Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I hope I am not about to reveal what was said in a private conversation, but as it has been done already during Leaders' Questions, perhaps it encourages me to do so. During the interregnum I was walking around St. Stephen's Green and who did I meet but the Minister for Finance who was walking the other way. We stopped to have a chat, as one does. We talked about social partnership, capital plans and, inevitably and briefly, books we would recommend to each other. I recommended to him The Myth Gapby Alex Evans, while he blessedly recommended to me a short book he had just read, On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder. It is a good book and worth reading as it is very interesting. It contains a thesis about politics having moved from the politics of inevitability, as he calls it, whereby it is just a question of hte inevitable progress towards liberal democracy, to a political system, as we see here, where one party defends the status quoand the other just consists of negation. However, this myth was shattered in 2008 in the crash. It is a myth that has collapsed and is no longer viable. Mr. Snyder argues that it is being replaced in many countries by an alternative, the politics of eternity, as he calls it.

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