Difficult Choices Are Never Easy

So spake the Taioseach, a Mr Enda Kenny of County Mayo, on Sunday night. Difficult choices are never easy. There is something near-fabulous about the phrase. It has certainly prokoked Fintan O’Toole most severely. He’s in rasping form this week

Savour the phrase. Hold it to the light. Swirl it round the glass. Stick your nose in deep and inhale the rich aromas of full-bodied absurdity. Get the pungent whiff of carmelised cliche and curdled smugness. Imagine the work that went into crafting it, the bleary-eyed, caffeine-soaked speechwriters in their lonely eyrie, in the early hours of Sunday morning, running through the variations: hard choices are seldom soft; nasty things are never pleasant; difficult options tend to be difficult. The ecstatic high-fives when the quiet kid suddenly pipes up – hey guys, how about this: difficult choices are never easy. The rush of knowing they’d nailed it this time – the perfect tautology, the complete annihilation of any smidgen of meaning or content. Romantic that I am, I like to imagine that one of those backroom boys, so selflessly slaving on behalf of the nation, was Ciarán Conlon, who has long been one of Enda Kenny’s key communications people. But this could hardly be so, since in Ciarán’s case, difficult choices actually are easy. He made the difficult and patriotic choice to reject the “ridiculous” maximum salary of €92,000 he should have received as an adviser to Richard Bruton. As detailed by Ken Foxe in the Mail on Sunday , Ciarán held out for €127,000 instead. And, at the personal instance of Enda Kenny, he got it. So here’s what a difficult choice actually looks like. We could have Ciarán for €127,000 or we could have five care assistants for people with intellectual disabilities at a starting salary of €26,590 each, totalling €132,950. Or, to be fair, we could have Ciarán on the basic salary for a Government adviser of €80,051 plus two care assistants. So the Taoiseach really had three options: no Ciarán but five people with intellectual disabilities given some kind of dignity; a somewhat grumpy Ciarán on a mere €80,000; or a happy Ciarán on €127,000. Enda bit the bullet and took the difficult decision that the nation in its hour of crisis needs a happy Ciarán, on the top of his game.

In this modest, yet telling, episode one sees clearly that replacing Fianna Fail with Fine Gael is only some minor kind of upgrade and, perhaps, not even that being little more than swapping one set of grasping chancers and cute hoors for another mob distinguished only by their slightly sharper suits. That is, the post Celtic Tiger Fine Gael is not Garret FitzGerald’s Fine Gael.

Meanwhile, Bertie Ahern sees his 150,000 euro a year pension reduced by 80 euro a week. Yer man’s quite the scrificial lamb or hero ain’t he?

Whatever happens as a result of the eurocrisis, I wouldn’t want to be a eurocrat trying to persuade the Irish to approve any new treaty if it takes a referendum to do that.