It’s true that I’m not the sharpest tool in the box. I never have been. It takes me time to work my way through the details and that’s very often a handicap, but every so often, it can be an advantage. Occasionally, it means that I have to stop and ask the hard question: what does that mean?

Last week, the government made an offer to the general public if only they’d vote to abolish the Senate.

The offer was this. If you get rid of that privileged elite in the Senate, we’ll make sure that in future all new laws will have experts involved in drawing them up.

I’m not the brightest ever, so I had to stop and think about this for a minute. Are they really saying that if we agree to get rid of the Senate, with its privileged elite, the government will consult a different privileged elite? That’s what it looks like but I might be wrong.

Am I so utterly stupid that I could be getting this completely skaw-ways? That’s perfectly possible, so please correct me if I’m wrong.

Is that what they’re telling us? Get rid of the old elite so that we can replace it with our new one, instead of fixing what’s wrong with the thing we have?

Are they saying that they don’t want our present parliament to have any other body overseeing its behaviour? Are they saying that the faults of the upper house simply can’t be corrected and that the only answer is to abolish it, leaving the government’s activities unobstructed by outside interference?

Surely a party like Fine Gael with its proud tradition of anti-authoritarianism would never behave in such an authoritarian way.

Right?

Let’s put our trust in this political party with a proud tradition of anti-Fascism.