It may seem an odd claim for such an obvious proposal, but Fine Gael's suggestion of a TV channel devoted to public affairs could turn out to be the most productive idea in its programme, A Democratic Revolution, launched this week.
The channel would show the Dail in session four days a week, parliamentary committees when the Dail isn't sitting and in due course find time for tribunals, local authorities or other assemblies.
Sounds dull? So, I suppose, did the notion of broadcasting day-long sessions of the Public Accounts Committee's deliberations on DIRT - until they found a dedicated audience on TG4. And who'd have suggested reading out transcripts from the Flood and Moriarty tribunals until Joe Taylor and Malcolm Douglas, with a little help from Vincent Browne's radio show, made it a national pastime?
With even more help from Susie Kennedy, Taylor and Douglas turned it into provocative theatre and vivid commentary in Will We Get a Receipt For This? - Will We ****!. You don't have to be a political know-all to get the point.
There's a serious point, too, to Fine Gael's proposal, one of many designed to overhaul the institutions of the State. The title, A Democratic Revolution, is ambitious - but no more ambitious than it ought to be in these dangerous days for politics and public life. The authors, John Bruton and Jim Mitchell, have been worrying the theme for a long time - Bruton as leader of the Dail in the 1980s and Mitchell more successfully as chairman of the PAC.
The reforms they now propose cover the Oireachtas, State departments and agencies, judicial and legal systems, tribunals of inquiry, a constitutional council and laws governing political parties.
The aim is to make the government more accountable to the Oireachtas and an efficient Oireachtas more visible and accountable to the public, with longer sessions, fewer but more powerful committees and greater scope for the questioning of ministers.
All governments have become increasingly reluctant to account for themselves. And procedures intended for the 19th century have provided convenient shelters. Convenient for stonewalling ministers, frustrating - and expensive - for the rest of us.
One of the few telling points in the report of the beef tribunal drove home the message: if ministers had answered as expected in the Dail, there would have been no need for the whole confused and costly business. Indeed, if the people the ministers were trying to protect had been made to pay for the shenanigans the tribunal heard about, the need to insist on greater accountability would not be so urgent now.
As it is, lack of information contributes to lack of interest and lower polls. Frustration grows when even those who take more than a passing interest in public affairs find they can't follow events.
As the TG4 broadcasts showed, there's nothing to beat reality: voices heard and faces seen in question-and-answer or debate about issues of national importance. It's especially important when doubt and suspicion have reached the stage where nothing seems straightforward and every statement is examined for hidden meaning.
Fine Gael could hardly have chosen a week in which cynicism and suspicion were more widespread, or at any rate more loudly expressed. In the space of a few days we've seen the gathering gloom of inflation and what could turn out to be another oil crisis, heard cries of betrayal from an ardfheis of Eircom investors and warnings about risks to the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness.
There was also a damning report - less newsworthy, it seems, than clogged roads or investors' fury - which said that many young couples who might once have felt secure can now kiss goodbye to a chance of having a house of their own.
The surprise at the Eircom meeting was that no one seemed to analyse what had happened: a semi-state company, for which the people of this State had paid, was privatised - presumably at the insistence of many who later bought shares in it. A great deal of money - £50 million by Pat Rabbitte's reckoning - was paid to those who advised Mary O'Rourke and the Government on the privatisation. A great deal was spent on a lot of guff about a share-owning democracy and on selling shares to those who'd once owned the company.
The only issue publicly debated at any length was the price of the shares. The wisdom of privatisation seemed accepted by all but a few in the Communications Workers' Union who believed that only the fat cats would benefit.
Now, many of the most vociferous of Eircom's critics sound as if they believe it's still, in some sense, a company owned by and controlled by the State, as if it were not in a free market, as they call it, to be bought by whoever has the money to pay for it.
The mood in the RDS was too exciting for Geraldine Harney of RTE. She found the anger "palatable" (Ray MacSharry found it hard to swallow) and described Denis O'Brien as "Esat's brainchild" - not, as we'd been led to believe, the hero who emerged fully formed from the womb of global capitalism.
Another warrior of rampant capitalism, Michael O'Leary, meanwhile showed his mettle when he told the Wall Street Journal that the best way to settle Ryanair's differences with Aer Rianta was with Semtex, especially at a board meeting. Aer Rianta, in case you don't know, hasn't been privatised yet. And Semtex, as one of Aer Rianta's worker directors, Peter Dunne, reminded Pat Kenny, was used in an explosion which killed a worker at Dublin Airport in 1974. When he was invited to withdraw his remark, O'Leary refused.
The proposal to reserve a channel for constant coverage of the Dail and related affairs is intended to breathe new life into politics, weakened by indifference and undermined by cynicism in a society that has fallen prey to the powerful and greedy.
The proposal deserves support. dwalsh@irish-times.ie