We all felt the Taoiseach's pain on Wednesday when he tortured himself - yet again - with the thought that Ireland's reliance on pencil-and-paper voting made us "the laughing stock of Europe". Until recently, I would have said that Europe had better things to laugh at. But now that poor Boris Yeltsin has passed on, right enough, the Irish voting system is the next most obvious target for international ridicule, writes Frank McNally.
Thank God, therefore, for people like Maiko Kawakami. I must confess I had never heard of the Japanese film actress until yesterday. But she has taken the heat off us - for this week anyway - by revealing herself to be one of the victims of a fraud in which Japanese dog-lovers who thought they were buying miniature poodles over the internet were sold miniature sheep instead.
According to the Sun newspaper, Ms Kawakami was none the wiser about the true nature of her pet lamb until she mentioned it on a Japanese talk show, expressing disappointment that it would not eat dog food and that it had so far failed to bark. She also produced photographs of the alleged mutt. Whereupon, although sheep are rare in Japan - a fact on which the swindle depended - someone correctly identified the species and broke it to the actress that her poodle would not be barking any time soon.
Hundreds of women then came forward to reveal that they too had bought miniature poodles from an internet company based in Sapporo, paying a mere €945 each instead of the €1,890 that the breed normally costs. Police said that as many as 2,000 people may have been taken in by the scam, for which the unscrupulous dealers had imported lambs from Britain and Australia.
No doubt the Japanese poodle fraud is only a temporary reprieve for Ireland. The world will soon need something else to laugh at, just as Irish voters - including a mortified Bertie Ahern - head for the polling booths. And the annoying thing, as he says himself, is that our pencil-and-paper shame could have been so easily averted.
There was nothing wrong with the e-voting system, on which the Government spent €62 million and which is now in cold storage at an additional cost of €1 million a year, the Taoiseach told the Dáil on Wednesday. The machines "worked perfectly", he insisted. Unfortunately, the Opposition had gone out of its way to find flaws in the system, and any waste of money was "lies at the Opposition's door".
I have some sympathy with the Taoiseach on this one. I saw one of the voting machines in action when it was piloted, and it was so cute I wanted to buy one for myself. But something put me off. No matter what I did, the machine wouldn't bark. Then when I threw a stick and asked it to go "fetch", it just stood there looking back at me, saying: "Baaaaaaaa!"
The Japanese poodle scam is a variation on one of the oldest frauds in the book. The book I refer to is, of course, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which attributes the term "pig in a poke" to an old fair-day practice whereby unwary buyers who thought they had bought a suckling pig would be pawned off with a less valuable animal - typically a cat. The disguise was facilitated by the delivery of the animal in a "poke", or bag.
A variation of the phrase was recorded was long ago as 1530, when Richard Hill's Common-place Book advised traders: "When ye proffer the pigge open the poke." It is possible that another still-popular phrase, "letting the cat out of the bag" originates with the same practice. But what about that phrase used by the Taoiseach - "laughing stock"? Does that not sound medieval too, I hear you ask? Well, yes it does, although apparently it does not refer to the "stocks" into which people were once locked. It uses "stock" in the sense of the butt or trunk of something, on which other things - in this case ridicule - can be pinned. By coincidence, this phrase too can be traced as far back as the 1530s, when Sir Philip Sidney used it in connection with "poetrie", which he regretted had become "the laughing stocke of children".
But getting back to the subject of ovine fraud, the poodle scam highlights how far Ireland has fallen behind in this area. Time was, the news from Japan would have been yet another exciting option for sheep farmers, who used to be among the country's most creative talents. That was before the EU reformed subsidy payments, since when I hear the sector has seen a sharp decline in inventiveness.
Back in the old days, a farmer would sometimes claim the ewe premium for sheep he didn't have. When an inspection loomed, he could borrow the necessary number at short notice, often from Northern Ireland. Unfortunately the sheep tourism industry was badly hit by the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis, which left some parts of the Republic very short of ewes vis-à-vis the number that had been claimed for. At any rate, subsequent reforms have greatly diminished the scope for creativity.
Were it otherwise, I would have been able to suggest a way the Government might minimise the cost of putting all those e-voting machines into intervention. My proposal would have involved amending the software to allow the machines to make crude bleating noises. Then maybe we could have claimed headage payments from the EU. Of course, when the inspectors called, we would still have had to - in the words of an old phrase - "pull the wool over their eyes".