Once again, while the world has been transfixed by events in the Arab world, legal but no less revolutionary change has been occurring elsewhere. For there is no word other than "revolutionary" that fits the Irish voters' rejection of Fianna Fail, the party that has dominated Irish politics since independence, in an election last week.
The dethroning of Fianna Fail was both expected and justified — the party's incompetence created one of the most spectacular economic crashes in modern history. The new government will be lucky to prevent the situation from deteriorating: Indeed, there is little reason to expect more from Dublin's new leaders.
Fianna Fail, a centrist nationalist party, has been in power in Ireland for 60 of the last 80 years, and ruled in one coalition or another since 1997. It presided over the birth of the Celtic Tiger, a period of 9.6 percent average annual economic growth that turned Ireland, a perennial backwater, into the second richest economy in the European Union.