There’s a contrary streak in me, I’m afraid. Surrounded by people celebrating, I find myself growing morose and miserable; in the midst of those solemn or crying doom, I feel an urge to start laughing. Wretch that I am, over the course of the last twenty-four hours I found myself grinning and sometimes guffawing out loud. Here are five of my top rib-ticklers.
1. Watching Fianna Fail ministers bust a gut trying to deny that an IMF deal would impinge on Irish sovereignty. Like, if you’re about to go under for the third time and a guy says he’s going to throw you a life-belt but you’ll have to put up with some spartan conditions he’s arranged, once you get to shore – that’s not impinging on your sovereign right to make free choices?
2. Hearing the bleating of twenty-six-county commentators and opposition politicians, as they lamented the massive dent in sovereignty that the IMF coming in would represent, how the sacrifice of 1916 was being betrayed – without a single one of them mentioning the north. Hello – guys? You remember the north. The six northern counties of Ireland, where all major political decisions are controlled from London and where 5,000 heavily-armed British troops make sure things stay that way. No loss of sovereignty there but massive loss of sovereignty in getting the finances straight?
3. Looking at a photograph in today’s Guardian. It shows Ajai Chopra, the deputy director of the European department of the International Monetary Fund, striding along a Dublin street with his underlings. He’s staring straight ahead, which means he can pretend not to see the Dublin beggar who sits with his paper cup extended for a bail-out. Sorry, hand-out.
4. Gasping at Steve Bell’s cartoon in The Guardian. It shows a helpless Brian Cowen strapped to a post, saying ‘ME? Bend over and SPREAD ‘EM? NEVER in a MILLION YEARS!!’ while behind him a dozen European elves carrrying a very stout post come charging towards his exposed bum.
5. Finally and top-fun of all, an SDLP apologist called Owen Polley writes in the VO this morning. He uses his article to explain why Maggie Ritchie wore that poppy and apparently it’s because she’s busy reconciling the SDLP’s ‘aspiration for Irish unity with longstanding acceptance of the principle of consent’. Eh? She is also ‘making a respectful, bridge-building gesture’ while at the same time ‘championing a 32-county republic’. And there’s more. The article is 800 words long and the knock-out hilarity is that the writer doesn’t once use the four-word phrase ‘South Down unionist votes’. If young Polley had any wit, he’d turn from the tight-fisted payroll of the VO and sprint towards the lucrative world of stand-up comedy. He’d be brilliant.