Taoiseach Enda Kenny canvassing in Kilbaha, County Clare at the weeken with Caoimhe McNamara (left) and Lucy Keating

Moan, bitch, carp.

Cease all that bellyaching.

You don’t know you’re born.

Eamon Delaney writes:

Enda is right – we have among us a dominant chorus of whingers who see no merit in anything and who criticise any efforts being done to improve things. It is a prevailing feature of this election unlike any other contest I have seen.

…there is now a major note of whinging in the country, quite at odds with the usual positive portrait of the upbeat Irish. On the radio, and more especially on the night time TV shows, we hear a constant tirade of complaints.

Granted we have significant problems, in housing and health, for example, but you wouldn’t think we were the fastest growing economy in Europe! You wouldn’t think we had come back from the economic abyss and had put ourselves in a position that the Greeks and Spaniards could only envy

And along with the negativity is a growing and unchallenged sense of entitlement, of injury and demand, and the apparent need for the political parties to appease all of this. This is the new orthodoxy – the Government is to blame for everything.

The main thrust of the campaign is no longer about stabilising our recovery, and securing our fiscal future (with Brexit and global recession on the horizon) but about dishing out more state resources to our citizens. And such voices seem to be defining the entire election campaign with no-one brave enough (or reckless enough, like Enda) to question this swelling sense of victimhood.

When will Fianna Fail and Fine Gael properly stand up for the people who actually pay for everything, like they used to do: the people who are working and raising families and who just want to get themselves on? Forget the SMEs and quiet working people – it’s the squeaky wheel of the whingers which gets the oil. Who defends the taxpayers and those who are sceptical of an over-generous welfare culture?

Our entire political debate has now veered to the left, with much of the media, and a toxic social media, feeding this mentality of dependency and entitlement, but also of negativity and, indeed, whinging.

The actual truth is that the State already has to do too much, the established interests are too strong and our tax base has been too narrow. And the message that people should really be hearing is that the State is not your mommy, and you should try to pay your own way and take care of your own kids.

However, the main parties won’t say that – instead they appease the complainers, no matter how unreasonable. And they cynically target voters.

And so FG has done a complete turnaround on abolishing USC and dishing out the election goodies, all to appease a campaign where FG fears it is being seen as too harsh or miserly about public funding.  And if FG will raise the State pension, then FF will raise it more.

But it won’t do them much good. Long pent-up anger at austerity is now out of the bottle and in many ways, offering more State goodies only feeds the sense of entitlement and of whinging. The sad thing is that ordinary taxpayers have to pay for all this public spending.

The other sad effect is that a constant tirade of negativity and whinging is not good for the soul, or the individual.

It is the very opposite of what the self-help books advise us and the very antithesis of what our sporting and cultural heroes represent.

Eamon Delaney is founder of ‘frree market’ think thank Hibernia Forum . This column appears in today’s Irish Daily Mail [unavailable online]. Follow Eamon on Twitter: @eamondelaney10