Protestor at the D‡il makes all our anger concrete

At four in the afternoon on Monday, my aunt – who's in her 80s and has a heart condition – went into UHG for a hip X-ray. They kept her there until two in the morning, then told her to come back at nine. And the government reckons another 50 million can be shaved off a 'service' like that.

The summer's gone, and time is right to get the bastards out. A range of tactics are available. At one end of the scale there's Fine Gael's simple but effective plan to just be awkward buggers. That is unquestionably legitimate – in fact it's the system of pairing that throws democracy into question, as it dismisses any possibility that a Dáil debate might ever change anyone's mind about anything. At the other end, you have driving heavy industrial vehicles into Leinster house. Now this . . . this is of questionable legitimacy.

I wouldn't condemn it as terrorism out of hand. At the time of writing it doesn't seem that the intention was to cause death or injury. Despite its huge mass the truck didn't even break through the gates, so it doesn't appear to have been travelling at much speed.

 Fergus O’Dowd of Fine Gael said that a Guard on duty had to "jump out of the way", but he is a TD so you can't really believe what he says. (I mean you can understand why, being personally involved, he might exaggerate. I didn't mean to imply for one moment that all TDs are habitual liars.) He claimed that if it had happened at a different time people might have been killed. True perhaps, but more an appeal to emotion than sense. People might have been killed if it had happened at a different place too. Clearly, though it at least borders on being violent protest, and it is very hard to make a case for using any violence against a legitimate government.

But, is this a legitimate government? I'm quite serious. In order to be legitimate, a government must have the assent of the ruled. Obviously the current crowd no longer has that, but there is the reasonable exception in a democracy for an administration to remain in power until the next election. It's only when one cancels an election it knows it will lose that it becomes a dictatorship.

And how is that not exactly what they're doing? Now three constituencies have to go without proper representation. The Government pretends that this is acceptable; nowhere in the Constitution, they argue, does it say that bye-elections need to be held in any particular period of time. While that's true, it is probably because the framers of the Constitution didn't think you needed to spell out the flaming obvious. They should be held as soon as practicably possibly, otherwise people are being disenfranchised for no reason except the Government's political advantage.  

One wonders why this administration is so bitterly determined to hang on to power. Why not let the opposition parties do the dirty work? I can think of one reason. In Iceland this week, the government that came to power after their economic collapse moved to prosecute the previous prime minister for misconduct.

Is that the future Fianna Fáil's leadership is so desperate to postpone?