If aliens were to land on the Hill of Tara and utter the immortal words "Take me to your leader", the most surprising thing would not be the presence of little green men but the belief that we had such a thing as a leader.

To any sensible alien, the image presented by Ireland in recent weeks would suggest almost complete anarchy. Schools closed. Stationary taxis blocking the streets. Gangs of foul-mouthed men bravely using women and children as a battering ram against Garda cordons. Roads and footpaths dug up, apparently at random. Despairing nurses threatening to strike because they just can't stand the chaos of their working lives any more. The Programme for Prosperity and Fairness teetering on the edge of collapse. More people sleeping rough in the boom town of Dublin than in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Oxford and Nottingham put together.

And while all of this is going on, the Junior Minister with responsibility for the taxi crisis decides that the new President of Mexico could not possibly be inaugurated without his own august presence. The Taoiseach jets off to New York to unveil a statue which has been standing upright without his help for quite some time. The Government, it seems, has decided to refute accusations that it is constantly involved in crisis management by declining even to manage the crises any more.

On Wednesday, for example, when the Opposition raised Bobby Molloy's trip to Mexico at a time when his Department is engaged in delicate and difficult attempts to defuse the taxi crisis, the Taoiseach blithely replied that things had been left in the capable hands of the Department's secretary general. While many people might be tempted to think that the idea of leaving everything to the civil servants has its merits, the fact remains that governments are supposed to be interested in governing. The style of the present administration, however, is increasingly one of masterly inactivity. . . without the mastery.

The handling of the taxi issue illustrates the pattern. First, there is a long period of drift while a bad situation gets worse. Then there is a split-the-difference manoeuvre, an attempted stroke which aims to please everyone and satisfies nobody. Then the courts step in to fill the vacuum where political management ought to be. Then the pendulum swings completely and there's a big, bold gesture whose policy and political consequences have not been thought through.

For anyone thinking about deregulating taxis, two things were absolutely predictable. Opening up entry to the industry would require active regulation of services to ensure that standards were maintained and that cars were available at off-peak times. And deregulation would be fiercely opposed, not just by the taxi-drivers but by their political supporters, especially within Fianna Fail.

Yet there is no sign that either of these things crossed the Government's mind before deregulation was announced. There is no policy for organising the new taxi regime into a consumer-friendly service. And there seems to have been no strategy for dealing with the inevitable campaign of disruption by the taxi-drivers.

Politically, Bertie Ahern seems to have made no effort to warn Willie O'Dea or Ivor Callely to stay on-message, even though it was obvious that signs of an internal Fianna Fail split would encourage the taxi-drivers to up the ante in their protests.

In terms of law and order, the management of those protests has been disastrous. We had the ludicrous spectacle of ordinary drivers who manoeuvred on to a hard shoulder to try to get around a blockade of taxis being summonsed by the Garda while the illegal blockades themselves were granted blanket immunity from the laws of the land.

The school closures resulting from the ASTI's refusal to supervise pupils, meanwhile, were just as predictable. Yet, again, the Government seemed to have absolutely no strategy for dealing either with the immediate issues or the larger dispute. On the specific questions raised by the work-to-rule, the Government had no help to offer. Should parents send their sons and daughters to school anyway? Should schools try to organise other people to do the supervision? Phone a friend, ask the audience, but don't ask Michael Woods.

And in relation to the dispute itself, Mr Woods has remained as passive and stoical as a Buddhist hermit. Even for the sake of political spin, it would make sense to offer the ASTI something more complex than a blanket "no". A commission on teaching, similar to the one on nursing which helped to solve another difficult dispute, might show some capacity for creative engagement with the underlying issues. Yet it would also require a capacity to take the initiative and set the agenda which seems far beyond the Government's range.

Even simple things just don't get done. Some 21/2 years ago, for instance, the Government committed itself in the Belfast Agreement to establishing an Irish Commission on Human Rights. The parallel body in Northern Ireland is long since up and running. However, last Tuesday the Cabinet deferred the appointment of the commission for the third time. It's not even as if the Taoiseach and his Ministers would have to do much. A distinguished committee under T.K. Whitaker has already drawn up a shortlist of appointees.

Someone, somewhere will probably start to read something sinister in the Cabinet's inability to tick a few names on the list. In all likelihood, however, the real explanation is just that they can't summon up enough interest and energy to get the business done.

Meanwhile, horrible little bits of State mismanagement float on to the radar screens of political consciousness and then disappear. On Wednesday, Opposition TDs Joe Higgins and Pat Rabbitte, scrutinising a Bill to transfer the debts of the State fertiliser company NET to the Department of Finance, tried to find out how NET had paid £188 million in interest on a debt of £164 million but still owed £187 million. The Government couldn't tell them, not because it was trying to cover up anything, but because it simply didn't know. Expecting a government to know what's happening to huge amounts of public money is obviously a bit much.

Yet even this was not the worst example of the Government's inability to use unprecedented resources to actually achieve real progress on the ground. While Focus Point was revealing an appalling growth of homelessness in Ireland, the Minister for the Environment, Noel Dempsey, was quietly handing £27 million of his housing budget back to the Exchequer because he hadn't managed to spend it. There could be no clearer image of a Government which likes to be in power but has lost interest in using power.