The international context of the blockades of recent days on Irish roads deserves to be kept in mind. It is not just that the rise in the price of diesel and petrol is due to the fraught situation in the Gulf. The protests, like other far-reaching political changes in most European countries, can be in part traced to a wider failure of international political economy.

This week’s spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund in Washington evoke the Nordic twilight of the gods. The participants – top financial officials from around the world – realise that the institutional framework of the post-second-World-War international economic settlement has been shaken, even if not yet crumbling. Despite its many shortcomings, that system has had a long winning streak, compared with what came before. But its very successes, notably in lifting the living standards of billions of struggling households, especially in Asia, triggered a backlash of nativist voices in the formerly dominant Europe and the United States.

The full consequences of this nativism, stoked and exploited by unprincipled political entrepreneurs, can only be glimpsed. Alternative channels of international economic diplomacy and co-operation must and will be developed, as recently urged by Mark Carney at Davos. But how effective will these be? The skies are somewhat overcast.

So far, the global economic system has been scrambling, with some short-term success, to adapt to the turbulence and chokepoints generated by arbitrary tariffs and reckless wars – with Chinese producers rerouting their exports through third countries; energy importers reconfiguring the flow of oil and gas into different pipelines and sea routes, and substitutes being explored for other bottled-up or tariffed products.

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But it cannot just be a question of reacting to every twist and turn in the geopolitical lunges of the US administration. For the long haul, there will have to be economic re-engineering to deal with a world where old certainties – such as the freedom of navigation through international waterways – might no longer apply. The new supply chains are, and will remain, more costly. The necessary global progress to decarbonisation is being set back by the short-sighted determination by the White House to derail US efforts, leaving more for the rest of the world to do. International respect for the rule of law and the predictability of economic policy that have been the sine qua non of sustained economic growth have been damaged, and will be hard to restore.

The biggest national winner of the last quarter century of globalisation has been China. The relative stability of its autocratic political regime combines with its productive capacity to make China as central a geopolitical power now in the world as the currently rudderless United States. This has evident consequences for Ireland, given the strength of our economic links with the latter.

China has many economic problems, not least growing inequality and a burst housing bubble in its smaller cities. But broad access to technical education and cost control have helped it build a highly productive manufacturing sector. Combined with policies generating too much national saving, this production is spilling over competitively into exports undermining the manufacturing sectors of its trading partners, notably in Europe.

As a whole, Ireland too has been a globalisation winner, thanks in large part to being firmly anchored in the European Union for the past half century. But, as Mario Draghi has stressed, much is needed to restore vigour to a faltering European economy. And, for the rest, we seem to have bet the house on the dynamism of – and tax revenue from – American multinationals. Clearly, Ireland must build resilience in the face of potential relative decline of one of its main current economic partners and the detachment of the other. We should be among the leaders in supporting Draghi-inspired EU reforms. And it is even more important for us than for most other countries to take larger, more effective steps to strengthen physical and social infrastructure at home to sustain what has been achieved here in terms of economic advance, and to ensure the benefits are being shared more widely.

Rapid growth in population and employment has not been matched by public infrastructure and a commensurate growth in housing. Many long-time residents cannot feel much benefit of the national economic growth that has occurred, as evidenced by the recent protests.

A remarkable degree of consensus in Ireland on the appropriate directions of policy has not been matched by effective delivery. On housing, healthcare and more, the broad agenda is clear and, in political terms, largely uncontested. But concrete results in the public interest have been slow to materialise because of sclerotic process and obstruction from special private interests.

Pressure points – with the fuel price protests and the housing shortage – are being met by Government with poorly thought-out, reactive Band-Aid solutions, typically frittering away the substantial tax resources that have come to us as a side effect of financial engineering of American companies. To paraphrase the observation often attributed to the 1960s US senator Everett Dirksen: half a billion here, half a billion there, sooner or later you are talking real money.

While they still flow, these windfall funds should be used to build lasting solutions that will underpin Ireland’s prosperity in a changed global environment, one which is unlikely to be as benign for us. A world increasingly influenced by China, and perhaps by AI, is not one in which we cannot thrive. But to do so, we need to make sure the State achieves through education and public services the inclusiveness and resilience that have always been claimed, but not in recent times actually accomplished.

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As little as Ireland can do to stabilise a world disrupted by chaotic and myopic political leadership in some of its great powers, we do have agency and the opportunity to reinforce our resilience. It will require a more convincing performance by the Government and the machinery of the State – not only in promising results, but in ensuring those results are achieved and felt by an increasingly restive population.

Patrick Honohan was governor of the Central Bank of Ireland from 2009 to 2015

© The Irish Times