Screwing the pooch

It’s proving to be an interesting and discontented summer. Blame the weather for a start. Travel agents and sun holidays are doing fine thanks, as are sellers of umbrellas and slug pellets. And there are great bargains in garden furniture and barbecue gear. But mostly we’re just pissed on, and pissed off.

It’s ramifying into other areas. We’re complaining more, and blaming more. There are lots of targets. The Government is one, in a way it hasn’t been for a long time. It’s a case of chickens coming home to roost. They were happy to take the credit for the good times. Well, it’s payback time now. Except that we’re the ones who’ll have to pay back.

An almost forgotten word is being invoked like a mantra. That word is ‘cutbacks’. It applies to all public services, but you (consumer) will really feel it in health, despite protestations to the contrary. And a sister term, ‘charges’ will make third level education more expensive, which won’t please some hotpress readers.

Having enjoyed bumper harvests in recent years, what’s gone wrong? Was it a miscalculation by Charlie McCreevy of the Government’s finances? Or is it just an unfortunate and unpredictable side-effect of the global downturn triggered by September 11, 2001 and exacerbated by the revelations of corporate greed and accountancy corruption in America?

All of the above. McCreevy certainly cut taxes more than was prudent. He should have remembered the basic Irish dictum that fair weather will always turn bad in the end. Like Nigel Lawson in the UK before him, he overcooked the roast.

Another image that springs to mind comes from The Right Stuff. The astronauts discuss the delicacies of landing the capsule in the water on re-entry. Hot Shot tells his colleague it’s easy as long as you don’t panic. ‘Just don’t screw the pooch’, he cautions.

Well, it looks like our pooch has been screwed. Our capsule whacked down into the Atlantic and turned belly-up. Now Captain Charlie wants us all to swim for it.

Whether this general national malaise and bad humour is the cause of, or is being caused by, the increasingly bad press we Irish have been giving ourselves and getting from others is hard to say. But bad press we’ve got, and no mistake.

Ireland is seen more and more as a sour, intolerant and expensive place. And it’s true! Ask us!

Of course, there are reasons. For a start, we pay ourselves more than most other Europeans, apart from our fellow-rich in the Nordic countries and the south-east of England. Apparently a manager in Ireland gets three times what her or his counterpart gets in Portugal. That and the cost of insurance are going to do for the already wounded Celtic Tiger.

Of course, we now know these things because of the euro. A great invention altogether, it is exposing price and profit differentials across many sectors. We are emerging as one greedy bunch of (blood)suckers.

We are also emerging as a drunken loutish shower of proto-Brits, if surveys of attitudes to tourists in other countries are anything to go by. The British are the most unpopular tourists, which is no surprise. But the Irish are next in the least desirable stakes.

Begod now!! And we thought they all loved us!?! Joxer goes to Stuttgart! Italia ’90, USA ’94. Singing and river-dancing and bejasus and young Europeans and U2 and the Phwoarrs and Guinness and the Cliffs of Moher and the craic was ninety. What do you mean we’re the second most unpopular tourists?

But it’s true. And they’re right. Sure, many of us are grand inquisitive participatory visitors, and would be welcome in any society on earth. But an awful lot of us aren’t, and it isn’t just the new internationals coaxed into the air by low-cost airlines that are to blame. The haut-bourgeoisie are as bad.

In this, we create our own mayhem, but often in terms and behaviours that reflect our dominant cultural influences which are drawn from across the water. Think Big Brother...

The honeymoon is over. Our grudging attitude to the Nice Treaty, and the clear implication that we took Europe for what we could get and are now pissing on it, doesn’t help. There is a palpable sense of shock and outrage in other European countries at the thought that we might veto enlargement and deny other countries the opportunities we were so keen to take ourselves, notwithstanding that we may just have squandered them.

But in the midst of all this bad press and ill-temper, it is timely to mark two steps forward for Northern Ireland. The first of these is the decision of Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Belfast Alex Maskey to lay a wreath commemorating those who died at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The second is the IRA statement of apology for non-combatant deaths during the last 30 and more years. It was issued on the 30th anniversary of Bloody Friday, when nine were killed and hundreds injured in a huge city-wide blitz on Belfast.

Of course, Northern Ireland being what it is, any step forward is usually accompanied by two steps back. What with the increase in sectarian tension, and David Trimble’s need to be noticed and his fears for the electoral future, there is certainly backward movement. But let’s acknowledge something positive for what it is.

The Hog