The recent poll on my website showed people were almost 8 to 1 in favour of a general election in preference to a national government that would comprise all of the major political parties. This is almost the exact reversal of the 90% poll on the Joe Duffy Show in favour of a national government. You might well say that those logging onto my website wouldn’t be a random sample of the population as a whole, which may be true. However, I think the result still illustrates how hugely poll results are influenced by the way in which the question is asked. Here are two questions that loosely ask people their view on a national government, but few would be surprised if they generated very different answers.

• Do you believe that everyone in politics should pull together and form a national government? Or
• Should a new government include those politicians and parties who led us into this mess?

People are easily sucked into a way of thinking about an issue, particularly if they have been ambushed and haven’t had much time to think about it beforehand.

What then are we to make of the frequently heard suggestion of a national government?

It is my belief that the next general election is already shaping up to be a battle between the past and the future. Between the remedies espoused by those who are complicit in the present problems and new thinking on our deep-seated challenges.

The first group are easily persuaded that the best solution is to pull up the ladder behind those safely inside, and batten down the hatches until the storm has passed. The economic version of this are: to “write all cheques that are necessary” to nurse along the bad loans of the past, without regard to the fact that this starves new businesses of the credit necessary to start up.

• To ban new recruits to the public service, without reforming the existing voted bureaucracies.
• To slash investment, even though critical arteries like our electricity and broadband networks are simply not up to a competitive standard.

The hope is that when the storm is passed, we can get back to where we were.

The trouble is that our world has changed. And the people who are needed to help us to steer a course in this new ocean are the very ones that are being abandoned up on deck as the storm rages through. It is the young and dynamic parts of our economy that will be jettisoned if investment is slashed, recruitment is banned and credit is starved.

The strategy to invest in our future is very different. It must be built on an urgent agenda of reform confronting the lack of accountability, restructuring the extravagant array of agencies, changing the way we all work in the public service so that we can release resources for an ambitious reinvestment programme.

We are at a turning point when strident leadership is needed in a new direction, not a grubby compromise with the strategy that has gone before.

This is why I believe that a national government embracing Fianna Fáil is the last thing that this country needs. They are prisoners of the past mistakes and this has imprinted upon them a narrow view of what now needs to change. Their authority is destroyed, because they went to the country on the last occasion claiming that the property bubble was “built on sound economic fundamentals”. Their strategy of crude retrenchment is simply not enough to reinvent the Irish economy in a very changed world. However, perhaps most of all, political accountability for the errors of the past is essential if we are to show that things can be different. If failure has no consequences in politics, how can people be motivated to make the supreme effort that is now necessary to achieve success. People cannot be motivated to pull together and to accept sacrifice if a charmed few are going to be rewarded regardless of how badly they screw up.