Does anyone understand what is going on? Anyone at all? We have been subsidising a road-tolls company for a bridge which is operable only because of the State-built roads which connect it on either side.
Worse still, we have tied ourselves into a contract that means we will have to fork out the cost of the EU space probe to Saturn if we renege on this idiotic deal. Naturally, National Toll Roads declares there has been no consumer resistance to the outrageous prices it charges; but the complete absence of consumer resistance is merely confirmation of the totality of their monopoly.
The Government could threaten National Toll Roads with another, rival bridge, but that would require an imagination and political courage that is as natural to this Taoiseach as cannibalism is to the Dalai Lama.
Meanwhile, the Government is advertising in Conga-Brazzaville, Burkino Faso and Tierra del Fuego - and worst of all, the entire US - looking for victims of child abuse in Irish institutions at any time since the Treaty of Limerick, in order either to compensate them, or to reward their descendants for their good fortune in having such unfortunate ancestors. No punishment awaits false claimants, and the State will pay all the legal and travel costs of all those who allege they were abused, regardless of whether or not they were. This is an open-ended invitation to fraud: claimants cannot lose by making a claim, no matter how dishonest or absurd. The expected bill for this avalanche of money is close to €1 billion.
No good can come of this. The abused are not disabused, the raped are not unraped with the disbursal of all this money; and as for the next of kin who are being rewarded because of their forbears' misfortunes, if you can think of a more stupid waste of resources, then you clearly have been spending too much time at the tribunals.
For if you sought proof that there is no such thing as a public conscience in this country, the unending farce of our tribunals provides it. Take the McCracken tribunal, and if you can't remember which one that is, and to tell you the truth, I never can, it's not the one about the great sheep-dipping scandal of the 1930s. Nor is it the one into allegations that a garda imported a condom in 1956. Nor is it the one into the alleged fixing of the Roscommon county final in 1943. And it's not even the one into the great ballcock affair at the Convent of the Little Sisters of the Depraved in Leitrim.
No, the McCracken tribunal is the one investigating allegations that Ben Dunne slipped Charles Haughey £1 million. The legal costs of Ben Dunne and his sister Margaret Heffernan - paid for by you and me - now stand at more than twice the original amount alleged to have been handed over to the wretched Haughey. What did we get for this money? But then, what do we get for any of the money which leaves the Department of Finance each day in huge dumper-trucks, to be shovelled into the Four Courts by sturdy, glistening Nubian slaves for the wigged ones to help themselves to?
In the past decade we have created a vast and corpulent social class of parasitic drones who have gorged at the open-cast mine which is the tribunals. Those who have the misfortune to report on these melancholy farces carry horrifying tales of sessions that barely begin before they break for lunch, of how the participants have hardly placed their ample bottoms on the upholstery in the afternoon before they are lifted off them for the day, and of the same questions being laboriously rephrased and recycled for hour after Jarndycian hour.
The protest from that milch-cow, Irish public opinion? There is none, only inertia, quiescence, abjection and stoic indifference. Amid all our wealth, we are a people without a public conscience. And what else must we be to have tolerated the filth of the IRA - often enough with the active contrivance of the very profession which is now making such fortunes out the tribunals - for so many years?
Yet in all this vast, placid ocean of moral indifference and ethical indolence, some things still manage to shock. This newspaper yesterday reported the plight of Lindsey Purcell, who is 18, and who has cerebral palsy. Her family have been waiting four years for a grant from Kildare Council to build a bedroom and downstairs bathroom for Lindsey, who at the moment is sharing a bedroom with three other sisters, one of whom has Downs Syndrome.
Apparently, Kildare County Council has a €5 million backlog in applications from "people with special needs". We'd be getting closer to reality if we dumped these ridiculous euphemisms and referred to the victims as they really are: the handicapped and the helpless. Local councillor Suzanne Doyle is quoted as saying that the council will not be taking in any new applications for grants for the next three years.
This is incredible. Our Government is scouring the world looking for alleged victims of institutional abuse from half-a-century ago or more in order to shower hundreds of thousands of euros on them or their next of kin, and almost every week is setting up a fresh tribunal into the great seagull-egg scandal of 1900. Meanwhile, young people who are crippled are told they must wait for years before the State gets round to doing anything for them - a subsidy for their coffins, probably.