Can you construct a career from a negative standpoint?

Is it possible to go your whole life without a positive public pronouncement emanating from your lips? Can you spend your time criticising everything everyone else says and yet offer nothing by way of alternative?

Or in a nutshell, can you actually see the glass half empty all of your days and think that you’ve a balanced approach to life?

It can work for some politicians and for pundits – but doesn’t criticism ultimately lose its effect if you never have anything good to say by way of counter-balance?

After all, if you don’t see the positive in anything, how could people possibly know what floats your boat?

And if you’re constantly criticising everything, how do people know when you really, really don’t like something?

The formation of the current Government was a case in hand – Sinn Fein sat on its hands, criticising every alternative but still refusing to move seats to a position where they’d actually have to do something instead of just cribbing about it?

The only thing you’d say in their defence is that, even if they decided they wanted to put their collective shoulder to the wheel, nobody wanted their help in pushing anyway.

There’s another pocket of the Dail where negativity reigns – the seats occupied by those who see themselves as the socialists or far left but in reality are just a bunch of whingers.

And in case we get to ignore them in their natural habitat, they’re also the staple diet of radio and television shows that want someone to bark at the Government just because they can.

At the recent Galway International Arts Festival, I had the privilege of chairing a panel on the future of Irish politics where the contributors included two former Ministers – Mary O’Rourke and Alex White – and long-time Fine Gael strategist Mark Mortell.

Whatever your views on their politics, the one thing that came across here was their collective honesty – Mark Mortell, for example, readily admitted they got their election campaign wrong because, for so many taxpayers, the recovery wasn’t as far underway as the marketers might have thought.

But the most honest – indeed, one might say, strident – contributions came from Alex White, freed of the shackles of public office.

His dander was raised a couple of times; once when I asked him if Labour effectively signed its own death warrant by going into Government as the minority partner in the first place, and again when a member of the audience questioned the value we got for the price of paying our politicians.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.