THEY are all the same. Only out for what they can get for themselves. Wouldn't trust any of them as far as I could throw them. Chancers and crooks, the lot. Not a blind bit of difference between them.
Or alternatively: cynicism eroding confidence in our democratic institutions. Sniping and begrudgery subverting the State. No appreciation for the work we do.
In Irish politics, just weeks before the start of an election campaign, two sets of inanities compete for space. On one side there is a crass ignorance of politics which has reached a point where young men with DART accents are proud to go on the radio and boast that they know nothing at all about it, as if stupidity were an achievement. On the other, there is a refusal by many of those within the system to understand there are good reasons for cynicism and mistrust has been hard earned.
Asked what he thought of British civilisation, Mahatma Gandhi replied that it would be a good idea. The same might be said for Irish parliamentary democracy. If we can get it going, it could be a very good idea indeed.
Conversely, being cynical about politics does not protect you from the consequences when the system fails. Anyone who doubts that it is failing badly should read the report published last week by the Ombudsman, Kevin Murphy, on his office's investigation into complaints about the way the Department of Social Welfare has treated some pensioners.
THIS report is particularly damning because it challenges the democratic system on what would generally be seen as its strongest ground. The usual complaint about TDs is that they spend all their time on the little issues of personal entitlements - Mrs Murphy's pension, Mr Kelly's phone and not enough on legislation. The Ombudsman's report raises serious questions about whether, even at this nitty gritty level of clientilist politics, the system works.
The issue in question is a classic case of little people being messed around by the State. These people are entitled to old age or widow's pensions, but have failed to claim them on time, often because they were given wrong information by State.
In one case investigated, a man who should have got an old age pension in 1983 started to receive it only in 1992, largely because the Department had told him he had no entitlements. He is owed £33,000, which the Department refused to pay him. This is an extreme case, but the Ombudsman faces this general problem "year in, year out". At the moment, he has 59 similar cases on hand.
Where, though, has the political system been in all of this? Even if parish pump politics was working properly, there would surely be huge pressure to sort all this out. Here is a case of the State, as the Ombudsman puts it, "depriving insured, people, year after year, and without good cause, of arrears of pension". Why has parliamentary democracy riot worked to stop this happening? The answer, simply, is that parliament has nothing to do with it.
What happens to these unfortunate people is not a result of a law passed by the Oireachtas. The Social Welfare Acts set down the basic entitlements. But it is the "statutory instruments", the rules and regulations made under the Acts by the Minister of the day, that govern what really happen. One rule says that, if for any reason you do not claim your pension on time, you can claim no more than six months' arrears.
And, for all the attention the Dail pays to such regulations, we might as well be living in a dictatorship. It is unlikely that our TDs ever intended to make a law saying that, for example, someone who suffers from a psychiatric disorder and fails to claim an oldage pension at 66 should later be told that they can whistle for the money.
It is, on the contrary, likely that most of our TDs do not know there are statutory regulations which say precisely that this is what should happen. Statutory instruments, in theory the expression of the will of the people, are in reality often no more than an expression of the will of a Minister and/or some civil servants.
The Ombudsman says: "There is no effective scrutiny by the Oireachtas itself of these statutory instruments which, in many cases, can have far reaching consequences for the public."
He also highlights that there is "no longer any Oireachtas committee dedicated to the examination of statutory instruments and it appears the mechanisms for raising such instruments in the Oireachtas even if the volume of such statutory instruments allowed - are far from ideal."
A small minority of statutory instruments are - put to the Dail and Seanad for their approval. Most are simply "laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas", a grandiose way of saying that copies are placed in the Dail library. Only if some TD or senator happens to be diligent enough to notice, informed enough to understand, and passionate enough to pursue, does the notion of scrutiny arise. That is not, amazingly enough, a frequent occurrence.
AND, even then, it is not at all clear that there is anything the Dail can do about a statutory instrument it doesn't like. Even if the Government doesn't bother to lay a regulation before the Dail, it does not automatically become invalid. It is probably lawful in our democracy for regulations which have serious consequences for ordinary citizens to be made without any reference to the Dail.
In this case, it seems the members of the Dail knew nothing about the way in which the law was operating. Furthermore, it seems that neither the Dail nor the Ombudsman was told that the Department had, since 1961, a scheme going with the Department of Finance which allowed for discretionary payments to people caught out by the rigid operation of these rules.
The Ombudsman expresses "disquiet" that, even though his office has been investigating complaints of this nature since 1985, it was only told of this scheme in 1996. And he adds that, to the best of his knowledge, this scheme "may not even have been referred to the Oireachtas". A very important law, in other words, became a private affair.
Some of these specific problems are being tackled. The current Minister, Proinsias De Rossa, is drawing up new regulations to allow pensions to be paid in some cases where they are claimed late. The Freedom of Information Act should, when it comes into force next year, begin to change the culture in which the relationship of citizens to the State is conducted with all the transparency of the Third Secret of Fatima.
But neither of these changes will address the fundamental flaws in the operation of parliamentary democracy that Kevin Murphy has exposed with such clarity. If TDs can't manage even to fix the parish pump, bow can they expect us to trust them to wash the system clean?