By 9.30pm last Monday night, Brian Cowen, the cabinet, the Fianna Fáil party and a good number of political journalists were having a great time tucking into their beef, sea bass and vol au vents as the elements of what would become Garglegate were carefully oiled. Pre-dinner aperitifs had been downed at Blazers Bar. Now the wine flowed and the craic was mighty. Soon they would return to the bar to relax, to enjoy a bit of socialisation, as Noel Dempsey would describe it.

By unlucky coincidence, at the very minute that they were tucking into dessert, the rest of the country was gloomily stuck into the second part of Freefall on RTE, the documentary that, for all its moody shots of high-speed clouds looming over Dublin's glass office towers, grimly picked over the rotting carcass, not just of Anglo Irish Bank, but of Ireland Inc. It was a clear and wholly damning indictment of the massive mistakes made by this government. Nobody, not even Bertie Ahern, blamed it all on Lehmans.

That day, people had also been rocked by finance minister Brian Lenihan's suggestion that €3bn in adjustments/cuts flagged for the 2011 budget was actually "a minimum". What further hardships would 455,000 people out of work, 36,500 in mortgage arrears and thousands of small businesses teetering on the brink have to bear?

When the Taoiseach took to the airwaves, late, on Tuesday morning, people were probably ready to tune out, accustomed as we are to learning absolutely nothing from the jargon-filled, incomprehensible, directionless meanderings he usually serves up. What made this different was his "hoarseness". Was he having a laugh, or what?

None of us, as Noel Dempsey contemptuously put it to those who questioned the wisdom of Brian Cowen's post-party interview, wants to be the man's babysitter. But was it too much to ask that our taoiseach goes to bed before 3.30am when he has an early morning interview on national radio?

Nothing can make up for the damage done. The apology was sincere, the regret clear, the humbling uncomfortable to watch. The essential decency of Brian Cowen is indisputable, as are his respect for the office he holds and his love of his country. The national relationship with alcohol is so deep and complex it allows us to understand that and feel a great deal of sympathy for Brian Cowen, the man.

But Michael Noonan is correct. Cowen's reputation is damaged at home and abroad. This cannot be fixed.

Fianna Fáil ministers, whose tribal rallying around the indefensible exacerbated the national ire, are equally damaged. Batt O'Keeffe went so far as to describe the apology as "extremely manly", offering an unintended insult to half of the population in the process.

Micheál Martin, whom we are supposed to respect because his phrase "there are lessons to be learned" is some sort of code for an admission of error, must be as deluded as the rest of them if he thinks the substance of what the Taoiseach said was clear. It wasn't. It never is.

Uncertainty and vacillation have been the hallmark of the past two years. That is why interest rates for our international borrowings are so high. Nobody knows what to expect next, whether it's about the latest plan for Anglo, bank recapitalisation, the budget, public- sector reform, property taxes, water charges, university fees, class sizes, health entitlements or social welfare.

Lessons are never learned. The report of the Comptroller & Auditor General is proof of that. Waste is endemic in the public sector, be it Fás, the OPW or the HSE. Yet because nobody is ever accountable, the "system" – inscrutable, archaic, unfit for purpose – is never reformed.

The Croke Park agreement is supposed to be about that. It took a year to come up with that fudge. It is taking another year to implement it. It might as well be the Good Friday agreement for all the savings it is going to produce.

Brian Cowen clearly feels a huge onus of responsibility to fix all that was broken on his watch as finance minister. Tragically, as his party knows, as the Dáil knows, as the country knows, he is not the man to lead us out of this mess, as much as he wants to be.