Our Only Hope?

I wonder is it even beggining to dawn on our main opposition party, Fine Gael, that winning the next election will simply not be enough? It's no good if FG simply replace Fianna Fail government hacks, cronies and gombeens with their own insiders, clogging up the apparatus of power with more incompetent, irrelevant bods who are just marking time till they can claim their massive pensions.

No, it's clear that FG need to do much more than simply win the next election; they need to lead a revolution. True, a very boring, grey middle-class kind of revolution, but a very necessary one at that. One based on the appropriate spending of taxes and the slicing down to size of unnecessary pork. Most importantly of all, I would argue that it is vital that FG introduce a major overhaul of the electoral system, introducing a national list system or some other mechanism with which to break the link between national government in Ireland, eh sorry, "Lyonnesse", and the parish pump politics that has hamstrung government on our island with the most asinine of parochial concerns.

But how will Labour, FG's obvious partner in any coalition government, view the above steps, necessary though they are. I would suspect that Labour and the Labourites, prone as they are to bouts of intelligence unbecoming of Irish politicians, will see in the long term the necessity of a national list system. But could they stomach trimming down the fat in our national budget? I'm afraid I think not. Will revolutionary red Labour be the main roadblock to change in our country?