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.
These days, according to the IHT, you can find developer Seán Dunne inside the Baggot Street hostelry at 3 a.m (shurely shome mishtake?) "on perhaps his sixth pint of Guinness, capping a rollicking night of Champagne cocktails, followed by a wine-soaked dinner." Drowning his over-leveraged sorrows? Au contraire, "his thick brogue is clear of even the faintest slurring" and "he has meetings scheduled to begin before first light." Good to know he'll be dealing with his creditors with a clear head, eh?
Dunne blithely admits that "if the banking crisis continues I could be considered insolvent." Erm...I thought the reason the banks were insolvent was that "Dunner" and his pals had borrowed hundreds of millions to speculate on overvalued property. But whether he ends up personally going bust does not depend on the banks (who would be exceedingly stupid to lend him another cent) but on the quality of his own investments. And those now look as sensible as downing six pints of the black stuff after imbibing a skin full of Dom Perignon and Chateau Margaux (as the old rhyme has it: beer then wine, and you'll be fine; wine then beer, and you'll be queer). His €379 million punt on the Jury's Hotel site in Ballsbridge now looks extraordinarily reckless, all the more so given the fact that, by his own estimation, he needs at least another €600 million or so to actually build his grandiose scheme, which has, in any event, already been shot down by Dublin City Council in a decision unlikely to be reversed on appeal.
So don't be surprised if Dunner's days straddling the whale foreskin-upholstered yacht, Christina O, are numbered. Formerly owned by Aristotle Onassis, who delighted in informing his female guests a propos aforementioned upholstery that they were "sitting on the biggest dick in the world", Christina O was the Irish people's gift to a consortium of Dunner's pals who were able to avail of around €25 million in tax write-offs after claiming capital allowances on their "investment" in this floating monument to hubris and bad taste. Dunner celebrated his marriage to Gayle Killilea aboard Christina O in 2004 along with 44 of his closest friends during a two-week cruise...around the Mediterranean appropriately enough.
For there is an obvious historical parallel for inebriated plutocrats who give themselves up to epic extravagance and insist in the face of all evidence that "failure is not an option for me". Dunner's last stand in the IHT recalls nothing so much as the fall of Rome.
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