For many years my colleagues here at The Irish Times have been seeking to elevate the minds of the Irish public, to instil a degree of enlightenment and civilisation, and gently to correct any tendency towards slumbering sentimentality, backwardness or wrongheadedness. I, and indeed they, had thought that these tuitions were being received with application and diligence.
Indeed, several of these tutors, in their end-of-millennium reports, pronounced themselves very pleased with the progress being made: we had left behind us not merely our attachment to nationalistic sentiment and Catholic superstition, but also our links with agriculture and the land, family values and the Irish language.
We were therefore, it seemed clear, ready to take our place among the nations, that is, among the partners of Europe, and thus were well adapted for the next stage of our education.
But, I regret to say, there is evidence that things are not as they appeared. I refer to the publication in this newspaper's Weekend section, on the last day of the old millennium, of the results of a survey conducted jointly by The Irish Times and Poetry Ireland of the top 100 poems by Irish poets of all time.
The result must be a source of dismay to all those who thought we had left behind the foolishness of the past.
The first thing that strikes you is that most of the listed poets are rednecks and mucksavages who have neither once offered an apology for their origins nor made a firm purpose of amendment. At least one, a Mr Padraic Pearse, with no fewer than five entries (with a bullet?) in the Top 100, was a noted revolutionary of distinctly nationalist sentiment.
Anyone who had been paying proper attention to the instruction provided by this newspaper would know that Mr Pearse was a bloodthirsty bigot, a misguided romantic and mediocre poet, whose deeds and words are best consigned to the dustbin of history.
Worse still, many of the poems are concerned not with the need for progress, secularism and a stable currency, but with the inedible, and unedifying, scenery of Rural Ireland. One poem is called Digging. Another is called The Lost Heifer. Another is entitled Spraying the Potatoes. Many of the poems are littered with references to cattle, larks, berries, trout, clay and such like.
Have the readers of this newspaper failed to grasp that Rural Ireland has been abolished by Order of the Editor? And where, in the immortal question of Eoghan Harris, are our poems about briquettes?
A full 10 per cent of poems are in Irish, the language in which, as readers of An Irishman's Diary will know, we are wont to express our more primitive forms of tribal identity.
Several refer in uncritical terms to the Irish struggle for independence, as though the Workers' Party had never existed, still less worked long and hard at the fine art of deep-entryism. Two poems are about mothers, but both present women in stereotypical mould, and only three poems by women make the Top 100.
Can this really be a survey of the preferences of Irish Times readers? Yes, that's what it says in the blurb. Dear, oh dear.
But the greatest source of concern is the number one poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, by William Butler Yeats. It begins:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there,
A hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
To what does this poem amount but a hankering after the same vision as expounded in Mr de Valera's much criticised "Dream Speech"? In fact, by comparison with the scenario outlined in this first stanza, Mr de Valera's "cosy homesteads" sound positively luxurious.
I note also that, in the context of a proposal to build in an area of high amenity value, there is no mention of planning permission. Has Frank McDonald laboured in vain? Should not the Flood tribunal be alerted forthwith?
Moreover, does the poet propose to pay tax? He makes no mention of it:- And I shall have some peace there," he goes on, skilfully evading the issue, "for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
Here we observe the familiar stubborn attachment to concerns of a rustic nature, coupled with an unpatriotic desire to avoid participation in the economy. Perhaps the poet is seeking tax reliefs to lure him back to the lathe. I trust the editor will move quickly to condemn such thinking.
If this list is an accurate reflection of the tastes of Irish Times readers, and if the content of these poems has any significance at all, it is clear the work of my colleagues in this newspaper in recent decades has been entirely in vain.
It is as if Mary Robinson had never been heard of, as though the Irish Times editorials had been e-mailed into a black hole in the public consciousness, to be accessed or reclaimed only by those who are already enlightened.
My solution is radical, but necessary. All would-be purchasers of The Irish Times should henceforth have to undergo a small informal test at the newsagent's each morning to ascertain whether they are actually reading the newspaper rather than simply seeking to exploit its cachet so as fraudulently to participate in civilised society. A couple of weeks walking around with the Irish Independent would bring persistent transgressors to book.