AT SOME stage in the political madness of the last two years, one of the many cracked notions that took hold was that fraternising between public representatives and businessmen was a Bad Thing. It became this mad, moral certainty, largely driven by -- who else? -- journalists. Journalism is a morally ambivalent profession at the best of times, and most journalists have a fairly loose relationship with perfection in their own lives. Which is perhaps why they are so good at getting on their moral high horses about everyone elses. The idea that a puritanical fatwa could be driven by journalists, of all people, is a ridiculous one. But in the mad obsessiveness of the past year or two, that is just one of the incongruities we have been faced with.

So, business and politics mixing, we were told by these perfectionist puritans, was a cancer, a cancer exemplified in the Fianna Fail tent at the Galway races, which became a byword for everything that was wrong with this country. Builders and developers, who were employing so many people and driving so much economic activity, were regarded as 'Bad Men' who should not be allowed to pollute political thinking, which had to remain pure, uninfected by capitalism and other viruses.

Of course, the funny thing is that, while that supposedly unholy alliance of public representatives and the private sector was going on, most of us didn't think there was a whole lot wrong with the country. As more people start losing their jobs, as they watch their children having to emigrate, as more people start having difficulty paying their mortgages, that era of Fianna Fail consorting with builders will probably be looked back on as a golden age.

What do we now have instead? We have a bunch of guys running the country who don't talk to builders, who probably look down on them as ruffians and 'trade'. We have, as our Government, what appears to be a bunch of civil servants obsessed with the minutiae of balancing books and obsessively shaving a few bob off one side of their budget. Not only do they proudly not consort with builders, they don't appear to consort with anyone from the real world. This is what the new Puritanism of the era of Mahon has visited on us. It's good enough for journalists to hang around with, and get stories and pints and dinners, from every vested interest in the private sector, from builders to lawyers to chancers, but apparently the Government must live in a rarefied environment of its own, uncorrupted by the real world.

And what does that give us? It gives us a whole week of politics, and the last week of politics we'll have for quite a while, dominated by the intricacies of an accounting exercise. The Government put on a dog and pony show about saving a minuscule amount of money by practising the kind of efficiency they should be practising anyway.

And instead of calling them on it, and saying, "that's a very nice accounting exercise, but in the meantime what the hell are you going to do to stimulate the economy", the Opposition buys into it and starts to argue about the details of the accounting exercise. And the media spends the week obsessing about the accountancy exercise. And, meanwhile, the economy tumbles out of control, with no one paying a bit of attention to it. It was Civil Servanty nerds arguing about nothing, while a bunch of other Civil Servanty nerds wrote about it as if it mattered. As if saving half a billion was going to save the economy, when there was probably half a billion wiped off the value of our houses and our pensions in the time it took for these guys to outline their measures.

Somehow, the Government, the Opposition and the media all bought into the notion that saving this half a billion was what mattered last week. It was crazy stuff.

Of course, the opposition and media reaction was pretty much a product of the Mahonisation of

RUAIRI QUINN, SOAPBOX, BACK PAGE

ANALYSIS, PAGE 28

the country as well. All of them have lost sight of the bigger picture or any kind of original thinking. They blindly accept whatever agenda is presented to them, and then think they are being smart or opposing by obsessing over the detail of it.

Would it ever strike one of them to think that the really smart thing to do, instead of taking on the bullshit agenda they are spoonfed and arguing with it ad nauseum, would be to say, actually, there's another more important agenda here, a bigger picture. And this bigger picture is what we should all be talking about. But the political and media set are locked together in this dance of unreality and no one is bright or courageous enough to stop it and deal with reality.

Which brings us back to fraternising with builders. Disclosure first: I take a drink with builders the odd time. I don't think it compromises me in carrying out my duty as a journalist. In fact, I have rarely walked away from meeting a builder without knowing considerably more about what's going on in the real world than I did before I met them. You see, builders don't live in a world where a bit of shaving of costs saves the day. To be a good developer, or a good entrepreneur in general, you need to understand economics, a bit of sociology, some psychology, a bit of statistics and much more. Like all entrepreneurs, builders need to watch everything about how people are living their lives. They need to be able to spot little funny details, things the rest of us mightn't, about how people live, and they need to spot them before everyone else, and understand their larger implications.

And as much as you can argue that some builders mightn't have seen this current chaos coming, I'd say they knew a damn sight more about what was coming than the Government did. Builders, like all businessmen, are out there

engaging in the real world all the time, and their ability to do this, and to read the real world correctly, has enormous consequences for them. They are the direct opposite of civil servants like Brian Cowen and that frightened rabbit Brian Lenihan Junior, who can mess around with accountancy exercises in fairlyland, safe in the knowledge that their failure to engage with reality has no immediate consequences for them, or their jobs, or their income.

Mr Cowen and Mr Lenihan need to hang around with builders a bit more. In fact, I think that Fianna Fail should take an immediate decision to reinstate the Fianna Fail tent at the Galway Races. And they should all go down there and get pissed together. If Mr Cowen is a bit shy or aloof about talking to builders, they should ask Bertie to come down and break the ice for him. And Mr Cowen should listen to the builders.

As well as that, on this seemingly interminable tour of the country Mr Cowen has undertaken since he became leader, he should call into lots of small-business people. No one knows reality like a restaurateur or a boutique owner. Maybe they can wake Mr Cowen up.

Show me a politician who hangs with business people a bit and I'll show you a politician who is in touch with reality.

Look at Ruairi Quinn. As an architect, Mr Quinn has presumably known a few builders in his day. At the very least, he probably chats to his brother Lochlann, a hugely successful and realistic businessman, now and then. No coincidence, then, that it was Mr Quinn who put forward the most sensible suggestion yet about public sector pay. If the lower-paid guys in the public sector are the main concern when it comes to a pay freeze, don't freeze their pay.

In the meantime, freeze the pay of the higher-paid civil servants, who can afford a pause. God knows most of the higher-paid guys now outstrip their equivalents in the private sector and have the added bonus of guaranteed jobs and pensions. So let them bear the brunt of the cutbacks.

It was a realistic workable solution. The kind of reality that Mr Cowen and Mr Lenihan and the rest of them need to be confronting now. A bit of the kind of reality that might encourage them to stop wasting their time and our time with bullshit, which is what they did last week.

In fact, it might not be a bad idea for Mr Cowen to swallow his pride, put together an emergency committee of successful business people, and sit down with them every few days with just one item on the agenda -- how do we get things moving again, how do we get people confidently spending for the next while? Until Mr Cowen confronts this reality, he and his gang, and politics in general, are actually completely irrelevant in this country.

When a boffin like Richard Bruton is being held as the new guru, the only straight talker in Leinster House, and when he and the Labour Party are the only ones making sense about stimulating the economy, we know we're in trouble.