Two words changed the political landscape last week. George Lee.

The announcement that RTÉ's economics editor and most dismal of the dismal scientists was Fine Gael's celebrity candidate in the Dublin South by-election has overshadowed every other piece of news all week.

The EU says our economic outlook is worse than the last worst prediction.

Who cares? George Lee is standing for Fine Gael.

The partnership talks are dead in all but name because the government has decided it's worth pushing the state to the point of bankruptcy to save the banks, but not worth borrowing a billion more to keep people in jobs, or to fund an insurance scheme for private-sector pensioners whose defined benefit schemes are on the brink of collapse.

Who cares? George Lee has had a haircut and is wearing a new suit.

Extremely serious reservations about the Nama toxic loans clean-up scheme are being voiced by some of our most influential economic experts at an Oireachtas finance committee. Nobody's listening – not even Brian Lenihan, who seems intent on gambling the future of the country on this unprecedentedly bold action.

Who cares? George Lee was mobbed at his first canvas in Rathfarnham.

There are times when the media's judgement about what makes the big issues and its obsession with celebrity prompts despair. But the mass hysteria over the decision of the country's leading economic commentator to join the Opposition is a measure of how deeply despondent and in need of hope this country is. That a personable journalist with a quick intellect, a strong grasp of economics and, most importantly, an ability to explain complex fiscal issues to a battered and bemused audience, can ignite the nation's interest so dramatically that his input could conceivably bounce Fine Gael into power come the next general election is symptomatic of the country's desperation for fresh ideas.

His first visit to his constituency had people queuing to shake his hand and wish him well. Some voters believe absolutely that his contribution will lead this country back to prosperity.

Time will tell.

Lee has framed his decision to move into politics in the terms people are yearning for. He is doing it for his children and for his country. The difference between him saying this and a politician saying it is that Lee's integrity is without question – after all, he and others who warned that the property bubble would inevitably burst, were vilified by the political establishment for daring to question the sands on which the good times were built.

More seasoned politicians and commentators shrug that he does not have the monopoly on idealism. The more cynical reckon that within a year, any notions that he can "fix" anything will be battered out of him, or will be defined in an entirely different way.

And there, surely is the nub of the disconnect between the political system and the people.

In the public's eye, when a politician from Fianna Fáil – and, it has to be said, almost as often from Fine Gael – says he wants to "fix things for his children", it usually means a political career in the Dáil or Seanad. Fianna Fáil's decision to nominate Shay Brennan and Maurice Ahern (neither of whom has any experience at national level other than through their respective father and brother) as by-election candidates was simply another signal to the electorate that they still don't get it. They are so far from getting it that they are not prepared to make even the smallest concession to the new politics that people want. They can't. Perhaps they are genetically incapable of it.

Fine Gael will bask in their coup for a while. Given the overwhelmingly positive reaction and the fact that Lee is such a national figure, it could catapult them into power more quickly than even they might have dared to hope. He certainly significantly strengthens their economic team.

But for Lee, it is a double-edged sword.

His attraction to the voter is that he is not of the political village that is Leinster House and its environs, although he clearly knows it. But what happens when the outsider, free to criticise without necessarily offering solutions, becomes a member of an unreformed, deeply dysfunctional political system which serves neither people nor democracy?

Among Lee's party colleagues, for example, will be young and idealistic Joe McHugh and Olwyn Enright, the husband-and-wife Fine Gael TDs who, as our story today reveals, double-claimed on overnight allowances worth almost €120,000 during the period they were married, until they agreed to stop the practice following public criticism. It was, of course, nothing more than what they were entitled to, but as we have seen so often within the political system, what a sense of entitlement.

What happens too, when Lee begins to specify the sort of public service reforms and efficiencies he has been highlighting in his economic journalism? Many regard it as a supreme irony that his own job within the public service has been held open for him in the form of a career break while he bids for political stardom. The entire public sector is proving incapable of the sort of reform that the country needs in these days of despair.

Lee is not naive. He is convinced of his own ability to effect reform. He is certainly a lightning rod for an alienated nation, but whether he can restore the necessary faith our political system needs in order to regain its moral authority is a tall order indeed.