So while begging the professor's pardon, here are the nominees for the 2006 Preventing the Future Awards - those individuals or vested interests doing their utmost to keep Ireland from moving on.

Our first nominee is the socalled Shell to Sea/Rossport Five campaign. Enabled by a compliant media who shamefully buy into their faux nationalist line, this shower thinks they're the Second Coming of Bobby Sands, Padraig Pearse and Michael Davitt.

The natural gas find at Corrib off the Mayo coast really should be a no-brainer. If it wasn't, Russia's Vladimir Putin putting the occasional squeeze on Western Europe's gas supply should have been a hint.

That the opponents of the Shell-led consortium which wants to develop the gas find and bring it ashore to Ireland have as many arguments as there are shades of green, each contradicting the other; that they're allowed to peddle spurious safety arguments and intimidate dissidents into silence; is a national disgrace.

Second nominee is Vincent Sheridan, the VHI chief executive who has been so successful in defending the VHI's 80% share of the Irish market that he has now succeeded in forcing his closest competitor, BUPA, out of the market.

Sheridan has done this all while managing to wriggle out of complying with EU directives requiring insurance companies to be solvent and deflect initiatives to undermine his power-base by breaking up the semi-state. Ireland did her citizens a huge disservice this year by knuckling under to pressure from this dinosaur.

Third nominee is CIE. Not because they still haven't signed the necessary permissions for the redevelopment of Lansdowne Road - though we suspect you'll be hearing more about that soon. It's actually because CIE owns the largest single fleet of combustion engines in the state, and therefore could be doing a lot to move Ireland towards a biofuels-led transport economy.

But because CIE continues to receive a rebate on all of the excise taxes it has to pay on fossil fuels, it won't find much of a reason to change - as much as at least two government departments want it to. You want Ireland to meet its obligations to reduce its carbon footprint to combat climate change? CIE is a good place to start.

Fourth, continuing in the same vein, is the ESB, or more importantly, its unions. We might be able to forgive the average Euro120,000 salaries at Moneypoint. But its resistance to allowing renewable-source electricity generators like Eddie O'Connor's Airtricity on the grid for so many years merits its inclusion.

Fifth is education, where it is hard to pin down the villain responsible for the car-crash that is schools in the burgeoning commuter belt around Dublin. Why is it we can't build enough schools quickly enough in Meath and Kildare? It isn't lack of money. It isn't even active opposition from the Catholic church. It's the fact that the church is evaporating before our very eyes, and nothing and no one is able to fill the vacuum. If anything, it's our failure of imagination - which will come back to haunt us in 20 years.

But the winner of the 2006 Preventing the Future Award is? Ibec. It wasn't a union, resurgent clerics clinging to power or a displaced cultural elite leading the counter-revolution that made the top of the list. It is Ireland's premiere business lobby, which while bemoaning the quality of graduates in an August Irish Independent story offered the following: "Texting, online chat, Bebo - they all involve a style of interaction that is acceptable among young people, but which fails to make the grade in the working world" - words attributed to Caroline Nash.

The 'those kids - they'll have to get in line' mentality symbolises the gulf between Ireland's global-savvy rhetoric with foreign investors and its domestic reality.

Let's hope they improve before the end of next year.