Some of you may be old enough to remember an Irish Times editorial of the 1970s which began: "This is a bloody awful government."
Well, if the writer were still at his desk, he could say it again. This is one of the most pathetically inept governments it has been our misfortune to endure.
Worse still, the Ministers who have most spectacularly failed are those who, less than a year ago, swaggered about with an air of omniscience: Charlie McCreevy, David Andrews, Brian Cowen, John O'Donoghue, Jim McDaid . . .
Their claim was that, if only we had a government in which they - and, of course, their colleague, Ray Burke - held office, we'd never see another poor day, suffer a cut in services or have to make do with second-best.
The leader-writer quoted above had another memorable offering: "Fianna Fail is a great organisation. So is the Mafia . . ." The Mafia still is; about Fianna Fail, I am not so sure.
Neither is Fianna Fail. At a time when certainty and confidence are what the country needs, the party is at sixes and sevens: on the wording of the Referendum on the Amsterdam Treaty; on mandatory reporting of sex abuse; on the investigation of the scandal in swimming.
Prisoners are sleeping on the floors in Mountjoy: Mr O'Donoghue blames Nora Owen. Doubt still hangs over certain blood supplies: don't worry, Mr Cowen is in charge.
Since the Budget, it costs more to stay overnight or to be treated as an outpatient in the Republic's hospitals. The usually noisy Mr Cowen hasn't had much to say about that.
And now we have Mr McCreevy, who masquerades as a man of the people, taking on not the banks, or the building societies, and certainly not the offshore sharks, but those founts of high living and secret fortunes, the credit unions.
Provisions of the Finance Bill, just published, are meant to ensure that the credit unions apply interest retention tax to deposits and report dividend payments of more than £500 to the Revenue Commissioners.
As I write, these provisions are under discussion; some expect them to be changed. Too late: the message has been received and understood. This is the Minister who prefers to attack the savings of the poor than to tamper with the stashes of the greedy.
This is hardly surprising. The Fianna Fail-Progressive Democrats coalition follows a neo-liberal line in economics. Don't expect it to reduce the gap in income between richest and poorest. It isn't meant to.
In his New Yorker essay, of which I wrote last week, John Cassidy listed issues that confronted Marx in the 1840s and, though they were later addressed by reformist governments, reappeared "like mutant viruses" in the past 10 years.
The issues were: "globalisation, inequality, political corruption, monopolisation, technical progress, the decline of high culture and the enervating nature of modern existence."
It's the kind of list we used to mock with such comments as: "Down our way they talk of little else." Suggesting that, in the real world, such issues are for the birds.
Not any more. Mr McCreevy's Budget and Finance Bill, the issues he avoided as well as those he touched, remind us that what Marx had to say 150 years ago is as relevant to Ireland now as it is to the wider world.
Some discussions of Marx and Marxism during the week concentrated on the prescriptive element of his writing and missed the point: Marx's real importance arises from his analysis of capitalism, not from the proposal of communism.
And his analysis is particularly relevant now because of the "mutant viruses" which marked the fall of the Berlin Wall and the failure of Stalinism.
John Cassidy brings us up to date: "It is only in the past two decades that a systematic assault on social democracy has been carried out in the name of `economic efficiency'. This right-wing backlash has produced a sharp upsurge in inequality, just as Marx would have predicted."
The growth of inequality is evident here as elsewhere.
Cassidy's figures make a point which is somehow forgotten by those who argue for neo-liberalism along Anglo-American lines.
"Between 1980 and 1996 the share of total household income going to the richest 5 per cent of families in the US increased from 15.3 per cent to 20.3 per cent, while the share of the income going to the poorest 60 per cent of families fell from 34.2 per cent to 30 per cent.
"Between 1979 and 1994, the poorest 10 per cent of the population in the UK saw their incomes, after taking in housing costs, fall by 13 per cent. The income of the top 10 per cent rose 60 per cent over the same period."
And Cassidy included some information which the SIPTU members in Ryanair's baggage-handling department, not to mention the company's chief executive, Michael O'Leary, may think relevant to their present disagreement.
"In 1978 a typical director at a big US company earned about 60 times what a typical worker earned; in 1995, he took home about 170 times as much . . . Half of all financial assets in America are owned by the richest 1 per cent."
This, it seems, bears out Marx's theory of immiseration: he didn't believe that wages could never rise under capitalism. What he said was that profits would rise faster, so that workers would become poorer relative to capitalists over time.
But if we are to tackle this, not to mention the bigger issues in Marx's list, we must approach with scepticism one of the points he was fond of making: about the place and power of politics and politicians.
Cassidy writes: "Marx, of course, delighted in declaring that politicians merely carry the water for their corporate paymasters. `The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie', he wrote in the Manifesto."
We may feel that politicians are even less powerful now than they were in the 1840s. It's not so; and it's not in our interest to encourage those who insist, at every hand's turn, in denigrating the democratic process.
We complain about monopolies, foreign monopolies in particular; but, like technical progress, they are amenable only to the control and regulation which politics and political institutions can provide.
It's well to remember that those who clamour for deregulation and complain most loudly about the influence of the state are those who look to the state for aid when foreign competition gets too tough or they need to be propped up or bailed out.