There are many reasons to be cheerful – free cheese, disappointment money and our fight against Nurofen Plus, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
IT’S TIME we started to concentrate on what is still great about Ireland and not give in to those doom-mongers in, er, The Irish Times. Hey, there’s no one here on Mondays anyway. Let’s go to a happy place.
Yet things move so quickly here at The Irish Timesthat, since that opening paragraph was written, going to a happy place has become official Irish Timespolicy. You are undoubtedly aware of Saturday's editorial Perspective, please, which laid out a pretty strict programme of optimism. Don't be giving out, said Saturday's editorial. Other countries have their problems too. (That is a rather crude précis of Perspective, please, but it was managed in just 10 words.) As far as I understand it – which isn't very far – perspective has always been a bit of a tricky concept. It took painters quite a while to get the hang of it, and the vanishing point is always changing; or is vanishing point always at eye level on the horizon? I forget.
Anyway, perspective shifts. On Saturday, Perspective, pleasepointed out that the United Nations Human Development Report, released last week, "ranked Ireland fifth in the world in terms of quality of life, behind Norway, Australia, New Zealand and the US, but ahead of Britain, France and Germany. The rankings are based on indicators such as life expectancy, per capita income and average schooling rather than on the health of the body politic". Yes, yes, yes, but that is not asking the crucial question that those of us of another perspective need to have answered immediately: who the hell writes these reports? Have you ever met a single person whose opinions have been canvassed for one of these amazingly reassuring surveys?
You may think this perspective childish, but similar suspicions surrounded the audience figures for RTÉ television two decades ago. Inquiries round the country elicited only one person who allegedly had a second cousin who had a little machine attached to their telly to report their viewing habits, and no one had ever met this man or seen the machine on his TV. In the end, that method of counting audiences was superseded by something more reliable.
What I’m trying to say is that the Irish are great doubters, and in these troubled times, we should play to our strengths. Doubting and moaning and giving out are fun and they are free. More to the point, despite the noble sentiments expressed in Perspective, please, they are fully justified.
I don't have the moral fibre to be cheered by the extraordinarily happy thought that, as Perspective, pleasepoints out: "Despite levels of immigration over the past 15 years unparalleled in recent European history, no xenophobic party has yet emerged in Ireland."
I've tried turning down the lights, putting on the mood music and even having that particular sentence from Perspective, pleaseread to me in French, but you know what, I'd rather despair at the fate of my country than comfort myself in that way. It is unseemly. And pretty sad.
From a certain perspective, it is of course undeniable that we have much to offer as a nation.
There is an enormous amount of natural talent here just waiting to be tapped. No wonder we are such a fantastic success abroad – except with the bond markets, obviously. So let’s all pull together and have a look at the things we do really well.
There’s the free cheese. There’s the “disappointment money” – how much have they got? You have to say that “disappointment money” is a daring concept. If only there was enough disappointment money to go round, says you. But let’s not be negative. Our foreign brethren are shaking their heads in wonder at a nation that could come up with an idea as fabulous as disappointment money, and then apply it to a public representative who has a Dáil attendance record of 17 per cent and resigned – after a somewhat chequered career – of his own free will.
We are talking of course of Jim McDaid, the Donegal North East TD who broke the news to a heartbroken nation last Tuesday that he was surrendering his Dáil seat. It has to be said Jim looked pretty positive. Disappointment money is what Jim McDaid is getting apparently, and that’s what it is called from the Dáil perspective – about €300,000 in the first year of his “disappointment”.
Presumably the rest of us can form an orderly queue because quite a few of us feel disappointed from another perspective, and that number could rise, as the economists say, if the country finally goes bust after Christmas.
Then there’s Nurofen Plus. No other country has tackled the scourge of Nurofen Plus the way we have. It is easier and apparently a great deal more pleasant to buy cannabis in Dublin now than it is to source a codeine-based painkiller from a registered pharmacy.
And given the disastrous consequences of taking Nurofen Plus, as outlined last week by an unfortunate Aer Lingus passenger to Cork, this is probably just as well. We are leading the world in our campaign on Nurofen. We have a lot to be happy about, from that perspective.