There is a beggar with a pitch close to the entrance to a car-park used by the customers of one of Dublin's more upmarket department stores, who appears to understand the concept of societal guilt arising from newly-acquired wealth better than any clergyman, writes John Waters
I have been observing him for some time and am lost in admiration for his ability to manipulate the potential discomfort of those who have just emerged from a bout of retail therapy and are headed to stash the goods in the boots of their 03 regs.
I sense that he has not merely seen through all the rhetoric of social concern, altruism and Christianity that pervades our public discourse on a daily basis, but has utilised this knowledge to earn himself a living while providing a multi-dimensional public service - both in the sense of revealing the reality beneath the humbug of Irish society and alleviating the guilt of the conspicuous consumer in return for a minor consideration.
He sits a few yards from the entrance to the car-park, with a box in front of him.
Knowing he is there, the objective of the less philanthropic shopper (i.e. nearly everyone) is to stare fixedly ahead, pretending to be lost in thought.
But our man is wide to this tactic, and waits until the target has crossed over an imaginary line beyond which it is all but impossible to find the grace to relent and pay up.
At this moment, he cries out, along the lines of: "Have a nice evening, Madam!".
This ejaculation is devoid of aggression or obvious malice, but suffused with a regretful irony, which says: " You have missed an opportunity to be Christian! Woe!".
What tends to happen next is infinitely interesting.
It seems by then to be too late for the initiated shopper to repent and make good. Already, he or she is headed for the slot machine inside the car-park foyer.
The shopping bag has acquired a new heaviness, the endorphin-releasing benefits of its contents being diminished by the second. To turn now and put an offering in the box would require acting of Oscar-nomination accomplishment.
While the point of the determined stride towards the car-park has been the pretence of unawareness of the beggar's presence, and his vocal intervention has rendered this futile, it is not easy to suddenly stop, turn around and convey by an act of generosity that one would have done so earlier had one not been preoccupied by some urgent matter. In any event, the momentum of the determined stride is carrying the now fruitlessly repentant shopaholic relentlessly towards the car-park doorway.
It seems, for the moment at least, that the beggar's outburst of apparently soulful benevolence has been entirely gratuitous and in vain. At best, one might suppose, he has made a mark for the future, teaching his subject a lesson to be remembered. He has tapped the buttons of modern Ireland's guilt-based inability to unabashedly wave its wad in the face of the also-rans.
But lo, a remarkable thing then tends to occur. The shopper sheepishly escapes through the doorway and heads for the slot machines.
He or she shuffles through purse or pocket, and selects a higher-denomination note and feeds it into the slot machine.
In a moment or two, the change comes jangling down.
As though by some unspoken conspiracy, these machines never seem to have any notes to give in change, so that what emerges is a pocket-busting weight of coin.
This, the noise it makes and the moment of grace supplied by the slight delay, offers the shopper an opportunity of redemption. He is struck by an inspiration and, at the same moment, his acting skills have kicked in. He pockets a handful of the coins and, taking the rest in his hand, returns to the street and drops them in the beggar's box.
His air is not one of confession or repentance, but perhaps of a slightly injured innocence: "You see," he seems to say, "it was simply that I had no change! Surely you did not think I was forgetting you? In fact, my hurry was inspired not by a desire to ignore you, but so as the quicker to come to your aid!"
The beggar smiles the smile of a shopkeeper who has just dispensed a good or service to a paying customer, which, of course, is precisely what he has done in granting the conspicuous consumer licence to nose his 03 Mercedes onto the road without compunction or guilt.
"Thank you, Sir," he intones, his irony melted away.
"Have a nice evening now."