You’d never guess that Brian Cowen and Brian Lenihan are members of Fianna Fail, would you? Oh, you would? Fancy that.
Grotesque. Unbelievable. Bizarre. Unprecedented. Ireland has known crises before, many of them extremely serious. But the GUBU days now seem the stuff of comic opera when set beside the battering Ireland has taken these past few weeks and months. The game is up and all that’s left is the reckoning.
Today the Green party pulled the plug on the coalition in Dublin. The Greens may not fare well in this poll but they deserve some modest amount of praise for recognising, as Fianna Fail patently did not, that an election is in the Irish national interest and the sooner it is held the better. The Greens will vote for the budget next month (though it may require Fine Gael’s assistance to pass) and that will be that.
Never mind the economics; consider the politics.
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