Charlie Haughey ate Brian Lenihan s liver and washed it down with Crystal champagne. Metaphorically speaking. He also consumed his son, using young Ciaran's helicopter company as a cheque-out machine.
Whatever next? Will David Trimble hang onto the three hundred and sixty thousand quid he got for the Nobel prize, which he promised to donate to charity? He only promised "some" of it, a colleague points out. That's all right then. David gives thirty thousand to the Orange Widow's Benevolent Society, pockets the rest and Charlie's his uncle. They're both ten per cent socialists ten per cent to the workers and the rest to themselves. Brian got his new liver, didn't he?
Fianna Fail and the rest of the shower in Leinster House wring their hands, draw their salaries and write substantial cheques at tax-payer's expense to Tribunal lawyers. Up at Stormont, all the politicians take lumps out of each other, draw their salaries and demand that London underwrites the cost of the North at the expense of taxpayers.
Well yes and no.
Some politicians should not be let out at any cost. Most of the rest lead a dog's life and money would not pay for what they have to go through. Some have paid with their lives in the North, while North and South many are treated like mushrooms, heaped with shit and told to shut up.
Well, yes and no.
Off-hand, it's difficult to think of those who walked away from it all, so the vast majority who stick it out must get some kick out of it. It can be perversely pleasant to receive a kick from a well-shod boot. You get your name and photograph in the local papers, occasionally appear in the nationals, often speak on local radio, sometimes reach the heady heights of RTE and BBC, and there are those who are never out of sight or sound.
The effect on the ego should not be underestimated. As Warhol sagely observed, everybody should be famous for fifteen minutes. Politicians, however humble, are famous for longer than that.
You don't have to join a party to be a politician. Join the Orange order and you get a police escort. Join the picket line and your face will appear in some publication, if only in the Special Branch files. Join the women's movement and enter the archives, to be resurrected and televised as we look back over the century. Publicity is the oxygen of politics.
It's still, by and large, a lousy life, with little glory at the end of it. Clinton can't get laid, Haughey can't get paid, any more. John Hume can't get no rest, Trimble no guns, Adams no government, Ahern no spouse, Quinn no majority, Bruton no luck. They'd be the first to complain about this. And the last to walk away from it.
Who would we kick if they weren't around to kick anymore? Wrong question. It has been an ambition of mine, this last year since the Good Friday agreement was signed, to walk up to each and every one of them and says "Thank Christ I don't have to talk to you ever again. Go and bore me no more." Far from wanting to kick them on the political shins, I looked forward to a hush-puppy life of music, books, booze, and women's liberation. The most aggressive plan I had in mind was spraying the greenfly on the roses.
The greenfly will take an awful hammering this next month, the snails will flee for safety, the trout will feel the hook, as politicians take August out. Come September, it's back to the drawing board again. When they do finally solve the North, who will be left to remember where the effing guns are stashed? Who among the current crop will be alive to remember what the row was about?
There's that at least the politicians will die peacefully in their beds, while the world rocks on, taking no notice of their passing but for a last photo and paragraph in the papers. Doubtless written by me. Journalists can be sad bastards too. n