In my more fanciful moments, when my mind is wandering, I cobble together a cabinet of columnists in my head. The idea came to me a few years ago when I heard a Fianna Fáil TD wittering on about the media and how easy it was for commentators to criticise and denigrate government decisions when they would never themselves have the responsibility of governing. If journalists wanted to run the country, they should go about it in the usual way and put themselves forward for election, this backbencher said. Her implication was that knocking on doors, putting up posters with your picture on them, and promising to help people with their planning applications somehow qualified you to run a country.

This idea would be obvious nonsense in itself, even if the ruination of the country by such door-knocking, poster-erecting politicians had not recently hammered home the point. The notion that democracy automatically produces good governments – as opposed to merely legitimate ones – has been undermined so many times now it's hardly worthy of comment. A cabinet of columnists (or engineers, or farmers, for that matter) would be no less qualified to run Ireland than the government currently in charge, and probably a lot more so.

Because it's my game, I get to be Taoiseach. Also in my fantasy cabinet are Sarah Carey, Elaine Byrne and Fintan O'Toole from the Irish Times, Shane Coleman and Una Mullally of the many candidates from this parish, Brendan Keenan and Eugene McGee from the Irish Independent, Gene Kerrigan and Shane Ross from the Sunday Independent and Liam Mackey from the Irish Examiner. Others are reshuffled in and out as the mood takes me. For example, David McWilliams – or Basil Brush's da, as I call him – was a member up to last week, but I had to fire him because of worries over cabinet confidentiality.

The people in my fantasy cabinet are chosen for two reasons: firstly they represent a variety of areas of expertise. Most importantly, they bring a variety of viewpoints to the table. This cabinet governs from the left, but it is informed by intelligent thinkers from the right.

You might think a government that contains Fintan O'Toole and Brendan Keenan would never get any work done, its decision-making capacity rendered useless by learned arguments and long conversations about the economy. But I would argue that it would be the tension in this government that would produce some creative and novel solutions to problems. I would further argue that it is the absence of any such tension in Brian Cowen's cabinet that has made it such an ineffective unit. It has become a blinkered, one-dimensional juggernaut which rolls over all alternative viewpoints. Nuance and alternative thinking are the enemy.

Because of this inability to listen, to adapt, to take on different viewpoints or think the unthinkable, the government is about to make a dangerous economic situation worse. It has decided (or a tiny section of it has decided, with not a peep of objection from the rest) that the "adjustment", as Cowen calls it, can be achieved only by taking billions of euro out of the economy, through pay cuts in the public service, and through social-welfare cuts. Because it is easier to hit the sitting target of a €204 per week dole recipient than rework the tax system to take more money from high earners who can afford it, that is the way, according to the new consensus, that we must proceed. And because there is no real debate in cabinet about the approach to be taken, there has been no consideration of the strong possibility that this approach (by taking so much money out of the economy so suddenly) will plunge Ireland into an unprecedented depression next year.

For similar reasons, there has been no substantive discussion about the many other ways money could be raised. On Thursday, for example, it was estimated that the black economy is costing Ireland €461m per week; where are the plans to solve that problem? How much are our off-shore gas supplies worth and why are we handing them over – with little benefit to the state – to companies like Shell? Could we find a way to use the National Pension Reserve Fund – raided earlier this year to fund AIB and BoI to the tune of billions – to soften the impact of what is about to occur?

These questions – and others – are not being asked because we are governed by a mostly overwhelmed, intellectually uncurious cabinet, which believes that there is only one train on the platform. By the time it terminates in disaster next year, it will be too late to do anything about it.

ddoyle@tribune.ie

total pro: Putting guests at ease is not flirting

A few years ago, I was interviewed by Miriam O'Callaghan on Prime Time. Like most people who wouldn't be regulars on live television, I was a little nervous before the show began, but O'Callaghan chatted away to me, laughed, joked and asked questions as though we were sitting in the pub having a drink. By the time the show started, I was relaxed, and because I was relaxed, I gave a better and more informative interview than I might otherwise have done. As a result, the whole experience must have been better for the viewer too, which is presumably what you're trying to achieve if you're presenting a live TV show. At no point before or during the interview did it occur to me that O'Callaghan was flirting with me. I just thought she was behaving like a true professional.