THE OSBORNE ASCENDENCY

“EVERYONE’S A COMEDIAN IN IRELAND”, we often hear on the Liverpool side of the water, “but the real jokers are in London.” This indeed may well be the case as seen through emerald-coloured glasses, but the ominous meeting being held today in Brussels, involving the usual suspects – the inglorious battalions of European Union grey-faced and grey-suited dismal failed and unelected ‘politicians’ – and our very own financially clueless George “Boy” Osborne – can only mean bad news for all involved, but particularly for those who have relied on Paddy McGinty’s goat for economic sustenance over the last ten years.

MOST SENSIBLE IRISH PEOPLE over recent years have realised what side their bread is buttered on (with their own butter, mind you) and have firmly set their allegiances with their fellow English speakers, this involving either going to live and work and/or settle in the UK or in the USA. If we asked any of the successful Irish people of the last fifty years whether they would prefer or have preferred to commit their all to Europe, and we just included Mischa Barton, Pierce Brosnan, Gabriel Byrne, The Corrs, Conan O’Brien, Robert Downey Jr., Val Doonican, Megan Fox, Bob Geldof, any Kennedy, Lindsay Lohan, Liam Neeson, Sean Penn, Ronald Reagan, Terry Wogan or U2 (and I am just referring off the top of my head to those I know through music and film) then I imagine that everyone except Lindsay Lohan is happy where they are now. Where Lohan would like to be is anyone’s guess.

NO DOUBT INSPIRED BY EAMON DE VALERA, the Irish government jumped at the chance to abandon the pound when the European Union was set up. It was the first of the Eurozone countries to issue commemorative Euros and its currency now includes the one boring symbol of Eire on every denomination: the Irish harp. Thus it was clear that the Fianna Fáil party simply saw the European Union as a way of putting two fingers up to the government of the United Kingdom

BUT THEIR NEW-FOUND FRIENDS were of little help when, during the “mad cow” crisis of the Margaret Thatcher years in the UK, the European Union also banned Irish beef, as most Irish beef, like most Irish people who are looking for money and success, used to get the ferry from Dún Laoghaire to Holyhead or Liverpool, and so this beef was seen as British when it was loaded, lowing, onto the stinking cattle boats to the equally stinking French and Belgian ports, and was also refused entry into Europe.

THEN, AS NOW, IRELAND TURNED TO LONDON for compensation. Then, as now, it was given. George Osborne, our Chancellor of the Exchequer, is a member of the Irish An Chinsealacht Phrotastúnach ruling aristocracy, and also the heir to the Osborne Baronetcy of Ballentaylor in County Tipperary and Ballylemon in County Waterford, both of which mean he has an interest in the ways things go. Perhaps this is why he is so keen to help Ireland after they showed two fingers to us and now come to us with two hands open.

(My picture shows Mr Osborne helping Sky News with their enquiries.)

FORTY SHADES OF GREENBACKS

MY FATHER NEVER REALLY GAVE OUT MUCH ADVICE to me when I was a boy, but his occasional dry quips about events and my capacity to deal with them have stuck in my mind as if set in stone. When he was entrusted to teaching me how to lace my shoes, he showed me his already laced shoes, gave me my shoes and told me to “work it out”. I was four. I remember asking him what ill results would befall if I didn’t learn this skill, and his response was; “Nothing. People will just go about saying that David can’t tie his laces.” I was distraught at this thought, and immediately set about the task.

HE ALSO TOLD ME, THIS BEING IN LIVERPOOL, never to go into Chinatown late at night with any money in my pocket, never to kill any animal for sport or amusement, never to make fun of anyone afflicted with an illness or deficiency, never, ever, to raise my hand against a woman, never to swear in front of my mother or any domestic servants, never to judge people on the basis of the colour of their skin, never to let success be my God and never, under any circumstances, to lend money to an Irishman. “Always give them the money”, he used to say. "Everyone feels better and the result is the same in the end."

MOST OF THESE TEACHINGS MADE PERFECT SENSE to me as I was a young man, although it is only now that the last of them is starting to ring true, and, happily, it does not involve me. Due to an anomaly of legislation, while I may be resident in Britain at the moment I do not pay taxes there; thus, unlike the rest of the population of the UK – each of whom will be “lending” the Irish seven hundred pounds in 2010 – I will not have to contribute towards the Irish crash.

NO IRISHMAN OWES ME MONEY, but, unfortunately, as I have lived in Portugal for a large number of years, the same cannot be stated of the Portuguese. Several people have asked me for some money in the past, and no one has made any attempt at paying it back. On the one occasion when I accosted the miscreant who was in debt to me he stated (I translate), “If you lent me the money it is because you have money”, meaning, I imagine, that it is the duty of those who have money to give it to the snotty unwashed who do not have any. Ireland has now been forced to admit its shame; if Portugal, Spain and Italy have to follow suit one wonders what will happen to the Euro project. Why shouldn’t we just make all of these people unemployed, give them all a guaranteed minimum wage of 400 Euros per month (which is more than most of them earn anyway) and just leave Britain, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Holland and Denmark to work? Isn’t this more or less what happens now?

HABEMUS CONDOM

JUST WHEN I THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE to get back to more important issues this Sunday, now that I have completed the oppression of marking students’ work, the cleaning girls have more or less cleaned the house and I have had luncheon in a Middle-Eastern restaurant a brisk walk from my house, I am assailed by abhorrent news from the Vatican City involving Pope Benedict XVI.

I HAD COME IN RELAXED FASHION TO MY STUDY to complete my latest painting, a nude study that will look fetching above my desk, when I turned on Sky News and saw our good Catholic leader informing the planet, according to the lady on the programme, that wearing condoms was acceptable now.

LATIN IS A TRICKY LANGUAGE at the best of times, and I am not sure what language Joseph Ratzinger might have been speaking when he gave his interview to L’Ossatore Romano, but one hopes there is a misquotation of some sort involved in these most ominous of tidings.

NVAGDA WAS HOW WE WERE TAUGHT LATIN nouns at school: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative (and in some cases, locative). This was not too difficult to follow, except when one got down to the dative and ablative forms, which were regularly translated, in the case of a noun like Mensa, a table, as “to, at, through or for a table” and “by, through, with or from a table”.

THUS I HOPE THAT WHEN JOURNALISTS TELL US that the Pope has stated that condoms can be used “by men” when having sex “with men”, or “by male prostitutes with diseases” “for the prevention of disease”, that the whole thing is more of a translation mistake than my Oxford entrance examination in Latin was. But if the Roman Catholic Church is now suggesting that “if one has to have sex with a male prostitute then one should use a condom”, then my comment can only be one: unicuique suum.

WE OWE A ROOSTER TO ASCLEPIUS. DON'T FORGET TO PAY THE DEBT

JOSÉ SÓCRATES CARVALHO PINTO DE SOUSA, the Portuguese Prime Minister, is obviously riding on a high this week after the “success” of the NATO summit in Lisbon showed that Portugal is capable of throwing a good party for guests who possess nuclear weapons and lend Portugal large amounts of money.

PINTO DE SOUSA, BETTER KNOWN TO HIS SUPPORTERS as “Socrates”, perhaps due to the prestige involved in being associated with one of the most intelligent, liberal, humanist and courageous thinkers of all time, obviously deserves a bit of a break, as he has been doing his best dealing with the collapsing Portuguese economy for the last two years – or, more specifically, he, an engineer by profession, has been struggling with trying to explain what is going wrong to the Portuguese people, most of whom seem to believe that money, when it doesn’t grow on trees or turn up during the night underneath a mattress, comes from Brussels.

IN AN ATTITUDE SOMEWHAT THE REVERSE of Lord Young’s (see Sunday Morning last), but the same as that of the Republic of Ireland, Socrates spends a large part of his increasingly rare public appearances (once it was twice a day on the news, but now there is a tendency to lay low) telling everyone that things are fine. The mere fact that Portugal owes untold billions of Euros to a large group of investors and the debt is increasing daily seems neither here nor there.

(My title states the reported last words of the “real” Socrates, mortified more by owing someone something than by the hemlock creeping up his legs to his heart. When most of our politicians come to an end I imagine they will owe someone much more than a cock.)

WHEN WE WERE YOUNG

SO MANY “IMPORTANT” THINGS HAVE HAPPENED this week that it is difficult to decide upon the “highlight”; the favourites include Education Secretary Michael Gove’s absurd decision to try to make young people in England and Wales write grammatically correct English, the wasteful NATO summit including Georgia and Russia, Prince Charles’ return to form in suggesting to an American journalist that he thought that Camilla should become queen of England and Scotland “when I become king” (sic), and a similar harking back to the good old days of predictable politics when a Conservative grandee put his foot in it over lunch.

LORD DAVID IVOR YOUNG, BARON YOUNG OF GRAFFHAM, Privy Counsellor and Deputy Lieutenant to the Crown, was generally thought to be the real person behind the imaginary figure known to readers of Private Eye magazine as “Lord Suit”, a Conservative millionaire who was completely out of touch with life in modern Britain.

THIS MAY HAVE BEEN MY OWN OPINION in the past, but Lord Young’s statement to the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday, in which he said that British people “have never had it so good”, shows that there is not a jot or scintilla of truth in the allegation that Lord Young is an outdated political figure who should retire to his country house and keep his mouth shut except when he is putting his Davidoff cigars in it.

PROOF THAT LORD YOUNG is one of us is his choice of restaurant for luncheon, a modest Georgian building a stone’s thrown from the Houses of Parliament. Young does not go for fancy foreign food, as many rich people do, but instead, like most of us, enjoyed simple, traditional British pub grub, on this occasion being a deeply flavoured starter of asparagus in a morel butter sauce, followed by a silky slice of confit salmon with samphire and zingy baby nasturtium flowers, quail with hazelnut, pomegranate and tiny pickled radishes, and a lemon tart. His only extravagance might have been the Bordeaux, but so many of us in England (and perhaps even some Celts) now drink foreign wine that it is hardly a luxury. And £12 a glass is cheap by anyone’s standards.

ERRATA

IT SEEMS LIKE ONLY MINUTES since I published my piece about the latest good news, yet I have received several comments about the mistakes it contained. I of course realise that there was a problem with the photographs. By mistake I stated that the lower photograph was of Herman Van Rompuy, but it is in fact one of Herman Goering. The other photograph does not in fact refer to reaction to the news that this young couple were "in love", but reaction to the news that the Duke of Edinburgh had told all three of these young people to "stop shagging for a while". My apologies.

UNBOUNDED JOY TO THE NATION

AS AN ENGLISHMAN I CANNOT HELP but share in the unbounded joy felt by not only all my compatriots and all good-thinking, kind people everywhere, but particularly for all those of us who enjoy a happy resolution for a union which on occasion has seen troubled times and doubts but now is leading to the inevitable and desired outcome.

THIS IS THE NEWS THAT HERMAN ACHILLE VAN ROMPUY, President of Europe and pictured above thinking about the future, has finally announced that the Eurozone – and indeed the European project itself – is almost certainly doomed to failure due to utter mismanagement of the hare-brained idea to unite Europe financially, economically and politically against all common sense. The best part of the news, of course, is that this collapse is taking place before the slimy Van Rompuy could produce his hideous plans for a “common European income tax”, although it may be too late to stop his equally sleazy buddy José “No way” Barroso to ask hard-working northern European citizens to cough up their cash to allow Irish, Portuguese and Greek politicians and citizens to sit around doing nothing.

ALSO OF NOTE IN THE PRESS TODAY is the news that Prince William of Wales is about to marry commoner Catherine Elizabeth “Kate” Middleton on a date to be announced in the spring or summer of next year. We all naturally wish them well. It will be extremely refreshing for the royal family to welcome Kate’s parents into their bosom. Given the fact that Kate’s mother was an air hostess and her father a luggage controller at Heathrow, one hopes that her mother does not forget herself at the banquet at the palace and start pushing trolleys around and asking “Are you paying in Pounds or Euros?” Particularly as (hopefully) the Euro will be dead before the marriage is dead.

(My picture shows Prince William’s and Kate’s joy when the Duke of Edinburgh phoned them earlier this year and told them they were in love. Prince Harry expresses his emotions in a rather more subdued manner.)