If the northerners would run our banks for us, maybe in return we could help them win the Eurovision
HAS IT ever occurred to anyone else that the Irish people who know how to run banks are on the wrong side of the Border? Just 100 one hundred miles away, in Belfast, sits a whole culture of caution and conformity and conservative financial rectitude; why don’t we go north and shop for some of that for a change?
Is it not possible that the whole economic meltdown which the Republic has brought upon itself is a direct result of partition? The late Charlie Haughey once said that Northern Ireland was a failed political entity – which was true, but offensive. Our neighbours in the North have kindly refrained in recent months from making similar, and similarly justified, remarks. But the fact is that we need Presbyterians, and we need them now.
The economy of the North is underwritten by the British taxpayer and seems to consist mainly of public service jobs designed to provide the population of the North with the best health care and education systems available within the United Kingdom.
In other words, it’s nice but it’s not exactly Wall Street.
And there is the case of the Presbyterian Mutual Society, in which many people unfortunately lost their savings in a banking scandal. These things happen.
However, the point stands. The Republic needs a cultural infusion from a grouping in which it is not laughable to save string. We need less imagination and more accounting – and indeed much less imagination used in combination with accounting. We became what the mothers of the nation used to describe as over-excited.
I think it was George V who remarked that he feared that Northern Ireland would become left wing (if only . . .) and that the South would become corrupt. George V saw that the two parts of Ireland needed each other, and they still do. They’re Calvinist and we’re cute.
If northern Protestants would run our banks for us we could, er, help them win Eurovision. It’s just that management isn’t really our thing. It is management talent that we lack. People from the Republic thrive when we go to live and work in a country where the institutions have been set up and are run by other people. We do amazingly well in those circumstances, demonstrating imagination and flair. At heart we’re a good-time culture.
There are those of us who were feeling a little fragile yesterday after a Saturday night spent in the most depressed capital in Europe. Funny how every restaurant and pub was packed to the gills. It was standing room only in the bars of the so-called luxury hotels. It seems that as a nation we have lost everything except the Christmas party.
It was rather wonderful to see, after a week in which the country had been subjected to the Budget From Hell, that crowds of women had booked tables for 12. These were the office parties and the girls’ lunches that we feared we would never see again. I was at exactly such a gathering myself.
It is said that when the guys from the IMF arrived in Dublin – and they were overwhelmingly guys, I think we must reluctantly observe – they went out for a meal. It was a Monday night, and they went to L’Ecrivain which lies, as its own website puts it, “in the heart of Georgian Dublin”. To their surprise the IMF guys found L’Ecrivain absolutely rocking, as those inside enjoyed the run of their teeth. The wise men of the IMF could only shake their heads in wonder at the strange land to which they had travelled.
Now this story may or may not be true – and there is a book of collected anecdotes about the IMF guys to be published some time in the new year, with analysis from psychiatrists and cultural anthropologists, as well as full colour illustrations. But one of the points of this story is that a good-time culture can get a bit worn out by disaster, particularly by disaster that seems to have no agreed solution.
Economics is said to be the new rock and roll, and at this point it feels as if we have listened to most of the bands recently. Astrologers demonstrate more unanimity than our economists are showing at the moment. Discussions about the nation’s finances now consist of middle-aged people shouting at each other and, as Peter Cook once said in another connection, I can get that at home.
So maybe it would be no harm for our Minister of Finance, instead of visiting the homes of our economists, as he did with David McWilliams at the beginning of our financial meltdown, to visit Northern Ireland and find some nice reliable Protestants who could set us on an even keel.
It would be neighbourly of them and give real meaning to those famous cultural links, which were much talked about at the time of the Good Friday Agreement, and have not been heard about since. In exchange we could show them how to screw business and even factories out of the Americans.
Who knows, if things worked out, we could even get a united Ireland out of it with nothing stronger than fiscal violence to pay for it. Which would make for a very nice change.