The disproportionate power of the executive to stifle debate is a widely recognised shortcoming of the Dáil, most starkly illustrated by Kenny's recent refusal to permit a free vote among his party colleagues on the contentious matter of abortion.
There's one shortcoming of the union movement: not enough people have a job where they can join a union.
"That really does feel to me like a shortcoming: we haven't built a product that's easy enough for unmotivated users.
Trying to make her incrementalism into a shortcoming, Mr Steinbrück suggested that Mrs Merkel lacked "feeling" for the European project because she spent the first 36 years of her life in East Germany, outside the European Communities from which the EU grew.
And that brings us to the third shortcoming, which strikes me as the biggest.
The book's main shortcoming, however, is in what it overlooks.
By contrast, Mr Koizumi, though plain-spoken by the standards of Japanese politics, is not the sort of leader to win public debates on a global stage.That shortcoming might not matter much, however, in a region where governments are inclined to fudge their public statements and let bureaucrats work things out behind the scenes.
No wonder, then, that getting the Greek parliament to approve the deal may not be easy.The new plan's biggest shortcoming, however, is its attitude to Greece's debt.
He has not been mellowed by having had to run a state a shortcoming he shares with his Democratic rivals, but still a disadvantage.
Perhaps so, but they had other regulatory tools at their disposal, such as lowering maximum loan-to-value ratios for mortgages, or demanding that banks should set aside more capital.Lax capital ratios proved the biggest shortcoming.
But that is to ignore the other shortcoming of government controls: the bad blood between fishermen and fisheries managers.
