Lee's laundry list is good pub-stool economics but offers no ideas on radical political, public sector and private sheltered sector reforms.

In this fill-in-the-blanks world, like others who advocate leaving the euro, there is no need to do the hard graft of preparing a detailed case for such a move. This is Ireland, and why bother with the detail when your are an insider?

Lee is reported to have been contacted by TV3 and Newstalk while some of the outsiders will never work again.

Tellingly, Lee told Harry McGee of The Irish Times, what prompted him to decide to return to the security of RTÉ, was that he was omitted from the group of TDs who were to meet the board of business group, IBEC.

“Here I was in the room and there was no mention of me,”Lee says.“I realised then I was not a core part of the economic team and would never be. I also realised that I would never be involved in policy formation.”

McGee wrote on Saturday: "Lee says there was no particular moment which decided his political fate but that, if there was a straw that broke the camel’s back, that meeting came close."

IBEC like its trade union counterpart, ICTU, is a compromised body, which contributed to the economic crash.

The business group's disparate interests, including reliance on funding from public bodies, prevents it pushing for competition in the sheltered private sector and comprehensive reform in the public sector.

Taoiseach Brian Cowen established a taskforce to progress proposals on public service reform following a report from the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in April 2008. Alpine glaciers are moving faster and while NAMA, the State bank rescue agency, will spend €2.4 billion on professional services this decade, George Lee and other insiders never pushed for changing the system of Victorian secrecy, which is not in the public interest.

Last March we wrote that RTÉ's official view, was that it did not see any conflict of interest in its journalists, receiving freebies from commercial interests, while it was promoting the documentary by its economics editor George Lee on how the boom was blown, was a classic example of denial by Crony Ireland insiders.

George Lee reported on bad policymaking but his own organisation RTÉ, rode the Celtic Tiger to suit itself.

What is striking about those who maintain a grip on the public megaphone or develop policy - - politicians, senior civil servants, senior journalists and academics - - is the common feature that they are people who have a narrow range of experiences.

Most would never have lived outside Ireland and the world of business is an alien place. George Lee's RTÉ colleague Charlie Bird, has quit as the station's Washington DC correspondent - - a position that is in practical terms,  a costly indulgence - - because he was a fish out of water there.

During the first Lisbon Treaty referendum campaign in particular, most of the high earning Irish journalists had some reason to urge rejection but from their comfortable positions as insiders with networks of connections, what would they know of the day-to-day struggles of businesses trying to build markets abroad?

It is risible in the media world which George Lee has returned to, for the leading lights to claim they are outsiders.

It is an insult to the crucified people on the dole lines, in a week when George Lee mounted his media blitz as he waltzed back to public sector security.

An illustration of the cronyism in the Irish mainstream media is that eight columnists in national newspapers work for rival media organisations - - it’s as if the selected oracles have some superior insight but what is generally produced for the different outlets, are variations on pet themes.

Besides, while George Lee as a politician did not have the commitment to originate policy but wanted to influence it and back in his role as a journalist, he can make headline proposals without having the responsibility for implementing anything.

Meanwhile, as the boring "process" of necessary change is ignored by the protected insiders, the useless National Consumer Agency (NCA) spends €500,000 in three years for mainly issuing a few dozen press releases; it could not afford to fund a start-up to produce a value-for-money price comparison website (the US state of Missouri put all its public spending as detailed as the earnings of its highway troopers, online  for $200,000); professional financial adviser, Eddie Hobbs, became one of the 13-strong member board of the NCA and came to public prominence as a presenter on RTÉ, of a series of programmes called "Rip-off Republic", a consumer money programme and later as a promoter of property investment in Germany. Today the NCA is the embodiment of the "Rip-off Republic."

And George Lee was ultimately moved to abandon his mandate from 27,000 voters because he could not meet IBEC!

Even more depressing is that members of the public would accept Lee's version of events - - hook, line and sinker - - as a stand on principle. It would indeed have been a departure in Irish politics, for an individual to put the public interest before self-interest in resigning. There has been no risk of sacrifice here.

Finally, the influence he ached for in developing economic policy, while ignoring the fundamental change required - - an area that would require moving beyond populism -- showed the limits of his vision.