Good Morning Eamon Gilmore. Are you happy to be Tanaiste ? Enjoy your little jaunt to New York and Washington over St. Patrick’s Day ? Well let me bring you down to earth. Do you think for one moment that we will forget that during the election campaign you promised to renegotiate the IMF/EU bail-out. Then it was “ Frankfurt’s Way or Labour’s Way”. That was a lie, Mr. Gilmore. You knew it when you crawled into bed with your Blue Shirt buddies and sidelined Joan Burton from the Department of Finance on the basis that she just might have taken your party’s election pledges more seriously than you do. Remember the old joke. The Labour Party wrestles with its conscience and the Labour Party always wins.

What really depresses me about this new government is just how quickly the honeymoon has ended. After the Brian and Brian Show, I had hoped for a robust and reinvigorated administration that with a fresh mandate from the people would have the moral authority to lead the nation. The first sign that the main aim of the parties was power not representation was their dismissal of the notion that we should have a referendum on the terms of the EU/IMF bail-out.

The expression of the real will of the people was masked by the election result. There was widespread and justifiable disgust with Fianna Fail and the Greens who participated in one of the worst governments on record, but there was not unbridled enthusiasm for Fine Gael and Labour. There was, however, an expectation that a new government would rise to the clarion call of the people. The cry of revolution, no taxation without representation will come back to haunt them. The blunt truth is that what has just happened is not Labour’s way. It is Frankfurt’s way.

I warned recently about the cosy mindset of our leading politicians towards their European counterparts. I firmly believed in the circumstances that Michael Noonan was the best person available to be our Minister for Finance because he was making the right noise and had an understanding of moral compass. Yet, now what we see unfolding was that it was merely noise and does not represent action.

We must not allow our politicians to perpetuate the delusion that we have friends in Frankfurt. They fear contagion and they are displaying an attachment to naked self-interest more than a devotion to a great European ideal.

What has happened to the lack of sustainability that Michael Noonan so recently trumpeted ?

Wise up Enda or more than the West will be awake.