacency and fatalism. We seem, if not quite incapable of imagining a politics that might deliver better results for the country, then disinclined to pursue it for fear that it might make things worse. (The exception to this, of course, is the great national tradition of periodic referendums, which does wonders for our esprit de corps. It allows us to believe that ours is a culture of vital democratic energies and political dynamism.)

All that, as I say, was last week. If the conversation had happened a week later, I’d simply have pointed him towards a report by Olivia Kelly in Wednesday’s The Irish Times headlined “Council urges Johnny Ronan lobbyist Coveney to honour Glass Bottle site affordable housing plan” as a kind of scale miniature of this country’s systemic dysfunction.

[ Simon Coveney: Former minister once lobbied by developer Johnny Ronan, now lobbies for himOpens in new window ]

At the former Irish Glass........

© The Irish Times