Simple Southerner stereotype got a real boost this week from the great cap dynasty, writes DONALD CLARKE
THERE ARE times when you pray the world isn’t watching us. Last week was such an occasion. The scandal that bubbled up around Michael Healy-Rae is not likely to evolve into our own latter-day Watergate. But it should make decent Irish people – however innocent – cringe with refracted embarrassment.
As you should be aware, Healy-Rae, an unpretentious politician of the populist stripe, has agreed to pay for €2,600 worth of suspicious phone calls made from Leinster House. Big deal. Over the last five years, Westminster politicians have had to apologise for charging duck houses, ivy repairs and moat refurbishment to their unfortunate taxpayers. Moreover, at time of writing, Healy-Rae has not been directly implicated in the making of the calls. Why worry?
Well, at least those British politicians got something worth having from their duplicity (worth having for ducks, anyway). The telephone calls were made – oh, I can barely bring myself to write the words – in order to help Michael, scion of the great cap dynasty, win some reality TV jamboree entitled Celebrities Go Wild. State representatives of the Bongo Bongo Islands rarely find themselves caught up in such pathetic scandals.
The news comes a few weeks after the release of a fascinating poll concerning the attitudes of Northern Irish people towards a united Ireland. That survey found that some 52 per cent of Catholics in the North wanted to remain within the United Kingdom.
Jeez. Who’d blame them? We’ll be eating our young next.
This writer has always had something of a split personality when it comes to cross-Border matters. Raised in south Belfast (to a Protestant family, not that it’s any of your business) until the age of 11, I have spent most of the succeeding years in the Irish Republic.
On visits to the North, I have, thus, gained a certain perspective on middle-class unionist attitudes to those living south of Newry. Many Northern Protestants, of course, regard the South as a beacon of progress and stability. But a strong strain has always viewed the nation as a bit of a joke.
Trains don’t run on time. Heroin-addled car thieves wait on every street corner. Government employees use their phones to propel eccentric politicians toward victory in preposterous television shows.
Ironically, this view was at its most prevalent during the years of the economic boom. To that point, the State’s relatively sluggish economic performance was seen as confirmation that Southerners were not fit to be trusted with the controls of a pedal car.
The explanation for this fantastic (in all senses) surge in wealth was simple: every penny sitting in every Irish bank account came from “the Common Market”. It seems that, each weekend, European officials would travel over from Brussels and drive around the country handing out fivers to every gap-toothed yokel (that’s to say every citizen of the State) in every poorly maintained, rat-invested hovel (that’s to say every house outside the six counties).
Being simple folk – children really – the Southerners would then spend the cash on magic beans, pinwheel hats and rosary beads. Eventually, the European money would run out and they (you) would all have to go back to eating rotten potatoes and having too many children.
If you were feeling in robust form, you might have pointed out that Northern Ireland was, by some reckonings, the most subsidised corner of western Europe. You’d have been wasting your lazy breath. It was hard work, carbolic soap, early nights and Presbyterian thriftiness that turned the North into the economic powerhouse it clearly wasn’t.
The funny thing is that such views were not the preserve of the Protestant community. I can remember, sometime in the early 1990s, standing outside a pub in Soho and listening to a huddle of Northern pals, all inclined to vote for Sinn Féin or the SDLP, as they explained that “the Free State” was a motley-clad jester of a nation.
The conversation was triggered by the news that, faced with an administrative backlog, the Republic was planning to hand out driving licences without the formality of a test.
“What kind of country does that,” they sneered in chewed vowels. The implication was clear. Once a united Ireland arrived, the Northerners would potter down the road and knock this displaced Albania into some sort of working order.
There are, in these times of economic meltdown, more important things to worry about than the smug noises being emitted by Rosemary and Edwin McCausland at their local golf club. But it’s hard not to care a little that so many Ulster Protestants will be eating such great helpings of I-Told-You-So pie. The antics of Healy-Rae’s supporters will only add relish to their dish.
Let’s hope they were all looking elsewhere last week. Wasn’t Wimbledon on the telly?