As for this £400 million compensation to virtually anyone who has ever served in the army: who are the soldiers who are not suing you, me and us? Stand forward and tell us: are you declining to sue because you suffered no hearing loss?
Was your soldiering different from the soldiering experienced by others? Or was the soldering the same, yet miraculously you suffered no hearing loss? Or is it possible that as professional soldiers you don't think your own voluntary proximity to gunfire should now be a matter for legal action against your employers?
Alas, not all soldiers today are cut from such ancient soldierly cloth. This year one soldier has already successfully sued the State because he broke a leg playing a game of football, which meant he could not do a tour in Lebanon; and if hadn't broken a leg, maybe he would have done a bit of work on the firing range before going to the Lebanon and thereby suffered hearing loss, and he could have sued the State for that.
Or maybe he could have sued the State for air-sickness on the flight out to Lebanon, or sued the Army because it sent him off to Lebanon when all he wanted to do was to play football in Ireland.
Do you get the impression that soldiering isn't what it was?
Horrid things
Maybe it's just that all these ex-soldiers originally enlisted because they thought they were joining the Kingstown and District Sewing and Knitting Club, and they were simply appalled and amazed that they were expected to play with these horrid gun things which go bang in your ear, Prudence, perfectly frightful, bring me my smelling salts, Primrose, and cover this brutish rifle with that nice antimacassar there.
Hearing-damage is, you know, a rum thing, the perception of it being very much in the ear of the beholder. Many years I suffered hearing damage in a pub-bombing in Belfast and I went for tests, the results of which I assumed would somehow or other be clinically ascertainable. Instead, I was played little sounds in my ears and asked if I could hear them. No further test was involved. In other words, the question I was being asked was this:
If you say you can hear this loud and clear, it means that the State gives you nothing: however, if you say you can't hear this, you can sue and you will get lots of money from the State - and nobody would know if you were telling a lie.
Well I didn't sue the State, simply because two good men were dead, and a lot of people were injured, and to have taken money on that score would have been obscene. But one gentleman who wasn't even in or near the pub but had heard the bomb from his flat raced around in time to perform a fit of the head-staggers in the ruins and, looking very post-explosively glum, then went ahead and sued and was given hefty compensation for hearing damage which didn't exist and for general shock which he didn't experience.
There are few people to whom I genuinely wish. You, John, are one of them.
Primary arbiter
Now, I am not saying that the soldiers suing for hearing damage are pretending or even exaggerating the degree of sensory loss - would I do such a dastardly thing, particularly with libel courts the way they are? But I am saying that we should not be surprised that we are paying out £400 million in damages when the primary arbiter as to the degree of hearing loss, and therefore the size of the damages, is the applicant for damages himself.
The really sad thing is that this pay-out, the biggest in the history of the state, and perhaps the largest of its kind in European legal history, does not seem to have had the side-effect of stiffening the political will to bring an end to this ridiculous social disease of suing at every turn. Quite the reverse: the only side-effect of the case is the usual one on the morale of the legal profession: if soldiers - the poor, deaf dears - on average are getting £25,500 per case, we may presume that their legal advisers are getting one tenth of that in addition.
In other words, the 10,000 claims to date (with more on the way) stand to cost the State £25,500,000 in lawyers' fees alone.
State's costs
Enormous pleasure courses through my bloodstream when I think of all this money passing into the possession of this most needy of professions. However, some 26 cases against the State were unsuccessful. They were not genuine. So were the State's costs in defending the actions against the plaintiffs sought through the courts?
Probably not. The money is other people's - ours - and therefore the State can be profligate with it. For the missing £800 million we could, by the way, have 20 new fisheries protection vessels, or increase our overseas aid fivefold, or more than double the money we are spending on job creation.
Perhaps the only way to prevent a recurrence of this cruel ear-affliction among our valiant soldiers is to disarm them completely, equip them with silenced knitting needles and bring in the Kingstown and District Sewing and Knitting Circle to give garment-making lessons to the warriors of Ireland. No better girls. In a scrap, I'd back the sewers over the suers any day.
Knit one, purl one, sergeant major.