The politics of today and tomorrow are all that matter for Irish politicians.
The parties never look past the next election. There is no forward planning, no long-term policy and no real engagement with an issue until it becomes a crisis.
This is hardly a new phenomenon, but the events of the past few years should have woken us up to the problems this approach brings.
Take the issues that have dominated the news headlines for the past number of days.
Firstly, the case of Grace, an intellectually disabled young woman abused by her foster family.
Ministers were aware of the circumstances of this case in 2014. Three years later we are trying to piece together a commission of investigation, which in its original format would tell us a whole series of things we already know.
The Tuam baby bodies discovery was also known to the Government since 2014, but - and again three years later - we are trying to piece together a response that does justice to the scale of the scandal.
Controversies come and go. Outrage is expressed, apologies are given and investigations are launched.
What politicians never quite grasp is that the controversies of today are the crises of tomorrow – like the scale of our homeless crisis and the large number of children growing up in hotel rooms, or the direct provision system where asylum seekers are paid pennies by the State and told they cannot work or access third level education.
Those present problems are ignored or hidden because they do not appear on the front page of the newspapers or dominate pub talk.
They are not the politics of today or tomorrow. And to most people in Leinster House, that is all that matters.
