NEWTON'S OPTIC:HEY DUDE, Greetings from the Dublin Consulate, or the "Irish Embassy" as we still tell the natives it's called. Maybe not for much longer though as it looks like the Paddys have screwed up royally. Which reminds me, if we do go back to being part of the London office you'll need to change DBN to LDN in your encryption key.
Gotta keep the towel-heads guessing.
Is there any hope for the Irish? Well, they’ve gone from national bankruptcy to 40 per cent support for an ultra-nationalist party in little over a week, which is pretty impressive.
That usually takes a tin-pot European country several months. You could even call it German efficiency, although it’s not the kind of efficiency the Germans had in mind.
So I was talking to some of our guys from the IMF last night, or should that be some of your guys? It’s hard to keep a handle on who’s with The Agency when you’re stuck out here in the boondocks.
We’ve put the IMF team up in a hotel in town but we bring them back to the consulate as soon as the coast is clear, for security reasons. You know how easy it is for a Polish maid to be compromised.
Anyway, I was talking to one of the IMF guys about how the euro is basically SNAFU and how crazy that is when it was only a couple of years ago that Opec was thinking of switching to it from the dollar. Things would look very different for us if that had happened, I said.
“Sure would,” he replied. I got the feeling he could have said more but it was late and the water-boarding gear is in the fallout shelter.
Meeting these guys reminds me of the heady days after Operation Iraqi Freedom, when we dropped a bunch of 22-year-olds into Baghdad with a suitcase full of cash and an economics textbook, and told them to kick-start capitalism from scratch. I wonder if we could try that here? It would give a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘Green Zone’ but of course the situation is completely different. For one thing, those guys are nearly 30 now and their wives would need something more to do than talk house prices at dinner parties.
The denial here is incredible. I was flicking through the papers at the weekend and people are still expecting to sell little red-brick Charles Dickens houses for €500,000. That’s over $650,000, enough for a two-bed apartment in Manhattan. But hey, now I’m talking house prices. See what this place does to you?
You’d asked for an assessment of the current Irish leadership. Bit of a contradiction in terms there pal, but I’ll reply in the order of your list: drunk, drunk, fat and drunk, depressed, stupid, insane and Mary Coughlan. That about covers it.
One final note from the emerald isle. Jim Corr has somehow found out about the six-foot lizards and we can’t seem to shut his website down. Got a wire from Lizard HQ the other day asking if we could “arrange something terrible”. They mustn’t have heard his last album.
So that’s you updated. For Christ’s sake make sure this communiqué isn’t leaked. You wouldn’t believe how touchy the Micks are.
Yours
Brad