New Politics: Where we talk about everything and achieve nothing

Leinster House breaks for its summer recess today with most TDs and Senators running towards Dublin Airport or back to their constituencies.

The boys and girls will have nine-and-a-half weeks to assess what they have managed to achieve over the last eleven-and-a-half weeks.

Not that that will take too long. Five pieces of legislation passed so far (with three more expected to be completed today), just one Oireachtas committee fully functioning, and not a single decision made.

The five pieces of legislation that have passed through both Houses have all been carried from the last Dáil except one.

The Bill to suspend water charges for nine months being the only new piece of legislation.

That means the only new piece of legislation is to implement the decision to delay a decision.

It should also be noted not one of those acts have been signed into law by the President.

That’s New Politics though, where we seem to talk about everything and achieve nothing.

The break will surely give them time to ponder some of the other great mysteries about new politics.

For example, do we need to have a committee meeting every week to decide the running of the Dáil, while another one meets across the corridor to decide how to reform the workings of the same chamber?

Does it makes any sense to group votes on a Thursday afternoon, leaving TDs stuck in the chamber for an hour and a half, but free to avoid the Dáil for the other two-and-a-half days?

Do we need pre-legislative and post-legislative scrutiny? It is the equivalent of having pre and post reviews of your dinner. Surely both are further obstacles to getting legislation passed.

It has been a pretty dismal term by all accounts. No decision of consequence has been made in a Dáil term dominated by discussion, rather than implementation, of New Politics.

The Government is quite content it can sail into the summer having dodged all controversies by inviting the kitchen sink to the Ministerial corridor for consensus meetings.

Fianna Fáil can go quietly into the break having managed to fool people into thinking they are an opposition party who quietly hold the power to the Government's purse strings.

The Independent Alliance and other Independent Ministers will be thanking their lucky stars voters haven’t yet realised they are part of Government.

And the opposition, like the rest of us, will be happy to see the back of a weak and barely functional Dáil.

September will shine a light on New Politics, we hope. Maybe they just the need nine and a half weeks to settle into it.