HEART BEAT:'Fur coat, no knickers' sums us up neatly as a nation, writes MAURICE NELIGAN
ALL SORTS of things need to be tidied up before the return to city life to face all the nasty things that have been steadily getting worse while we blithely pretended all was normal.
One of the loose strands led to our very own “electronic picnic”. The other morning the HA when “tidying” asked me to explain why a seemingly redundant computer cable should not be removed as it constituted “clutter”. My feeble defence that it posed no threat to anything and best leave well alone was ignored. The result was entirely predictable – the computer ceased to work.
Later in the day, the television went out of commission. A very nice gentleman, somewhere in Scotland, took me through the idiot’s guide to restoring function. He thought somebody must have disturbed the cables to the set or viewing box. Hoovering and tidying had gone on in the vicinity, but the HA assured me she had not touched anything.
Passing around the side of the house and glancing into the bedroom, I noticed herself fiddling with the clock radio. Later, I was informed that she was setting the alarm for 8am the following day. I pointed out that I had already done this, both on my watch and my phone, at her request. Apparently she was just making sure. The alarm went off at 2am.
Enough of domestic pleasantries. Outside the door there’s another world. You’re all familiar with the expression “Red hat, no drawers”, or “Fur coat, no knickers”. It currently sums us up neatly as a nation. We haven’t a tosser, we’ve borrowed from everybody, and we have no realisable immediate prospects. Yet our snake oil salesmen and our three-card trick men are busy as ever. It’s called keeping up a front.
Thus I was not greatly surprised to read that Senator Ivor Callely would no longer be part of a delegation to monitor the mid-term elections to the US Congress. Nor would he get to watch the polls in Bosnia, later in the year.
This is crass. We deny our own people the right to vote in byelections, yet we see no problem with an expensive jaunt in order to ensure that other countries are holding to the tenets of democracy. President Obama, facing likely mid-term losses, could take a leaf out of the book of our leader and just not hold the polls. The problem there is that the American people wouldn’t tolerate that for one week.
In any case, why send a delegation at all? Let’s say we’re broke and that we’ll come out to play again when we can afford it. Meanwhile, as politicians, let’s stay here and pretend that we have some ideas as to how to get our countrymen out of the debtor’s prison we have created for them.
Red hat, no drawers, we’re still very important on this stage of make-believe. If we do send a delegation, they might be better employed finding out how the Americans have no trouble slapping their corporate miscreants behind bars and rigorously investigating and prosecuting corporate fraud and inadequacy.
Over here it’s different. The bad guys preserve their fortunes and lifestyles unmolested by the law. The burden falls on the little people who lose their jobs, their pensions, their homes and, worst of all, their children to the emigrant ships.
In the ongoing saga of Anglo Irish Bank and its unimaginable losses, we are told that sources in the Department of Finance signalled the “attraction” of lower annual cost to the taxpayer, if the wind-down of this house of horrors took place over a longer, say 20-year span, than a shorter, 10-year period.
“Attraction” is hardly the word. Revulsion would be more appropriate. The failure of our navigation through these perilous seas is the responsibility of the three Bs, Bertie and the two Brians, the collective Bellman of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark:
“But the principal failing occurred in
the sailing,
And the Bellman, perplexed and
distressed,
Said he had hoped, at least, when the
wind blew due East,
That the ship would not travel due
West”
Sorry about that folks, the economy of the good ship Erin has gone west, on your watch.