In Walter Benjamin’s celebrated formulation, the logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into politics. In Ireland this began not with the choreographed but futile appearances of Eoin O’Duffy’s Blueshirts in the 1930s, or the clumsy propagandising practised by the Stickies, but with the manipulation of Garret FitzGerald’s image that made him electable in the 1980s.

Not that FitzGerald or his handlers were fascist, but by giving marketing and image manipulation privilege over policy making they began the aestheticisation of Irish politics. More than ever, politics became a dramatic narrative, and with a pliable media resourcing rolling news at the expense of investigative reporting, image and perception became everything.

Ian Ritchie’s Spire of Light is another artefact of that process, appropriately reaching completion in a week in which Ireland’s hospital service suffered unprecedented crisis. Intended as a symbol of Ireland in the third Christian millennium, Ritchie’s 130 tons of shot-peened stainless steel has indeed become that, but hardly as intended.

There have been more grotesque wastes of public money, but Ritchie’s spire — ostensibly a brave, clean, optimistic symbol of a society liberated from traditional pieties — stands out as a decadent emblem of a culture fixated by spectacle.

Chosen by a panel of seven, only two of whom had any democratic mandate, the spire was imposed without public consultation by an administration fixated by expensive and largely useless public projects, one that talks the laissez-faire talk but still walks the Napoleonic walk.

At over €4m the most expensive of the projects approved by the national millennium committee, the spire is also the least democratic, allowing no public access, the mirror finish of its base a dismal acknowledgment of antisocial tendencies of many of those for whom it was provided.

Structural engineers and architects will genuflect before it, and even members of the public hostile to it may come around. But less a sculpture than a fetish directed as much towards the tourist industry as to locals, it is just another part of the commodification of Irish culture.

Compared with the millennium candles distributed to every home in the republic, and even the broadleaf trees planted on behalf of the country’s households, it is spectacular but sterile, anti-democratic and built to exclude.

Spectacular is what is required when, instead of a politics of accountability you groom a politics of spectacle, of which the humiliation of individuals and avoidance of institutional scrutiny — in the tribunals, for example — is just another manifestation.

The narrative of Irish politics since FitzGerald has been about the triumph of good over evil, and the triumph of the individual will. From Gerry Gregg’s disgraceful documentary series about Des O’Malley to Charlie McCreevy’s tax individualisation, public discourse in Ireland has become preoccupied with the singular at the expense of the social or structural.

Ritchie’s spire fits the Zeitgeist perfectly. It will be interpreted almost entirely in aesthetic terms; its significance, however, is almost entirely political.