Right. We start by finding the head of the Industrial Development Authority, covering him with Boyzone spit and feeding him to ravenous teeny-boppers, inch by industrially efficient inch. A fairly terrible end, to be sure - and only the first step in preventing the IDA from turning Ireland from becoming a cross between Mexico City, the Monaco Grand Prix and a car-park.
There was a time - remember it? - when RTE newsreaders would glumly announce that the IDA's hopes for a five-job maggot farm in Tarbert had been dashed by unscrupulous interventions from the Scottish Development Authority, which had promised unlimited bluebottles to the Taiwanese investors behind the project.
Unfair competition
The Minister for Industry, Commerce and Baksheesh would deplore unfair competition; Kerry in protest would raise yet another IRA battalion to free the North, though it probably would get only as far as Limerick Junction before, with a great deal of melodious muttering, turning and going home. Meanwhile, opposition TDs would lament the tragic - nay, calamitous - failure of the Government to attract the industry which would have made the south-west the maggot capital of the world, and guaranteed the region's prosperity.
Happy times. Now, barely a day goes by without news of some new industrial project arriving here, promising 500, 600, 700 new jobs. Who are these jobs for? Hardly Irish people; aside from the numerous dole frauds and the fictional population its perpetrators have invented, we have full employment. As our prosperity increases, we shall inevitably create further employment in the service industries, creating further labour shortages. And finally, native entrepreneurs, often the hybrid product of Irish education and foreign companies, are showing that they have the business skills to live with the best.
So why are we trying to entice more foreign industry to Ireland? We cannot cope with what we have.
To be sure, we can't prevent people moving to Ireland now - but surely we can stop promoting ourselves as the ideal place for businesses to come to; and if people still insist on trying to open factories here, we can always refuse planning permission.
If foreigners insists on setting up here, maybe the Government should resort to the old Official IRA tactic of bombing foreign factories it didn't like.
Halt growth
In other words, since we seem incapable of managing the various crises resulting from growth, might we not be the first people in the history of the world to halt growth as a matter of policy? Rather than have the Turks and the Somalis and Egyptians working in foreign-owned factories in an increasingly intolerant and racist Ireland, might it not be better for all concerned if the factories were sited in the lands of their workers' origins? After all, we have a capital city whose public transport infrastructure is very much worse than it was a century ago. We have Dublin suburbs which embrace half-a-dozen counties. We have a population grown surly and sullen, brutish, ill-mannered and racist. And we have the best part of 200,000 new cars added to Irish roads in the past year.
This is neither managed nor manageable growth; we must recognise the realities of what the Irish people are. We are not the warm, generous, openhearted folk of beer-advertisement, Bord Failte stereotype. Racism, a pride in ancient genes, is one of the strongest of all Irish characteristics. Was it not quite astonishing that dolmens featured so powerfully in so many Irish millennial celebrations? The dolmen was pre-Christian, pre-calendral, heathen: to confuse paganism with the birth of the Christianity which displaced it is to mistake cannibalism for veganism.
Is our political establishment not predicated on racial and probably racist stereotypes? Fine Gael? What would we say of an equivalent English party, "Family of the Anglo-Saxon"?
Fianna Fail? Why not a British political party named "Warriors of the Round Table"? And how many real but secret racist ambitions are concealed within those party titles?
So the Ireland these thousands of work-hungry foreigners are pouring into is only Ireland of the Welcomes Provided You Are Going Home In A Couple Of Weeks. Not even the most liberal democracy anywhere has ever frantically enticed foreign capital into a political culture which was so quintessentially tribal and into an economy which was not merely already critically short of labour, but was also legally unable to prevent uncontrolled immigration from a vast neighbouring continental land-mass.
Celtic vainglory
Our growth is now a new form of Celtic vainglory elevated to the level of formal policy. We have exchanged dreams of being the spiritual heartland of Europe for fantasies that we might economically overtake the British, the Germans, the Swiss.
But no sovereign state has ever embarked on such a national project which requires both foreign capital and foreign labour, rather like a Jackie Charlton Irish soccer squad; yet this is precisely what we are doing. Further growth is possible only if we have the very immigration for which we are not culturally, politically or infrastructurally prepared.
There is only one solution. To get Boyzone members to chew raw lemons; and then to invite the head of the IDA to meet them, with a few groupies to hand, and with Viennetta ice-cream to follow.