The Dubliner Magazine

Betwixt Clarity And Cliché

Max McGuinness on Obama's speech.

Well, it wasn't quite Henry V but President Obama's inaugural address struck three or four powerful notes:

"We are ready to lead once more" could have been a slogan on a par with "Ask not..." etc. but, perceiving that it would have been bad form towards Bush, he didn't overly emphasise it.

"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals" was another well-aimed dig from "44" to "43" sitting behind him.

It is notable that he immediately set to work yesterday on both counts, suspending the military tribunal in Guantanamo and weighing in on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

The reference to how his father "less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant" was very poignant and a sort of release for Obama who had, with the exception of his rhetorical masterpiece "A More Perfect Union", done his best to avoid making that point on the campaign trail.

More surprising was the inclusion of the last word, marked out by a dramatic pause and verbal stress, in this sentence: "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and non-believers."
Though the speech was not devoid of the gooey piety afflicting public debate in America, I think it's fairly plausible that President Obama isn't much of a believer himself and, as related in Dreams From My Father, if he found God at all it was because he felt rather isolated on Chicago's South Side where the dubious conclave of Rev. Jeremiah Wright (no sign of him on Tuesday) provided a spiritual home. Of course, whatever about the milestone of a black man being elected president, Obama knows that no atheist would have a chance in hell of being elected dog catcher let alone commander-in-chief so I cannot blame him for being slightly less than candid on this front. 

Brian Versus Brian

Max McGuinness on the cabinet's psychodrama

So Biffo and Brian Lenihan are going through a hard time in their relationship. It's gotten so bad that the Taoiseach has stormed out of the government house and gone to...Japan. Each month when the credit card statements arrive, a flaming row erupts as Brian, ashen-faced, contemplates the billions that his partner has frittered away on extravagances like pro-government independent TDs, management consultants, medical cards, and make-up artists.

"For Christ's sake," bawls Brian "you spend more money on slap than Mary Harney!" (see the Indo).

"You spend even more!" retorts a sobbing Biffo. "And how do you expect me to do you justice as a Beautiful Intelligent Filly From Offaly without a few tonnes of foundation? I'm a whole 18 months older than Barack Obama, don't you know?"

"Look, darling, it's gone a bit too far. Our overdraft is up to €13 billion and that's not even counting the €5 billion that's due this year on the car loan. It's time to make some hard choices. Either you cut back on the eyeliner or I'm cancelling next month's dinner-dance with your friends from SIPTU."

"But Brian, we could never...Imagine the shame, Brian! We'll have no social partners left! Oh the indignity! And no-one will ever vote for us againnnn........" (sobs)

"There, there, alright Biffo, snuckums, I'll tell you what. You can go ahead with the dinner-dance but there'd better be no Krug this year and to cover our costs, let's run a charity auction -- all proceeds due to the plain people of Ireland...and the international bond market, of course."

"But Brian, we simply must have the Krug! I knew I never should have left Charlie for you. Oh how we used to laugh! And Krug every single day of the week; we even used to bathe in the stuff. I foolishly took you for a toy boy but ever since we've been together you've taken all the joy out of my life."

Bev's "Entitlements"

Max McGuinness on another "tumbrel remark".

I've just heard Beverley "Brassneck" Flynn on Radio 1 defending her €40,000 a year allowance for being an independent TD (erm...even though she's not an independent anymore):

"It might not be equitable but I am entitled to it under the legislation."

This is another classic "tumbrel remark" -- which I originally wrote about here in connection with "Fásgate". (A "tumbrel remark", as defined by Joyce Cary, is “an unguarded comment by an uncontrollably rich person, of such crass insensitivity that it makes the workers and peasants think of lampposts and guillotines.") I argued that Rody Molloy's declaration that "I am entitled to travel first-class" was vintage tumbrel material and sure enough he was out of a job within hours of uttering it.

But Bev Flynn has long shown herself to be absolutely un-embarrassable so I have little doubt that she'll go on clinging to her self-confessed "inequitable entitlements".

How many more tumbrel remarks will it take to get the plain people of Ireland to storm Leinster House and stick the cabinet in stocks outside Buswell's Hotel?  Better yet, maybe we'll be invaded by some benign superpower who will dispatch the entire Fianna Fáil parliamentary party to Antarctica.

Dunne In

Max McGuinness on the latest installment in Ireland's "dégringolade".

So where did it all go wrong?...Doheny & Nesbitt's apparently. According to a front page story in today's International Herald Tribune, the "beery musings of a group billed by participants as the Doheny & Nesbitt School of Economics soon became government policy..." One can imagine the scene:

FF minister: Fuck the hospital beds (hiccup). Giss' us another one o' these, a ball o' malt, and some tax cuts for the rich.

Barman: How about a packet of Tayto and a 110% mortgage to keep the wolf from the door?

FF minister: Go on sher. And don't forget, we're moving the Department of Foreign Affairs to...where is it?

FF backbencher: Spiddal, Minister.

FF minister: Fucking hate the place. (hiccup) Spent a month there at Irish college when I was 12. The bean an tí forced us to eat spaghetti fuckin' hoops every day of the fuckin' week. No, we'll send the department to Limerick. Sher' couldn't they do with a bit of ole diplomacy out there?

PD minister: Pint of Romanée Conti please...and leak a few of these passport applications, would ya? Come to think of, I could with a bit of a leak myself. By the time I get back, Telecom Eireann better be privatised, right? You can do the sums on the back of this beermat and sort out this Luas malarkey while you're at it -- use another beer mat if you have to, but I'm like a one beermat kind of guy, you know. Hands off the Romanée Conti, by the way. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his greed." Gospel. Wha'?

And so on.

Chutzpah Charlie

Max McGuinness on some really bad advice from the man who got us into this mess.

Back in the heyday of Celtic Tiger 1.0, the then Minister for Finance “Champagne” Charlie McCreevy used to revel in distributing bags of goodies every budget day. Like a latter day Louis Philippe, his watchword seemed to be “Enrichissez-vous!”. There were tax cuts, spending increases, and handouts galore. The economy was booming already with growth hitting over 10% in 1997, the year Fianna Fáil came to power. But Charlie decided to chuck more and more diesel onto the fire.  The consequences are now coming back to haunt us: inflation sapped international competiveness leading to growth being concentrated almost entirely in the property market; and the swingeing cuts to income tax made government revenues excessively dependent on the housing bubble.

So is Charlie repentant? Does he express contrition for his irresponsible profligacy? Has he conceded that he may have made even a few errors of judgement? To paraphrase Michael Bailey: Has he f**k?

A Trivial Tumbrel Remark

Max McGuinness on "Fásgate".

Derry-born novelist and adventurer Joyce Cary coined the phrase “tumbrel remark”. Tumbrels being the carts used to carry Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette et al to their demise, Cary meant by this “an unguarded comment by an uncontrollably rich person, of such crass insensitivity that it makes the workers and peasants think of lampposts and guillotines."

The original tumbrel remark (though Marie Antoinette never in fact said it) was of course “Let them eat cake”. More recently, billionaire fraudster Leona Helmsley’s fate was sealed when her cleaning lady testified in court that she had overheard her mistress declare: “Only little people pay taxes”.

I don’t think there can be any doubt that the wretched Rody Molloy’s declaration this week on the Pat Kenny Show that “I am entitled to travel first-class” deserves to be filed under the same rubric. The fact that Rody lives in a bungalow in Co. Kildare just doesn’t cut any ice here – if you are entitled to fly first-class on somebody else’s dime, then you had better keep quiet about it.

Progressively Undemocratic

Max McGuinness will not miss the PDs.

It would be no bad thing if this country had a genuinely liberal party – a party prepared to advocate an expanded role for personal freedom in all areas, founded on the principles of John Stuart Mill and Friedrich von Hayek.  Such a party would argue for lower taxes and freer immigration, privatisation and gay marriage, a smaller public sector and legalised abortion, the elimination of subsidies and the decriminalisation of drugs. I probably wouldn’t vote for it but such a party would have the potential to make a marginal yet valuable contribution to Irish politics. Examples in continental Europe include the German FDP and Dutch VVD.

The Progressive Democrats were never such a party. Despite their membership of the Liberal International, they never seriously campaigned for liberal social reforms and latterly pursued an anti-liberal agenda with 2004’s citizenship referendum. The PDs were also in the tank for Fianna Fáil during the last abortion referendum, which, if passed, would have sent doctors performing abortions to jail for up to 12 years.

Sanity Comes To Washington

Max McGuinness on Obama.

The election on Tuesday of a half black, self-described “skinny kid with a funny name” is certainly unprecedented and historic for all those reasons. But what I find truly cheering about Obama’s victory is that, for the first time since perhaps the 1950s, the American people have elected a president who doesn’t possess a major character flaw. As his impeccable manners and conduct throughout the campaign, along with his vastly superior intelligence and the glorious magnanimity and understatement of his acceptance speech attest, Barack Obama is the first fundamentally decent and psychologically-sound person to assume the highest office in living memory.

Nationalise The Banks

says Max McGuinness.

While the government's reckless decision last week to guarantee all bank deposits has since been replicated by those hitherto famously good sports -- the Germans -- it has nonetheless exposed the country to a serious risk of long-term national insolvency and was guided by Fianna Fáil's traditional something for nothing hucksterism.

By contrast, the British government's policy of a proposed part nationalisation of their banking system is a costly but courageous move, whose wisdom, I believe, will become increasingly apparent in years to come, though it may well need to be extended to full public ownership.

Rather than pay the real price of a collapse in banking confidence -- i.e nationalisation -- Cowen and Lenihan thought they had hit upon yet another ingenious wheeze. They would guarantee deposits, staving off a looming bank run at a stroke. And, they reasoned, the ploy would not cost the exchequer a penny since the guarantee would never actually be tested.

In the process, the government has assumed responsibility for liabilities totalling some two and a half times GNP. That's almost €100,000 for every man, woman, and child in this country.

Nightmare On Wall Street

Max McGuinness on the Crisis of Capitalism

Like most people, I have spent the past week trying to understand the enveloping economic crisis, lavishing levels of concentration on the Financial Times and Barron's normally reserved for Heidegger and Proust.

Like, it seems, anyone who ever bought or sold  a Credit Default Swap or a Collaterised Debt Obligation, my comprehension of what they are remains at best hazy -- CDOs involve inherently risky mortgage-based debt; CDSs are insurance against default in the CDO market. The fiendish complexity of the various financial instruments now going up in smoke has been regularly adduced as one reason for the continuing meltdown.

Wise financiers like Warren Buffet and George Soros always steered clear of these toxic derivatives, insisting that they would never invest in something that they did not understand (in the process, they made much more money than anyone who ever worked at Lehman Brothers). And these speculative sophistries in fact obscure a simple yet fundamental problem with the global economy, particulary, its Western component -- twenty-five years of excessive debt.