A friend phoned with news of the revolution. "Ireland's going to become ungovernable," he predicted. "You won't see blood on the streets but there'll be more protests, more crime, more strikes and more tax evasion. Trust has broken down."

That was the day the bus drivers abandoned their depots to strike in Dublin. Taxi drivers were clogging up Dublin city centre again with a rally outside the Dáil. The Revenue had warned about a re-emerging black economy. And between headlines about money-mad politicians commemorating the Easter Rising there was a press report that house burglaries are on the increase. Citizens are turning against each other: thieving and inconveniencing and begrudging fellow victims of a dysfunctional ruling class.

My friend was never one for hysterics. The conversation reminded me of another a few weeks ago with a hospital doctor who is admired by his colleagues for his bolshie advocacy on behalf of his patients. "I'm so full of anger," the doctor had confessed while deploring the inefficiencies of the HSE. "There's nothing more I can do. Nothing. They've all the power. I'm beginning to think I can't actually change anything."

His despair was temporary. The happy news is that normal service has resumed, judging by leaked accounts of the good doctor's fulminations on his patients' behalf as he keeps endeavouring to save lives. All the same, it was a worrying glitch.

The more we give into defeat, the greater the threat to our collective well-being. Abdicating our individual investment in society is the road to ruination, as our senior citizens are demonstrating. Radicalised by the government's withdrawal of medical cards for the over-70s last October and the discovery of their own political potency, they have founded the Senior Solidarity Party to contest June's local elections. It's a bracingly bold initiative by a section of the community the government had deemed electorally dispensable. There is such sweet symbiosis as the party's conception coincides with the demise of the PDs, who contributed disproportionately to the culture of individualism and greed exacerbating our present predicament. Protagonists of "grey power" teach the rest of us a lesson. Our problems do not stem from the sole fact that a small coterie of arrogant incompetents hold all the power, but that the many others motivated by principled goals are willing to surrender that power to them.

Abdicating our individual duty to help shape the nation can no longer be an option. A worrying vacuum exists in national politics. Government by Fianna Fáil and the Greens is an unfunny comedy of errors. The alternative offered by Fine Gael, despite Richard Bruton's impressiveness, is hardly reassuring. Eamon Gilmore and Joan Burton talk the people's language but Labour baulks at the prospect of fighting a general election without a Plan B coalition arrangement. Ultimately, it will always be amenable to getting into bed with Fianna Fáil. There are undecided voters who never wavered in their lives before now and for them, Declan Ganley, champion of capitalism and orthodox Catholicism, comes riding to the rescue. There are, indeed,worse indicators of poverty than a plummeting GDP.

Ireland needs a new political party; one that reflects the sweeping reassessments that have taken place in the past six months, ever since the old order started to disintegrate. The traditional left-right pigeonholes of politics have been brushed aside by those events, as have the divides tracing the fault lines of social class. No more are you a bleeding heart, pinko liberal if you decry injustice, political favouritism, unaccountability, mé-féinism, cronyism and inequality. There is a hunger for the new creed that the common good supercedes all else. Yet politicians still think they own the power. Ibec still thinks it owns the economy. And both of them think the rest of us so gullible that, if they tweak a few rules and banish a few faces from the boardroom, the people will be pacified.

One popular, coherent movement is what is required. This is not a time to repeat the mistakes of the last recession when single-issue candidates protesting against potholes and hospital closures exploited the big parties' hunger for power at any price.

One former politician who grew ever more disillusioned the more he listened to his colleagues and knew their utterances to be half-truths and untruths still believes that politics can achieve the impossible. I told him about the phone call with the despairing doctor who felt he could not really change anything but the politician said change was in the hands of all of us.

To my friend who called with news of the revolution, he would say: The time has come for the armchair analysts to stand up and be counted.

Your country needs you.