Only One Winner in the Democracy Now Fiasco - George Lee

There is only one winner in this Democracy Later debacle and that is George Lee. George Lee tried. The media cabal behind Democracy Not Just Yet didn’t, and that will be their legacy. It now looks like they were all just hot air.

Fintan O’Toole’s extraordinary justification for his excellent imitation of the Grand Old Duke of York in Saturday’s Irish Times is a remarkable document, and a deeply depressing one.

This sentence seems particularly worthy of analysis: “An inadequate effort wouldn’t be a noble failure. It would be worse than doing nothing at all because it would raise hopes and then dash them.”

Remember the boy or girl in college whom everyone fancied in vain? You eventually pluck up the courage to ask him or her if, on the off-chance he or she has no plans, he or she wouldn’t mind being your date at the Engineers’ Ball on Saturday week only to get the wan look and pitying smile that are the inevitable precursors to the bullet behind the ear.

You are let down, politely but firmly, with the intelligence that, as a worm like you and a god/goddess such as he or she could never be an item in this or any other alternate reality, it would actually be crueller for the god/goddess to build your hopes up now only to inevitably dash them later by breaking your tiny little heart. Better to leave you in the mud with all the other lower phyla.

You can hear him or her say it, can’t you? “Oh no, John/Jane. I really respect you as a friend but you see, going to the Engineers’ Ball with you would be would be worse than doing nothing at all because it would raise hopes and then dash them.”

Worse than nothing at all. Staggering.

In what parish between Hell and Bethlehem would the country be worse off, actually worse off, if Fintan O’Toole and his chums in Democracy at Some Point in the Future tried to get elected but didn’t? Not even didn’t get elected now, or did get elected, but *tried* to get elected and didn’t? How could Ireland possibly be worse off?

Would the national debt increase? No. Would we all be conscripted into the infamous pan-European army, to fight General Zeb and his intergalactic clone army from the military labs of Alpha Centauri? No. Would corporation tax go up if Fintan O’Toole didn’t reach the quota? Hard to see causality. Would the US multi-nationals move out? Dearest Reader, the boys that run those corporations couldn’t pick Fintan O’Toole out of lineup of one.

The most sickening part of all this is that Fintan running would actually be a good thing. Politics is moribund in this country. The Taoiseach-elect’s media strategy seems to be to keep the head well down and hope he’s still ahead when the smoke of battle clears. Nothing else.

Debate on the country, how we went wrong, how we can stop that happening again, reflection on the nation on the eve of the hundredth anniversary of the Rising? Forget about it. It’s Fine Gael’s turn, and that’s it. And when that hits the rocks Micheál Martin will take the salute outside the GPO in 2016 because that’s how the pendulum swings.

If his candidacy allowed even a chink of a changed dynamic from civil war politics ninety years after the civil war Fintan O’Toole’s bid would not have been in vain, even if he didn’t even save his deposit. But to try to defend it with this hopeless blather about “an inadequate effort wouldn’t be a noble failure. It would be worse than doing nothing at all because it would raise hopes and then dash them” is galling in the extreme.

Because it’s not about Fintan and his chums, and egos so huge they have their own gravitational pull. It’s about how we debate politics in this country – do we turn around to look outside the cave, or do we look at the shadows on the back wall forever and think that’s all there is and all there can be? Fintan would only have been the hammer, not the hand. But he doesn’t even seem capable of seeing that.

A lot of people will have read that Fintan O’Toole article on Saturday morning while listening to George Lee serve his penance on RTÉ with that appalling Business show on Radio 1. The programme is a shocking waste of Lee’s talents, and a grim reminder of what happens when you try to make a difference. It’s like Lee’s been put in the stocks in the town square, as a grim example to those who would think of rocking any cosy little boats.

But at least George never told us that the country is worse off because of his own inadequate effort, his own noble failure. At least he spared us that. George put his money where his mouth was. If he failed, he failed, but he never pretended the nation was worse off for his having made the attempt.

If you pass George in the stocks some time during the campaign, maybe you can give him an apple as he sits in stoical silence, or wipe some of the mud from his little face. Whatever else George Lee had, he had courage. That’s not common in Irish public life. And it seems an even rarer commodity this week.

Morgan Kelly, Fiscal Autonomy and the Kindness of Strangers

Morgan Kelly is not like the other members of the Irish economic commentariat. The officer class of the bean-counters – David McWilliams, Jim Power, Brendan Keenan, Brian Lucey – are on TV or radio so often you could imagine they were all somehow related to Ryan Tubridy. There’s no escaping them.

Kelly ploughs a different furrow. He is never on TV or radio, and is not available for press interviews. His only contributions are more or less bi-annual philippics in the Irish Times on the economic issues of the day, philippics that foretell the end of days just around the corner, where there will weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Stylewise, Kelly is a combination of the Biblical prophet Jeremiah (“Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Turn back to the Lord your God!”) and Corporal Fraser of Dad’s Army (“Doomed. We’re all doomed.”)

And Kelly may well be right. He has certainly hit a nerve with people who email links to Professor Kelly’s works when they come out and then spend the rest of the evening idly wondering where a man might get a good price on a rope and a bottle of brandy.

Professor Kelly also taps into a powerful vein of self-loathing and lack of confidence in the nation when he reflects how things have come to this: “Europeans had to endure a decade of Irish politicians strutting around and telling them how they needed to emulate our crony capitalism if they wanted to be as rich as we are.” We can all feel the lash there.

However. An Spailpín can’t help but wonder if Morgan Kelly’s current guru status has more to do with style than substance. Your humble correspondent wouldn’t like to try taking on Professor Kelly on the substance of the matter as An Spailpín has no financial training whatsoever. But on style issues there was one thing I noticed about Professor Kelly’s piece yesterday that gave me pause to wonder if that was brimstone I could smell or just more hot air.

Professor Kelly remarks that “During September, the Irish Republic quietly ceased to exist as an autonomous fiscal entity, and became a ward of the European Central Bank.” What does that mean exactly, “an autonomous fiscal entity”?

An Spailpín’s guess is that “an autonomous fiscal entity” is a state that can control its own money free of the influence of other states. And this has only ever been the case for three of the 89 years of the state’s existence.

The Free State punt was introduced in 1928, seven years after “independence” but as a currency it was directly linked to sterling. One English pound was one Irish pound. The only difference was the picture on the banknotes. Irish banknotes were printed in England, and the coins made by Her Britannic Majesty’s Royal Mint, until 1978.

In financial terms, Ireland didn’t even have dominion status as a currency. Perhaps this explains why Ireland wasn’t able to take advantage of our neutrality in the war – because the currency was bound hand and foot to the British war effort. We were only, in those most evocative of Irish phrases, kinda independent. Sorta free.

The punt lasted for three years among the currencies of the Earth, by which stage we joined the EMU and hung on for dear life while the value of the punt fluctuated like a citizen’s heart rate on reading another of Professor Kelly’s articles.

If I am doing the Professor a disservice maybe someone could email me but in claiming that Ireland ever was an “autonomous fiscal entity” it seems to me that Morgan Kelly is having a little bit of jam on it. It is not today or yesterday that Ireland has become reliant on “the kindness of strangers.” This has been the state of play since the foundation of the state.

When Brian Lenihan introduced his emergency budget last year, Richie Ryan, was interviewed on This Week on Radio One. Ryan, who served as Minister for Finance under Liam Cosgrave from 1973 to 1977, said that when he was appointed he got a letter from one of his predecessors who said that he would pray for Ryan and “the cross you bear for Ireland.”

That’s the reality of Ireland’s fiscal autonomy. The Tiger was the chimera; the hard life is the reality over the history of the state. Ireland is a very small country with no natural resources and a huge reliance on foreign direct investment to keep the show on the road. We are in no position to pull faces about the kindness of strangers. If strangers are running our economy maybe that’s a good thing. We’ve certainly made a bags of running it ourselves.

Book of the Decade

The fifty best Irish books of the decade have been announced, and they are to go before a public vote to decide on a winner. An Spailpín Fánach has been going through the shortlist and it makes for interesting analysis.

Of the fifty books, thirty-three are fiction. This further breaks down as twenty-one literary fiction, nine popular fiction and two mysteries with one book, With My Lazy Eye by Julia Kelly, that seems to defy easy classification. An Spailpín hasn’t read the book and sees no good reason to do so; therefore, Ms Kelly will have to settle for an asterisk I’m afraid. Better than nothing.

Of the seventeen books remaining there are five memoirs, three children’s books, two sports books (both soccer; more of that anon), five history/sociology and two volumes of short stories. There are no books in Irish, not even for the sake of tokenism, and poetry is also absent from the list. (Tuilleadh faoi leabhair Ghaeilge níos déanaí, nuair atá an You Tube faoi smacht ceart agam).

Of those fifty books there are thirty-three in which your correspondent has no interest whatsoever, six that I respect but either haven’t read or have no plans to read, five I never even heard of (all of which I’ve categorised at literary fiction, which may be a tale in itself), two I bought but haven’t yet got around to reading yet, Miss Kelly’s whom nobody seems to know is either fish or fowl, two I have grave doubts about and only one which I’ve actually read and liked.

I can understand why The Builders, by Kathy Sheridan and Frank McDonald is on the list, considering the influence the same demographic has had on the country in the past number of years. But a little like the “angry men” of O’Toole, Cooper, Ross and Pat Leahy, I’m not at all sure this book will tell me anything I don’t already know.

I don’t remember anything from The Builders causing a ripple on its publication (the way Andrew Rawsley’s book on the British Labour Party caused a ripple across the way, for instance), and this would suggest that it may be what no book on a list of Best Books of a Decade should be: boring.

The sports books are very disappointing. Paul McGrath’s book is fair enough, but it’s as much a personal memoir of one man’s battle with the bottle as it is a sports book proper. The inclusion of Eamon Dunphy’s Roy Keane book, however, is very hard to justify.

The Irish Book Awards website is correct in assessing Roy Keane as a significant figure of contemporary Irish but that does not mean that the book is worthy of the man, any more than either of Brian O’Driscoll’s two autobiographies are worthy of him.

Ghost-writing is often derided as a skill but it is very much a skill, especially when ghosting for so multi-faceted a personality as Roy Keane. Paul Kimmage and Tom Humphries are the two best sports ghosts we have, and either would have written a better book.

Eamon Dunphy failed to sublimate his own ego – which does not sublimate easily, of course – in writing Keane. Read the passages about Saipan or Alf Inge Haaland aloud and after a few sentences you find yourself doing your best Eamon Dunphy impression. That makes the book a failure, and that should disqualify it from this list.

On the broader sports front, I posted here some weeks ago that this has been the best decade for GAA books ever, with some outstanding work in what is by no means a full field. For not one of these books to have made this list tells us a lot about ourselves, who we are and who we pretend to be. It’s a pity.

The books I respect but don’t plan on reading in the immediate – or ever – future are Paul McGrath’s autobiography, Judging Dev, Bill Cullen’s Penny Apples, Netherland, PS I Love You and Should Have Got Off at Sidney Parade.

PS I Love You got shocking reviews here when it was published. Not because it was awful, but because of who wrote it and who her father is. An Spailpín had the honour to rent a bedsit that was as draughty as it was expensive from the father of a chick-lit queen, and he assured me that PS would never have been published were it not for Bertie Ahern. But PS I Love You sold like hot cakes and even got made into a(n awful) movie, so good for Miss Ahern, who stuffed it down their jealous throats.

Sidney Parade is worthy of respect because in Ross O’Carroll-Kelly Paul Howard has personified exactly to whom we aspire now as a nation. Ross O’Carroll-Kelly started off as a satire in the Sunday Tribune but as the Tiger roared we all wanted to be like him. Howard softened the character to make him that bit more likeable at a cost to Howard’s art but to the considerable reward of his bank balance.

Immigrants read the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly books in translation in order to figure out what the Irish are like. Fintan O’Toole may be who we’d like to be, a moralist in a post-Catholic Ireland, but Ross O’Carroll-Kelly holds a truer mirror up to our contemporary reality. Focking deffo.

The only book of the fifty your correspondent not only bought but liked? The Pope’s Children by David McWilliams. The Pope’s Children, as identified here at the time, is not so much a work of economics as of sociology, in which McWilliams forensically details what it was like to live in Ireland in the first decade of the 21st Century, when all we cared about was money and turning a buck any which we way we could. It’s the only possible contender for Irish Book of the Decade.





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Class - It's a Little Bit Irish, Isn't it?

John Harris is one of the few critics on the current iteration of Newsnight Review that do not have An Spailpín’s fingers inching towards his revolver as soon as they open their yaps. Harris has a marvellous discourse on class and British society in this morning’s Guardian, as the British media goes into a full feeding frenzy over the ending of the relationship between William Arthur Philip Louis Mountbatten-Windsor, HRH Prince William of Wales, and Kate Middleton, er, full stop. It’s the full stop that broke the camel’s back, according to the blatts – the lovely Miss Middleton is rather too common to marry into royalty.

This “too common” notion about a doll whose siblings were educated at Marlborough, darling, and who herself when to St Andrews, founded in 1413, a long step of the road from NUI Galway, your quillsman’s own alma mater, is on Harris as the sound of the bugle is to the warhorse, and he gets stuck in with gusto. Harris is of his age, of course, and one of the great questions in Britain at the moment is how to respond to her class heritage and continuing monarchy. It's so less distressing as a topic at table than how the country itself is accelerating into oblivion.

It all makes for marvellous fun – your correspondent had to fight the urge to clasp his little handies together in joy when he read in Harris’ article that the contenders for the post of new girlfriend to HRH Prince William of Wales are Rosie Ruck-Keene, Davina Duckworth-Chad, Lady Rosanagh Innes-Ker and the nominee of The Sun newspaper, Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe. Them’s handles right there. Even PG Wodehouse himself would have blushed before bunging that little lot off for a weekend at Blandings.

Sadly though, in Ireland, in rolling names like Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe around our palates and thinking ourselves, in Lennon’s words, so clever and classless and free, we are ignoring the cautionary words of St Matthew in the opening verses of the seventh chapter of his gospel. Class is as prevalent in 21st Century Ireland as it ever was in Great Britain. Not to the same extent of course – while milord was having his boots shone for seven hundred years over the water and building up that class tradition, poor Paddy was under said boot, dying – but the lines are just as real and the distinctions drawn just as nice, just as subtle, and every bit by God just as enforced as those defined in polite drawing rooms up and down the sceptred isle since the Restoration.


The Pope’s Children, David McWilliams’ book about modern, Celtic Tiger, 21st Century Ireland leapt off the shelves here when it was published eighteen months ago. People bought it trying to understand how the country had changed so much in such a small space of time, but An Spailpín is convinced that the legacy of The Pope’s Children will be that it delineates the new Irish class structure that has arisen as the result of this boom and new money in the country. Breakfast Roll Men, Decklanders, Kells’ Angels, HiCos – what are those if not the new working, middle, aspirant and upper classes of modern Irish society?

McWilliams' neologisms' success as labels is reflected in the accuracy of the classifications, and the reaction of people when they found out which class they fitted into. A certain floppy haired economist, columnist, writer and TV presenter is filed as HiCo, Hibernian-Cosmopolitan, by the way, which McWilliams identifies as those that have created the perfect synergy between the ancient Gaelic traditions and the new, European-influenced-as-well-as-bankrolled generation. He was never backward about going forward, of course, Daithí.

The HiCo label is the loosest of the four classifications, of course, as the reaching into the Gaelic past bit goes no further than finding an ancient Irish name like Naoise for one’s issue that will cause a lot of difficulty to pronounce in eighteen years’ time for whoever is supervising Naoise’s shift gutting fish for the summer job in Scarborough, Maine, and Mater and Pater making sure that little Naoise goes to a Gaelscoil where he will not have to share the organically produced contents of his lunchbox with that great class that are totally left out of The Pope’s Children but whose common, non-David-McWilliams-coined designation generally rhymes with trackers.

The other great demographic that’s left out by McWilliams’ all-seeing eye is that part of the country that is outside of the Dublin commuter belt – Ireland, I believe, is what some geographers call it. People in the larger rural cities, like Galway, Cork or Limerick get a passing mention, but only insofar as they are aping the Dublin demographic (Galway apes it now more or less exactly – how heart-breakingly sad. They’ve turned the Emerald City into a strip mall. Dorothy and Toto may never go home again). Otherwise, of rural life on the land or in the country towns, there is nary a mention. I hope it was just sloth on McWilliams’ part, because the other possibility, that all of rural Ireland is on a slow but inevitable slide towards Dublin, to be assimilated on point of entry at the city’s hungry maw into Decklander or Kells’ Angels as appropriate, is a prospect that terrifies and appals.

Once tagged, the new recruit will find him- or herself picking through a series of social shibboleths that are becoming, in their way, as complex and arbitrary as those in force at Versailles before the Revolution. The reactions to the classifications are interesting – Decklanders are particularly offended, while those tagged as HiCo, top of the tree, A-number-one, are visibly relieved while steadfastly refusing to believe there is a class system in existence in the first place. And why should they, when they exist in the perfect homogeny of their own HiCo world, where everybody is sent for tennis lessons and the closest one gets to the “people-left-behind-by-the-Celtic-Tiger” is in reading about them in the election leaflets of socially concerned millionaire businessmen like Ciarán Cuffe of the Green Party who, for all his wealth, doesn’t seem to spend much on ties?

But reader, spare a thought this day for poor Kate Middleton, who flew too close to the sun only to be slapped back down to where she belonged. Can you imagine the land she’ll get when she comes back to Ireland to forget, only to be cut dead in Reynards for not having attended Loreto, Foxrock? Good luck to Kate, where-ever her road takes her; she might be having a damned lucky escape.





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