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.

The episode has something paradoxical about it. On the one hand, the self-indulgence and fecklessness involved in all these trips to Orlando with the wife, the 900 dollar round of golf, and the 400 dollars worth of blow dries are distasteful and appear rather obscene as the economic scenery collapses all around. On the other hand, the sums involved are frankly trivial and the expenditure was not entirely frivolous. Thanks to Molloy’s efforts, a bunch of Irish geeks get to tool around with the space shuttle (another monument to hubris) for a couple of weeks every year.

Meanwhile, the country is suffering from a profound bout of property-crash related angst. A scapegoat was required and a barrage of Freedom of Information requests from The Sunday Independent and Fine Gael duly delivered some high-profile scalps. The details are certainly entertaining – my favourite being the charge for surf board hire for the geeks.

However this distracting affair has no implications for public policy. A symbol of boom-era excess it may be but to imagine that the Fás junketeers somehow blew the budget surplus in the Kennedy Centre gift shop is mad. Senior public officials are probably a bit overpaid by international standards which will probably be altered by default under the straightened circumstances of the next few years. But the real waste is elsewhere – decentralisation, the corrupt and clientilist attribution of major infrastructure contracts, a panoply of “generous” tax loopholes.

So in a couple of days, this particular tumbrel will have trundled past and we can get back to moaning about important stuff like our insolvent banking system.

Comments

[susan]

Hows this for a tumbrel remark?Actually said to me by a famous irish singer..''We're not going to pay you,we dont pay for anything,we never pay.''.Said Irish singer takes the same attitude to his taxes...