Dominic Raab may be right when, urging British employers to hire ex-convicts as a solution to Brexit labour shortages, he suggests released prisoners are "more motivated" and "reliable" than other workers, and take fewer sick days.
But I wonder what Brendan Behan would have made of the idea that England's difficulty is prisoners' opportunity. He was himself a cautionary tale. Not long after his last spell in jail (Dublin's Mountjoy) Behan earned one of the most memorably bad employer references ever, from a lighthouse keeper in Co Down.
He had been hired to repaint the building, but as Mr D Blakely complained to the Irish Lights Office in Dublin, he had instead been "wilfully wasting materials", damaging property, and creating a "filthy shambles".
The lighthouse aside, he had painted the air blue with his language. He had also gone missing for 24 hours. And as Blakely summed up: “He is the worst specimen I have met in 30 years’ service. I urge his dismissal [...] before good material is rendered useless and the place ruined.”
Among the curious things about this is that, as anyone who has read Borstal Boy will know, the Behan of a few years earlier had prided himself on being a tidy worker, who was sometime critical of sloppy standards in England: "All over the place I'd noticed bad paintwork. Joints in ceilings where the fellows weren't fast enough to complete a stretch before the edges of the preceding one had dried; doors painted without going in the direction of the panels [...]; cracks left unfilled and holes unstopped."
It is also odd is that there appears to be no mention of Blakely in Behan's later memoir, Confessions of an Irish Rebel, although it does mention the lighthouse job, and tensions arising with a Miss Mackenzie, a "miserable ould strap" he had met on the bus from Belfast.
The work included repainting a sign to the effect that permission to view the lighthouse “must be obtained from the Secretary, Commissioners for Irish Lights, Westmoreland St, Dublin.”
But to annoy the loyalist Miss Mackenzie, Behan had amended this to read "from Eamon de Valera, Leinster House, Dublin", which he then painted over while she rushed to the Harbour Office to complain.
It may be relevant that Blakely’s letter was dated August 9th, 1950. The lighthouse job coincided with the North’s marching season, which must have taken a toll on the Dubliner’s patience. Perhaps Behan would protest that his crimes against painting were political.
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Reacting to another Brexit development – Tesco's withdrawal from Finland, to be replaced by French company Carrefour – some people on Irish Twitter have been wishing fervently that the same might now happen here. As Ed O'Loughlin put it, summing up the feelings of anyone who has ever been on a self-catering holiday to France: "French supermarkets are glimpses of a better world."
This is not a view confined to tourists. Even the enfant terrible of French literature, Michel Houellebecq, an ardent cynic, was moved to poetry by his first visit to one of these great cathedrals of consumption, a Leclerc centre in Normandy. Being Parisian, the experience was new to him:
“I was dazzled. Never would I have imagined the existence of such a well-stocked shop [...] Foodstuffs from every continent were displayed along interminable shelves, and I felt almost dizzy as I thought of the mobilised logistics, the vast container vessels crossing uncertain oceans.
‘See on these canals/The vessels slumber/With their vagabond mood;/It is to satisfy/Your every desire/That they come from the ends of the earth’.”
Opinions differ as to which of the French giants is greatest. I recall a debate in the Guardian a few years ago in which the readers plumped for “Eddies” (as Leclerc is known to aficionados). It was also noted then that in at least one big supermarché, the delicacies beloved of some English expats – steak and kidney pies, Bird’s Custard, Marmite, etc – were placed “next to the petfood”.
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As reported elsewhere, guests at Thursday's partition centenary service in Armagh included Charles Hamar Delevingne, grandson of Hamar Greenwood, the British chief secretary in Ireland a century ago, notorious for association with the Black and Tans.
In that light, it seems interesting that one of Delevingne's two daughters is called Cara, apparently after the Aer Lingus inflight magazine. As a property developer, her father used to fly to Dublin a lot and "loved the name".
Both Delevingne daughters are models and actresses, by the way. And this being late October, the other one’s name will be in the news a lot shortly. Although it was hardly a deliberate exercise in cross-community balance, it also seems telling that Cara’s sister is called Poppy.