John O’Brennan (Maynooth) on Ireland’s existential crisis: a contrary view on the Open Democracy website
Niamh Hardiman (UCD) on Firestone and contagion in the Eurozone: how Ireland got burned on the Out of the Crooked Timber website
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Irish Politics Forum 
John O’Brennan deserves full marks for highlighting the positive aspects; there is far too much doom and gloom. Most of Irish tradable sectors are in fine fettle and proving to be remarkably resilient.
But he fails to mention the deadweight costs being imposed by the state, semi-state and private sheltered sectors – and that drag the rest of the economy down. The surface of these is merely being scratched in the proposed 4-year programme agreed with the Troika. Ireland retains full sovereignty to address these problems. FG might do more; Labour would certainly do less. Another opportunity for muddle-headed governance? And the urgent need for reform of political governance – again fully within Ireland’s control – gets little attention.
Niamh Hardiman rightly focuses on the ineptitude of the EU’s Grand Panjandrums, but fails to address the underlying democratic deficit. The failure of politicians in the core Eurozone countries to secure the full consent of their voters when they forged ahead with the, now insufficient, institutions and procedures to support the Euro is coming back to bite them. Having convinced their voters that all would be fine and they had no need to worry their pretty heads about the complexity involved, these politicians live in dread of the reaction of their voters now that they will need their voters’ consent to implement changes (in a crisis situation) that should have been in place from the outset.