It sometimes appears, particularly with Labour and Fine Gael in such rude health in the opinion polls, that Fianna Fáil is undergoing some kind of reverse evolution, from homo sapiens, as represented by Sean Lemass, to the cabal of monkeys currently in charge of the country. How else to explain the meaningless, inconsistent chatter that comes from members of cabinet whenever the future of the economy is being discussed? On Wednesday, after ministers met at Farmleigh, Dermot Ahern suggested that we should all go shopping. The level of personal savings had risen from about 4% to 12%, he said. "So what we really need to do as a nation is to try to get those people who are saving their money to spend their money in the economy".

The big problem with this approach is that it is also government policy to get us to put what money we have in the new National Solidarity Bond, where we cannot touch it for 10 years if we want to benefit from the scheme's generous interest payments. So which do we do? Spend or save? The government says the money in the bond will fund capital investment projects and therefore stimulate the economy, but so far, as the Sunday Tribune reports today, hardly anybody seems to want to get involved. It's a government savings scheme, and nobody trusts the government. This is what happens when economic policy is run by monkeys.

Brian Cowen, the primate of All Ireland, has been reduced by the pressure of governing to blaming the media. "You know, we have enough frankly of this pervasive negativity," he said the other morning. "So can we kindly get the real message out?"

It is said in political circles that the taoiseach had been greatly annoyed earlier that day when he heard Aine Lawlor on Morning Ireland complaining plaintively that it was raining and we were broke. Cowen might prefer that Lawlor had broken into a verse of 'The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow' but in her defence, it was raining and we are broke. She was only saying what the rest of us were thinking.

Cowen, and others in the Fianna Fáil jungle, clearly believe the media should play some role in cheerleading for their governments in times of crisis. It's our patriotic duty. Fianna Fáil backbencher Michael Mulcahy joined in the argument during the week when he suggested that the media was very happy to report doom and gloom, but not so keen to balance that with good news stories when companies announced that they would be taking on new employees.

With respect, this is nuts. Firstly, new job announcements are reported prominently, particularly by RTÉ. But 40 averagely-paid jobs in Roscommon or wherever can never balance out the damage being done to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people every day because of the mismanagement of the economy by Mulcahy and his colleagues. If anything, the media is being too positive, treating Brian Lenihan as though he were some sort of messiah when it is his fundamentalist approach to the economy which is directly responsible for the lack of spending that Dermot Ahern now bemoans. Journalists are people too (oh yes we are) and would welcome the chance as much as anyone to change the narrative from gloom to boom, but at the moment we have very little to work with.

The ESRI's best-case scenario for the economy suggests that we might be back at full employment in five years' time. Cowen sees this and being a slave to figures, models, predictions and statistics sees only good news. Why, he wonders, isn't the media making more of it?

The media sees this and, being a slave to the circulation-boosting need to reflect their readers' concerns, wonders what this kind of prediction actually means. Five years is a long time for hundreds of thousands of unemployed people to wait for a job. Some of them, of a certain age, and a certain skill level, will never work again. And that's the best-case scenario?

On the economy, the media is doing its job. Brian Cowen isn't. Speaking after the Farmleigh gathering, as journalists looked for some words of hope and inspiration to people beaten down by the wilful pessimism of the media, the taoiseach said: "Predominantly we're looking at obviously the adjustments on the expenditure side". This is jargon and gobbledegook. Obviously. Much of the media would happily row in behind the right Taoiseach with the right policies. But it's a long time since we had the right Fianna Fáil taoiseach. The Lemass era feels like a millennium ago.

When it comes to my pixar dvds, you know the rules, and so do I

Rick Astley, the popular crooner from the 1980s, was around in my house during the week during a brief holiday in Ireland. A big movie fan, he was browsing through my dvd collection when he came across a few that he liked the look of. "Can I borrow a few of your Pixar dvds?" he asked me. "I'll post them back to you when I'm finished with them."

"That shouldn't be a problem," I replied. "You can take Toy Story if you like, and you can have Wall-E, Cars and The Incredibles as well. But I'm never gonna give you Up."

ddoyle@tribune.ie