Ma Lurv is your lurv is ma lurv is your lurv, It would take an eeternitee to break us, Ma lurv is your lurv is ma lurv is ma lurv is your lurv. . . So run the words of the excruciatingly awful song which Eircom plays you when you hold for an operator. In its sublime contempt for its audience, it reminds us of the exquisitely dreadful fate reserved for those who do not guard themselves against their rulers, be they corporate monopoly or big government.
Sile de Valera has opened the can of big government, one which should have been looked into years ago. Yet throughout the time when we were sleepwalking into monetary union, instead of examining the contents of the European can, we were congratulating ourselves on being "better" Europeans than our neighbours. For if we were doing something the British were not, then, ipso facto, we must be right and the British wrong.
Profoundly relevant
For Mary Harney and Sile de Valera to start discussing the cultural and fiscal consequences of European monetary union at this stage is rather like investigating ways of avoiding the iceberg after the Titanic's survivors had got back home, raised families, and taken them all to see the film. Yet even allowing for this rather eccentric leisureliness in addressing these questions, they remain profoundly relevant, and I rang the European Commission to discuss them.
Instead of a human, I got a televoice, using an English accent, intoning: If I knew the number of the extension I was looking for and had a touch tone telephone, I was to dial now; otherwise I was to wait for assistance. I was then put on indefinite hold. I rang off and tried again. Same result. And again. And again. And again. I never got through.
There are two possible explanations for this kind of thing. One is that Europe, heady with hubris, no longer asks the larger question about its future, and does not need to hear it being asked, being content with an estuarinely Thamesian voice dispatching callers into a telephonic wilderness.
The other is exemplified by Eircom, whose managers apparently pay no attention to the service they are giving their paying public. But then why should they? They have been given a monopoly on operator-assisted international calls. They presumably do not care that, as I have told you, callers looking for an operator are being put on hold and given a song which with sadistic relentlessness goes: Ma lurv is your lurv is ma lurv is your lurv.
It would take an eeternitee to break us. Ma lurv is your lurv is ma lurv is ma lurv is your lurv. . .
Weeping, I have asked the operators when they have finally rescued me from this torture what they thought of the tune. "Never heard it," they always say. Never heard it. Of course they haven't. Nobody in bloody Eircom has heard it. It landed at random in the Eircom computer, and the poor unfortunates who pay Eircom's wages are obliged to listen to it, endlessly, repetitively, suffocatingly, until we rampage from our houses and assegai passing curates to death.
American drivel
And this rather sums up the Europe we live in. On the one hand, the European Commission puts us through to a telephone answering machine which simply despatches us to limbo. On the other, our home-grown Eircom, while we are waiting for an operator, plays us, not German or Italian drivel, but American drivel of a persistently insinuating vileness.
That is the point. It is American. When Mary Harney declared that we had more in common with Boston than Berlin, she was speaking a truth with enormous ramifications - as was Sile de Valera with her concern that directives from Brussels "seriously impinge on our identity, culture and traditions". But why only now? And why ask these questions in the US? Are our politicians braver as Eurosceptics once out of Europe?
Yet in such matters, what we aspire to is not what we actually want - if, that is, we know what either is. I aspire to European unity, and I aspire to close relations between Berlin and Ballina (to use the alliterative style this discussion has favoured to date). But do I want the governance of Ballina to pass to Berlin, or its haustrained bureaucrats in Brussels? I aspire to Irish troops defending the freedom of the European Union of states. But do I really want Irish troops implementing a German-inspired EU foreign policy in Eastern Europe?
European unity
Mary Harney says she wants a European Union of independent sovereign states, which sounds excellent. But what does it mean? How can European unity be reconciled with the real and meaningful sovereignty of its component parts? The Americans had a war precisely over that Harneyian duality, and it concluded with the unconditional and abject surrender of the second half of the proposition - the independent states - to the first, the union.
We had no debate on this issue, unlike the British and the Danes. Instead we had a morality contest, which was assessed on how unquestionably pro-European we were (unlike those parochial, reactionary and insular British). Now, as inflation bulks large on the starboard bow, we find we have little or no control over the ship's rudder, which is designed solely for use in larger, more Germanic vessels.
Jesus, will you look at the size of it? What can we do? We can sing a song, of course. Ma lurv is your lurv is ma lurve is your lurv. . .