“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. ”Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad…or you wouldn’t have come here.”
I WAS reminded of the above quote from Alice in Wonderland as I sat agog in front of the television on Monday night watching Crisis: Inside the Cowen Government — the biggest exercise in revisionism since David Irving’s last book launch.
To its credit, the RTÉ documentary charting the fall, and fall, of Fianna Fáil had a remarkable scoop — ministers were apparently gagged and bound to their cabinet chairs for the duration of Brian Cowen’s tenure as Taoiseach.
One by one they all lined up, lower lips shaking, to tell us their tales of woe. Many still seemed to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder — not because of any of the calamities that befell the country on their watch, rather the pain of losing their seats is still raw.
Ignorant of the concept of collective cabinet responsibility, former ministers professed themselves to be innocent bystander cabinet ministers — utterly oblivious to any of the catastrophic decisions that destroyed the country. They were, they said, as taken aback as the rest of us when they belatedly realised the economy was in tatters and discovered members of the IMF stalking through the corridors in Leinster House….
