Fintan O'Toole: This place is a shambles. Even in a matter of life and death, like dealing with the carnage on our roads, the State is unable to implement a system of penalty points. Flagship public projects like the Luas in Dublin cannot be delivered either within a reasonable time-frame or at a cost even vaguely approximating the projected budget. The health service is a mess.
Thousands of children attend primary schools that are little better than slums. The fruits of an historic boom have been squandered. Revelations of corruption and maladministration have become so commonplace that they barely make the headlines any more. A corrosive public cynicism is eating away at the bonds between State and citizen.
The response of the Government? Go into hiding. Neuter the Freedom of Information Act. Batten down the hatches.
It is a perfectly rational strategy. Halfway through a 10-year stretch in power, the Government has no ambition beyond survival. It is not interested in engaging with the public. It is interested in hanging on until those who voted for Fianna Fáil and the PDs last May will have forgotten their sense of betrayal and those who didn't will have sunk into weary apathy.
The striking thing about the attack on FOI is the confidence it displays. A few years ago they wouldn't have dared. The revelations of corruption made it necessary to appear contrite, to adopt the new buzz-words of openness, transparency and accountability, to speak softly and resist the temptation to swagger.
Gradually, however, it dawned on them that the people don't really mind being treated like idiots. We get upset now and then when they behave in an especially egregious manner, appointing Hugh O'Flaherty to the European Investment Bank or treating the parents of children with autism as enemies of the State. But, after we've let off a bit of steam, we go back to wallowing in our own powerlessness, muttering about how politicians are all the same.
So, bit by bit, the timid process of political reform that was forced on the system by public reaction to the scandals of the early 1990s has gone into reverse.
The capacity of the Dáil to conduct investigations like the DIRT inquiry headed by the late Jim Mitchell has been taken away by the courts. The Electoral Act limiting the amount of money that can be spent on election campaigns was turned into a joke by the simple device of spending most of the vast Fianna Fáil war-chest before the election was formally announced. Ireland lined up with a handful of dictatorships as one of the few countries to refuse Amnesty International permission to visit its prisons.
Even as evidence of the depth and range of corruption in Irish public life continues to mount, the need to be seen to be doing something about it has diminished. For example, every single member of the OECD has ratified the organisation's Anti-Bribery Convention. Except, of course, Ireland.
The State has also failed to ratify anti-corruption conventions drawn up by the EU and the Council of Europe. The legislation allowing us to sign up to all three of these treaties was actually signed into law by the President in July 2001, but the Government hasn't bothered to actually implement it.
Parliament itself is treated with increasingly open contempt. Last week the Taoiseach was too tired after his genuinely sterling endeavours at the Northern Ireland talks to brief the Dáil on their outcome. He was not too tired, however, to travel to Tipperary on the same day to open a luxury hotel.
This week, as if to rub our noses in it, neither Charlie McCreevy nor Tom Parlon, the Ministers responsible for the gutting of the FOI Act, will actually be able to present their amendments in the Dáil. Both have far more pressing engagements at Cheltenham racecourse.
The contempt is now so open that they barely bother to hide their real agendas. In the Seanad debate last week, Shane Ross pointed to the hypocrisy of piously protesting the need for Cabinet secrecy while "Ministers constantly leak information detrimental to each other and others tell stories, which may or may not be true, under the veil of Cabinet secrecy" . The response of the Government's leader in the Seanad, Mary O'Rourke, to this outrageous suggestion? "The senator is correct."
Likewise, in the same debate, the Fianna Fáil senator, Mary White, explained to us that our senior civil servants are an elite group whom we are "privileged" to have serving us. The privilege, please note, is ours, not theirs.
And her clinching argument in her contention that freedom of information is in general a bad thing? "Those in the public service bureaucracy who make wrong decisions will suffer if they are exposed." This might seem to be a very good argument for transparency. But no. It is, breathtakingly, an argument against scrutiny.
They are, therefore, telling us pretty clearly that the shambles of misgovernment is to go on.