The inquiry system we have is like an accused person deciding which judge can hear their case and who the jury members should be. By Vincent Browne.

If Adrian Hardiman of the Supreme Court needed an illustration of the incapacity of Dáil Éireann to conduct a fair and independent inquiry into a matter of current controversy, he could not have wished for a more vivid example than the shemozzle over the holding of an inquiry into the banking crisis.

In the robust judgment he gave on why the Oireachtas should be debarred from conducting inquiries that could impugn the good name of individuals, he cited the partisan nature of politics which has marked the debate on the banking inquiry in recent days.

But, far worse than that, there is the consensus in politics and in the media that parliamentary inquiries need the permission of the very agency which, essentially, it should be seeking to hold accountable – the executive branch of government.

The idea of democracy was to make the people sovereign but its modern trajectory has been to make people subjects again. By Vincent Browne.

A former “best friend” described him as “false, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical and wicked”. He arranged for his five children to be given over to a foundling hospital immediately after their birth. He was vain, truculent, obsessive and solitary.

He changed his religion several times, probably opportunistically. And yet when he died he was one of the most admired people in his country of residence, and his remains were later moved to a distinguished resting place in the nation’s capital. His ideas were among the most formative of his and later ages.

This was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a native of Geneva and one of the philosophers whose writings inspired the French Revolution and, later, the struggle for liberty and equality around the world. He was an authority on music, a composer of operas and a writer of fiction and of some of the most influential works ever on political philosophy. His central ideas remain profoundly relevant, not least in Ireland right now.

A lack of transparency around the policy of Sinn Féin TDs taking only the average industrial wage, and a succession of irregularities in the financial methodology used by both individual TDs and the party itself around expenses casts a cloud of uncertainty over the party's claims to represent a break with the traditionally corrupt practices of the oligarchs of our political kleptocracy. By David Johnson.

While the sharp glare of the media spotlight was focused recently on the financial tribulations of Mick Wallace TD, who escaped to Poland and Ireland's glorious Euro2012 adventure to take his mind off his economic woes (and I wonder how that worked out for him), my own eyes were drawn, somewhat incongruously, to the Irish Daily Mail, not a "newspaper" I would make a habit of reading (but occasionally it's worth trying to understand what goes through the mind of the outraged moral majority as they shuffle up to the ballot box to vote Yes for whatever socially regressive piece of legislation the conservative/populist government of the day is alleging is without any alternative; will provide stability; save jobs and stop all the ungodly foreigners from having their wicked way with our innocent and cherubic daughters).

I would like to thank the party whips and the government for giving me the opportunity to speak today. In relation to my company’s under-declaration of VAT in 2009, M&J Wallace Ltd sold apartments in 2008 and 2009 and the proceeds from the closings of the sales were pledged to the bank. Normally, the business cash flow would have allowed us to deal with the VAT liability but not on this occasion. In early 2008, the company had got the go ahead to build a large project on the North Circular Road, which gave confidence in its potential to go forward. Towards the end of the year, the bank pulled the plug on the project. This meant serious and unforeseen cash flow problems for the company. M&J Wallace Ltd had committed a lot more money to the project than it ultimately received from the bank, it had to let some men go, pay redundancy, it was coming under pressure for payment from suppliers and subcontractors, and having to deal with four banks becoming increasingly aggressive. The company was not able to pay the VAT at the time but was convinced that it was possible to work our way through the crisis. M&J Wallace Ltd believed that the company would be able to pay the full amount within six to twelve months. It was feared that if the problem was revealed at that time that either the Revenue or the banks would have moved against the company and put it out of business.

The hypocrisy of our political class over plans to censure Mick Wallace is quite breathtaking. By Vincent Browne.

Over the years, many of us have become inured to the serial hypocrisy of our political class but every now and again the brazenness of that hypocrisy becomes so breathtaking that our tolerance for it breaks. Now is such a moment and it concerns the plans to censure Mick Wallace.

According to himself, Wallace lied in issuing a false VAT declaration on behalf of a company he controlled. He says he did it because he couldn’t pay the full amount of VAT due at the time, because of a cash flow crisis in his company. This is surprising for he could have declared correctly the VAT that was due and then delayed payment, as thousands of companies have done, notably since the financial crisis broke in 2008.

The claim by Mick Wallace that he needed to make a false Vat declaration because of cashflow difficulties raises questions. By Vincent Browne.

There are questions about TD Mick Wallace's explanation for having made a false Vat declaration on behalf of his construction company.

He said he needed to do that on a short-term basis to ensure a positive cashflow for his company, which was in financial trouble, and he said that he intended to correct the falsification and pay the tax due at a later stage.

Many companies that get into cashflow difficulties fail to pay their due taxes on time for cashflow reasons, even though they have made true declarations of the Vat and other taxes due.

There was a coherent case to be made for the No side in the Fiscal Treaty referendum campaign, but it went unargued. By Vincent Browne.

The role of the left in securing a Yes vote in the referendum should not be underestimated. The scale of their waffle and incoherence contributed substantially to the success of its opponents. The left's failure to deal with the central issue of funding for the Irish state beyond 2013 - with even a smidgen of credibility - was a clincher.

There is not the remotest prospect of the left achieving significant electoral success in the next election or at any time in the near future. So, unhappily, for all those who are apprehensive of the rise of an 'extreme' socialist movement here, they may sleep contentedly: there is no chance, at least on current form.

Sinn Féin is better and more credible, and the performances of Mary Lou McDonald, Pearse Doherty, Pádraig Mac Lochlainn and Peadar Tóibín in the campaign were impressive, even if they also made a mess of the funding question. I exclude them from the left, for Sinn Féin's trajectory is towards domestication.

The Yes side deserves to lose on Thursday for the way they have conducted themselves in the referendum debate: combining exaggeration threats and falsehoods. But the No side have been hopelessly inept at explaining how Ireland would fund its budget deficits if denied ESM funding. By Vincent Browne

The Irish grandads, Eamon Gilmore and Pat Rabbitte, need the support of their probable Soviet pals of the 1970s and 1980s, Buranovskiye Babushki, the Russian grannies who so impressively represented their country at Eurovision during the week. I suspect they might have met the Babushki in Moscow during their ideological induction classes in the early 1980s.

The Irish grandads and their sexagarian colleagues deserve to lose the referendum on Thursday, if only for the unSoviet-like submissiveness to the capitalist agenda of the EU. Remember the finger-wagging of "Labour's way or Frankfurt's way", in contrast to the childish eagerness to please the troika?