Generals always fight the last war. Yet in doing so they lose sight of radically new circumstances, ordering the cavalry to charge at machine-guns or building impregnable Maginot lines that a mobile enemy swerves around. Ireland’s current political impasse arises because we have been fighting the last war. We got hammered and humiliated in the great Celtic Tiger crusade. Our invincible Grand Armée, the boom of whose artillery was always getting boomier, met its Waterloo on St Stephen’s Green in the headquarters of Anglo Irish Bank.

Source: The Irish Times March 03, 2020 05:00 UTC