Of course, we all know that cabinet ministers and certain TDs will be doing some work over the 12-week summer recess. But tired as they are, and in need of a break from internal dissension inside Leinster House and the angry protests of the electorate outside, the length of the summer holiday remains the farce it always was.

In the midst of a recession that threatens to break our economy, the decision to take the longest summer break of any European parliament reinforces public cynicism in politics and makes it all the harder for the government to muster the united national effort required for recovery.

The narrative of this government right from the start has been contradictory. The "do as I say, not as I do" sense of entitlement may have been dented, but it has not gone away, you know.

The long summer break is an historic and traditional entitlement of life in Dáil éireann, so it stays. "Nonsense" is the only rebuttal the Taoiseach can find in himself to respond to legitimate criticism of the lengthy recess. It speaks volumes about his mindset and epitomises why nothing fundamental ever seems to change. People are entitled to ask why, if the body politic can't even reform itself so that it can meet the demands of a small nation trying to reinvent itself in supremely difficult times, how then can its leaders expect the citizens to go the extra mile?

It is another sign that we are not "all in this together". The Taoiseach explains tetchily that government ministers will be preparing for the budget and that Oireachtas committees will be meeting throughout the weeks until they're all back on 29 September, a distant hazy date one-quarter of a year away.

That doesn't explain why we have to put up with a part-time parliament. The Oireachtas is the legislature of this country. When it doesn't sit, laws cannot be passed, leaving a backlog of reform in every walk of life from business law, debt and bankruptcy, to children's rights and bioethics, from consumer rights over issues such as transparency of house prices and corporate crime to a host of health and educational issues. All these important areas of a modern society and of a modern economy remain untouched by modern policy-framing. It further weakens our ability to cope with the changes we experience in 21st century life, be they economic, political, medical or scientific or technological.

Society cannot be reformed if the Dáil is not debating reforming legislation.

Still, the Taoiseach is correct when he says the content of the next budget is vital.

But again, the narrative is totally contradictory. This budget has to cut a further €3bn from public spending if fiscal targets have a hope of being met. We know just how hard it was to get €4bn last year and even with that, progress in terms of lowering the gap between what we spend and what we take in has been modest.

The nation feels as if it's already endured an economic marathon, yet we're all but standing still.

The Croke Park agreement is supposed to bring efficiency savings within the public sector in return for a moratorium on further pay cuts and redundancies. An implementation body has been set up to ensure these savings materialise. But if the Oireachtas can't work a day longer, expectations for a speedy transformation of the public sector into a lean, efficient, well-oiled machine that drives growth and prosperity have to be pessimistic. When it takes five years for the Department of Enterprise to produce a value-for-money audit into a Fás course, is it any wonder that scepticism about the ability of the civil service to respond to the unemployment crisis is high?

The unpalatable reality is that we're still spending €50bn on public services with a tax take of €32bn, a gap that is completely unsustainable, as the Taoiseach drily pointed out in the Dáil, to the backdrop of 2,000 people with disabilities who'd hauled themselves to the gates to protest about respite care cuts.

How problems over such tiny amounts of money (130 places out of a total of 5,000) got to the point where severely disabled people and their families were frightened into travelling to Dublin to highlight their fears is perplexing in itself. The day after the protest, Mary Harney launched an ESRI report that got to the heart of the problem. It proposes a patient-centred approach to healthcare funding, which allows for tiered entitlement to medical cards and an end to the unwieldy block budget system that stifles efficiency.

The minister says it has a lot to recommend it. She will present it to government… after the summer recess.

To paraphrase John Cleese in that wonderful study of time and motion, the film Clockwise: It's not the despair. You can take the despair. It's the hope that gets you.