You can't afford to go to law in Ireland even with a good case? Too bad. Your neighbour pays for vital health tests, while you must wait months and possibly die? Tough. Your children are screwed for rent and cannot get a mortgage in today's conditions of employment? Shudda gone to the National Asset Management Agency as a vulture fund.
Dáil Éireann fiddles while citizens burn with resentment. It does not have to be like this.
Governments may be interventionist and decisive. They can manage their affairs professionally and be seen to address real needs with realistic policies.
A shocking lead story in The Irish Times has now revealed how deadly our health service can be. Waits for cancer tests are reportedly up to 25 times longer for public patients. We have come to expect no better.
Gormless mismanagement by governments, too inept or cowardly to tackle bad practice and to design or cost accurately effective systems, has led to low expectations becoming ingrained. The Irish Water shambles is symptomatic of a more widespread malaise.
Politicians shrug their shoulders and joke that the post of minister for health is for an aspiring politician what being sent to Angola was for colonial officials. With private insurance increasing in both cost and complexity, beyond the reach of many, getting sick in Ireland is a lottery.
Sure, what can you do?
Well, a mature government with able politicians would cut and dice it. Not abdicate responsibility to health ministers with an ideological bias towards privatisation. Reform is not easy but is doable if you want it.
Procedural complexities
And what of the legal system? At the State’s inception a revolutionary system of Dáil courts pointed to a simpler and different way of delivering justice. Today we burden ourselves with high costs and procedural complexities out of proportion to our population of less than five million.
It took a brave Cork woman, Josie Airey, to force Ireland in 1979 to introduce legal aid. The State did so resentfully, and never extended it to all areas of law. Meanwhile, public bodies each year spend fortunes on legal or other consultants for work that should be done in-house or not at all. Use this money better.
There is a yawning gap between powerful or wealthy corporate litigants and people less rich. Some citizens dare not contest just causes. The High Court has recently prevented one litigant from having his case funded by a third party abroad. Is this fair? The judge pointed to old rules against "champerty", or speculative traffic in litigation.
But reform would allow litigants with an arguable case to proceed if someone wants to share their financial risk, subject to a judicial check. The existing system of “after-the- event” insurance for litigants already looks like such an exercise, albeit one where judges seem to leave it up to private lawyers and insurance companies to determine what is a good case.
Tax deductions
Rich litigants are helped by the State through tax deductions for legal expenses, and sometimes use shelf companies with limited resources that are folded if a case fails. Ireland could have a simpler and more just legal system.
More advisory commissions and committees are no substitute for government. The belated banking inquiry did not even ask where the billions went that the taxpayers replaced in bank vaults. Might that be Panama, for example? It was an exercise in futility that underlined the limitations of the Dáil.
And the Dáil appears to have washed its hands of Nama in respect to the disposal of property assets. Once bitten, shame on bankers. But twice bitten? Properties are said to have been sold off by Nama to international investment funds in blocks at a fraction for each dwelling of the price people are being asked to pay now for scarce homes.
Mortgage rules help to ensure that young people pay high rents instead of lower repayments on homes. Rents in Dublin are higher than in many European capitals. And the Dáil just wrings its hands.
Government does not have to be like this. One plausible reading of the recent general election vote is that it was an attempt by citizens to change Dáil Éireann and not just turf out a government. If politics now fails again, then social unrest is more likely.
The possibility of effective government is not in doubt. What is in doubt is whether a government formed by this Dáil can even start to tackle such problems with the efficacy and verve required.