Brian Cowen is a Taoiseach with the toughness to take us through these terrible times. Brian Lenihan works long days and nights and no wonder he sometimes makes mistakes. So how come the Government has so far broken every rule in the handbooks on how to handle a structural crisis, aka a revolutionary situation?

Before opening the handbooks let me say that a Fine Gael-Labour government would have done no better. Given Gilmore's penchant for playing to the gallery, any link with Labour would have been lethal. Reacting to the polls, Ruairi Quinn rightly refused to build any castles on that fickle foundation.

In proof of this, the second Irish Times poll shows that public anger is aimed not so much at the public sector cuts as at the failure to take on the fat cats. But that bubble of public anger is not fixed like the sun in the sky. It will abate in proportion as the Government gets down and dirty with the bankers, professionals, big farmers and the padded parts of the public sector.

High time, then, the Government read the handbooks on how to handle a crisis. In the form of histories of the French and Irish revolutions. Because while history does not repeat itself, the same three common factors surface in every revolutionary situation -- which is what we are going through at the moment.

First, the political class does not recognise that it has a revolutionary situation. As a student of the French and Irish revolutions I did not make that mistake. Last December in Seanad Eireann I made three predictions which surprised some of my colleagues but which seem commonplace now: (a) That unemployment would hit 500,000; (b) That we needed a state of economic emergency and a national government; (c) That we should prepare for serious riots in the streets.

The second mistake in a revolutionary epoch is to look to the recent past -- rather than the historic past -- for precedents. In a structural crisis there are no precedents. All you can do is assume the worst, think the unthinkable and face the fact that you may soon have to arrest some of your former fat cat friends who are feeding off the poor.

Finally, the last and most lethal mistake is to make haste slowly. Many famous leaders of the French Revolution literally lost their heads because they dithered. In a revolutionary situation you simply cannot act speedily enough. The Irish people want the fat cats brought to book today, not tomorrow. And if it will take until tomorrow, announce it today.

But don't dream of telling the Irish people that you have taken legal advice -- that last doomed defence of political scoundrels and cowardly clergy -- and that it can't be done under the Irish Constitution right now. Because the Irish people will force you to amend the Constitution. Right now.

That means that the Government must grasp that it is already too late to appease the people by forcing out a few bankers. From now on the public will be also focusing on the big farmers and professional classes -- the fat subsidies, the five-minute doctors and the fee-bloated legal class whose obese monument is the Mahon tribunal.

Accordingly, Brian Cowen must stop comparing himself to peacetime leaders like Lemass, Fitzgerald, Haughey and Ahern and start comparing himself with war-time leaders like de Valera and Kevin O'Higgins and Danton -- who on September 2, 1792, called on the fledgling French Republic to fight for its life and act with audacity: "De l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace!"

Likewise, the first Irish Free State government only survived because it recognised immediately that the past was another country, that former friends were now deadly foes and must be treated as traitors. Without hesitation it broke mass hunger strikes, shot 77 IRA intransigents and set up the most stable democracy in Europe.

De Valera built on that firm Free State foundation by responding to the outbreak of the Second World War with ruthless speed and determination. On September 2, 1939, only a day after Hitler's Panzer divisions had hurtled across the frontier into Poland, de Valera declared a state of emergency and followed it the next day with the draconian Emergency Powers Act.

The Act gave the government sweeping powers to protect the people: To make provision for the maintenance of public order and for the provision and control of supplies and services essential to the life of the community... and to provide for diverse other matters (including the charging of fees on certain licences and other documents) connected with the matters aforesaid.

In defending Irish democracy, de Valera showed scant respect for the green (or golden) circles. He crammed the Curragh with former comrades. He hanged six IRA men and let three more die on hunger strike. But the more he literally slaughtered sacred cows, the more his popularity soared. And no wonder. Give good authority in a crisis along with transparent fairness and the Irish people will follow a government beyond the gates of hell.

De Valera understood dialectics. He knew that the Irish people can comfortably hold two contradictory ideas in its head at the same time. So why didn't this Government tell the people last Christmas that this recession could be both the worst of economic times and the best of social times?

Why? Because Fianna Fail's fat cat PR friends -- who had falsely claimed credit for three general elections won by Bertie Ahern -- were far too busy lapping up the cream to bother telling their Government how to cope with this crisis.

For the record -- and for free -- let me give the Government the three basic rules for surviving any structural crisis:

• Put precedents aside. The past is another country and of no account.

• Put a premium on speed. You simply cannot move fast enough.

• Put the people of Ireland first. Prove it by cutting politicians' pay, then professional fees, then pay in the public sector -- which should be flatly told that the worst public sector job is now safer than the best private sector job.

After that you pray the fat cats raise a legal challenge. If they do, announce you are going to rush through constitutional amendments. Make sure you run Lisbon and local government elections on the same day. Do these things and if you don't get a massive majority I will eat my two dogs. Because if you don't do that I may have to.

In revolutionary times, we need a government that thinks in revolutionary terms, a government that assumes the worst, protects the people, bangs up bankers, probes professional parasites, and forces out the fat cats, without mercy or more ado. And that means, if not a national government, at least a republican government.