Speaking of yokels, the Healy-Rae dynasty – pictured right, and the pride of South Kerry don’t you know – deserve to be thanked for providing some comic relief in these dark Irish days. As retail sales fall for the 39th consecutive month it’s reassuring that gombeen politics and cute hoorism remain as dependable as ever.
The latest evidence for this comes from the unlikely source of a (surely terrible) Irish “reality” television show called Celebrities Gone Wild in which bleak Connemara subsituted for the jungles of Borneo as eight celebrities [sic] did whatever contestants on this kind of programme do to make the best of things.
As always a measure of low cunning is required to thrive in these circumstances so asking Michael Healy-Rae, son of Jackie then an independent TD representing South Kerry, to take part must surely have seemed an obviously good idea. What could possibly go wrong? Precious little, you will say and you’d be right.
There is the small matter, mind you, of the 3,600 premium-rate telephone calls made from an office inside the Oireachtas. The finger of suspicion naturally points towards Healy-Rae Senior though given the probability that these calls were made by a robot one is left to marvel – again! – at the sophistication of the Healy-Rae machine. Healy-Rae Junior duly “won” the contest and I don’t suppose the resulting publicity hurt his effort to succeed his father as a member of the Irish parliament. The hereditary principle is one of the few remaining healthy things in Ireland and Michael was duly elected to the Dail earlier this year.
Naturally, the Healy-Raes are innocent of all and any accusations of squandering public funds and it would be wrong to suggest or even hint otherwise. That being so, it’s more than decent of Michael to write a cheque for nearly 3,000 euros to cover the costs of what he rightly calls “other people’s phone calls”. That’ll be the Ring of Kerry, I suppose.
By the standards of Irish public life this is small potatoes indeed. Nevertheless, in these straitened times we must be thankful for tiny mercies and the pleasures afforded by cute hoorism and graspingly shameless celebrity culchies is something to behold. Farce is a black business right enough and this minor episode of excess seems an appropriately grim coda to the madness of the boom years.
Comments