In Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 tale The Emperor’s New Clothes, two weavers make an emperor a supposedly fantastic suit of clothes that will be invisible to people of low virtue, low intellect and low ability. When the emperor parades his new attire before his subjects, they, in turn - desperate not to look stupid - pretend that he isn’t in fact naked. Only a child has the courage to say it as it is: “But he isn’t wearing anything at all”.
Although this popular Danish parable, a classic cautionary tale on the dangers of obedience to authority, has been translated into over one hundred languages, it has yet to be translated into the vernacular of the Irish peasant: Imapuckingthickpaddygluttonforpunishment-eze. At least that’s according to two significant polls to be published in today’s papers, which show that almost half the Republic’s population speaks nothing pucking else.
If Andersen were alive today and living in Ireland, he’d probably have written a cautionary tale about a former Fianna Fáiler who looked like a Fianna Fáiler, sounded like a Fianna Fáiler, acted like a Fianna Fáiler, but had a fantastic cloak of invisibility woven by two spinners who’d previously worked for Fianna Fáil (see http://judecollinsjournalist.blogspot.com/2011/10/what-me-fianna-fail.html). This splendid garment, they guaranteed, would be invisible to those of high virtue, high intellect and high ability, but bestowed with wondrous, hypnotic gorgeousness for those in the asinine majority. Only a goat on a blog had the courage to say: “Puck this for a game of darts”.
What the HELL is going on? Fianna Fáil screwed the economy. It’s left us impoverished, indebted, the laughing-stock of the industrialised world. IT HAS LEFT US WITH THE BIGGEST MOUND OF DEBT REPAYMENTS PER CAPITA OF ANY NATION IN THE WORLD (Debt/GDP: 490%), OWING MORE THAN THE GERMANS DID IN REPARATIONS AFTER WORLD WAR I. It’s also got the Brits back to laughing at us again.
Over the last couple of years I’m sure others have had the same experience: you’re watching the BBC or Channel 4 of a weekend evening because RTÉ will no doubt be featuring some B-Lister interviewing another B-Lister on some stony faced issue of national importance that will have you reaching for the Prozac. While merrily tittering away at 9 Out of Ten Cats or Have I Got News For You or, my favourite, Mock the Week, you’re suddenly stopped in your tracks when someone makes a wise-crack about the reckless, feckless Irish. The audience cackles heartlessly; the normally ebullient Dara Ó Briain just puts his head down and reddens, wounded, trying to laugh it off, looking like that big kid in school who wouldn’t be bullied so if he only knew his own strength. You feel for him and suddenly realise you’d probably do the same: we can’t blame the Brits for this; we deserve to be mocked; we made this mess ourselves. In the old days, when English comedians derided the Irish as terrorists or potato eaters, you’d fling the remote at the telly and yell something unprintable with a face on yeh like Daniel Day Lewis after he’d been sent down for the Guildford bombings. Now you just resign yourself to being one of the silly colonials who’d been told they couldn’t rule themselves but wouldn’t listen. “Just look at sub-Saharan Africa—” Tory dames probably reason over Châteauneuf-du-Pape at dinner parties in Chelsea, “—or Ireland; they were much better off in the empiaah”.
Being so ashamed of your compatriots, so acutely, cringingly demoralised by our beggar-on-horseback squandering of one of the most successful and sustained national economic booms worldwide in the last fifty years, leaves a pretty bad taste in the mouth. That men and women sacrificed their lives so that a squalid, corrupt, inept protectorate populated by privately schooled shoneens and superannuated ninnies would transform a once proud nation into a money factory for hedge funds is, well, deeply depressing. But while it’s one thing to make a monumental mistake, to keep making the same mistake and expecting different results, well, that’s just stupid. When the Irish people vote for Seán Gallagher for President next week, we’ll be electing the most nakedly unsuitable object of forelock-tugging that we could possibly have representing us at this time. To paraphrase a seething W.B. Yeats, you’ve disgraced yourselves once again.
So true and so gooood, An Puc - telling people what bridge they're about to jump off...I love your style. Keep hammering at them. There must be more of us. There MUST...
ReplyDeleteI can see that we shall have to have a repeat election as per Nice & Lisbon, because voting for the stooge Gallagher is TOTALLY Wrong lads and lassies!
ReplyDeleteAgree guys; fool me once and all that. It's shameful stuff. I hope Jude that you're right and that the polls don't reflect the reality on the day.
ReplyDeleteThe 1992 British General Election the opinion polls got that one wrong. They all had Labour winning in almost every opinion poll in the 18 months run up to that election. An election the Tory party won of course.
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