Inevitably when you're a taxpayer, your blood will be close to boiling when considering the manifold ways in which government can blow your cash. However, a neverending concentration on this painful subject would rapidly become a self-defeating rant.
If I haven't made it clear so far, this blog is not about attacking taxation per se, but the unacceptable waste of our money by an unelected bureaucracy who spend hundreds of millions as they see fit without any reference to the wishes of the people.
No doubt there are those who will say we elect a government which is given our permission to spend our money in accordance with the party platform put forward during a general election. That would be nice if it were true. But how many people can say that 'government' spending bears the slightest relation to the promises made by political parties at elections?
The truth is that the 'permanent' government of the civil service makes all the decisions on departmental spending, and the politicians who become ministers (with the benefit of their previous life experience as teachers, social workers, solicitors and publicans) quickly come to the conclusion that confining their activities to opening community centres, attending funerals of people they don't know, and playing golf, will be their wisest course of action.
The consequences of this dereliction of duty by our elected representatives is now clear to see. However, the fall-out goes beyond the current fiscal catastrophe.
Ireland is internationally acknowledged to be superbly positioned to exploit alternative energy. Already there are pilot programmes in place on the west coast testing the capacity of 'wave' energy - which we have in abundance - to be fed into the national grid, and the visionaries connected with these trials have ploughed lots of their own money into it, such is their belief.
But there is a problem. The total dominance of the ESB ( despite token efforts by successive ministers to free-up the grid) is acting as a massive brake on the alternative sector. Recent proposals by the Spirit of Ireland consortium to use natural seawater reservoirs as storage for wind energy - releasing pumped water during calm periods to turn turbines - has been completely ignored by the powers that be, despite answering the main complaint of the Energy Regulator that wind power is inherently unreliable.
There has to be a strong suspicion that the administrative establishment in this country is crushing any idea that didn't originate with them or their favoured acolytes. Perhaps the evidence lies in the fate of the 3.5% pay rise that was postponed for the public service last year due to the massive public deficit. Suffice it to say, the ESB employees were duly paid the rise, when nurses, et al, had to do without. The Government didn't even attempt to explain this blatant capitulation to the small group of massively overpaid and underworked union members who hold the ESB, and Irish energy policy, completely in their power.
The Irish taxpayer is only too glad to hand over a big part of his paypacket to fund projects that would have a long-term benefit for this country. That clearly includes alternative energy, which has the potential to be an important export-earner for all of us when, as expected, Europe's reliance on oil and Russian gas has to come to an end. But such visionary projects will earn us nothing if they are strangled at birth by the old administrative elite, who are happy to use our money to featherbed themselves and their pals while being careful to link politicians' pay and expenses to their own, to ensure a meeting of minds at the very top. If we want a future as an independent country, this has to be stopped.
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