IT WAS surely a little late in the month for that resident of Monte Carlo, Monsieur Michel Smurfeet to address the K Klub with warnings of the dangers of the increasing social divisions within Irish life.
Most of us went scrabbling through the calendar to see whether the date was actually April 25th, rather than the first day of the month.
"Regrettably," he told his audience (jaws doubtless hanging open), "money and criminality go hand in hand." (Funny you should mention that We are in danger of creating a two tier society and it is the Government's ongoing responsibility primarily through its social legislation to do its utmost to involve and support all sections of society.
Who is this "we"? "We" the friends of the Grimaldis who pay taxes, such as they are, to one of the most odiously nepotistic royal houses in Europe "we" the fine fellow who spent a million pounds chartering a Cunard liner to take "our" friends on a week long birthday cruise to celebrate "our" birthday last year or "we" the most heavily taxed people in Europe, who are happy to receive words of wisdom from fleet of foot Monagesques waving their admonitory fingers at us before returning to Rainierville faster than you can say tax exile?
Straight Face
Still, it takes a lot of nerve to give a sermon like that, and with a straight face in the K Klub, no less, a fine embodiment of the two-tierism milord complains about. For what is most infuriating in a booming economy is not the disparity of wealth, which is inevitable, but the smug caste system epitomised by the conspicuous but aloof extravagance of the K Klub Kultur.
KKK is not the only thing wrong in Irish life. We have, for example, a Bourbon like legal profession which smugly refuses to reform itself but continues to reward itself with spectacular largesse despite its extraordinary failures. The monies disbursed through the beef tribunal were only possible in an institution where ethical frivolity has become almost pathological.
Politicians and lawyers have not yet understood the profound anger over that tribunal which did not, in the end, even try to get to the origins of the beef scandal.
We know but cannot discuss those origins. They predate Albert Reynold's regime as Taoiseach, and almost certainly involved the kind of considerations we have been hearing so much about recently elsewhere. The disgraceful refusal of the Irish political establishment to insist that nobody in political life could have vast unexplained incomes, is beginning finally to reap its harvest of widespread disgust and disenchantment.
The consequence of this could be the electorate embracing fringe idiocies and politicians of high moral tone with high spend, high tax cures to all our social ills (as apparently advocated during his brief visit by M. Michel Smurfeet).
If that happens, the sound you will hear is the deathbed squawk of the goose.
A primary reason for our economic growth has been the creation of internal tax havens within the Irish economy. Growth follows investment investment increases in regimes of low taxation. So we have created, almost on a nod and a wink basis, a system of double havens for inward investment to Ireland. One is the tax free status of the company itself the other, less discussed, is the special tax status the Revenue Commissioners grant to foreign executives who accompany investment to Ireland.
They do not pay the taxes that you and I pay and good luck to them.
Section Thingummy
But tax free status is not restricted to incoming investment it is granted internally too, to all those section thingummy tax free investment incentives, and to things like topped up pension schemes. No tax exemption, no investment no investment, no growth. QED. Economically, we have learned the lesson high taxes, low growth.
We have learned another lesson, too. There is only so much you can distribute through social welfare without creating impossible distortions in the labour market. It is not a moral question. It is a question of what works. If out of entirely laudable motives of morality, you increase the dole to improve the lot of the poor of Dublin about whom M. Smurfeet talks so movingly, you must in law do so throughout the entire economy then watch as thousands opt for doing the double, claiming the dole and doing illegal part time work, and all requiring raised taxes from a reduced workforce to pay for it. Result? Boom busts.
It has been extraordinary to see how quickly people have forgotten the labour force survey of last year which showed that nearly half of those claiming the dole were not entitled to it. This is not PC, so we ignore it, and ignore a greater truth dole for the able bodied is not the answer to poverty, participation in the economy is.
Selling Hamburgers
This requires realism. Politicians endlessly blather on about the high quality of our young workforce, and how we do not want hamburger type jobs, etc.
Wrong. Selling hamburgers is the most challenging task many young people in the housing estates around Dublin will ever do. They do not belong to the silicocracy, the educational elite destined for the computer industry. These estate youngsters will be lucky indeed to be serving chips, never mind making them.
There are politically unacceptable things to say here two-tierism is indeed partly treated by a vain and witless K Klub Kultur but it is also created by another culture, the estate culture of low expectations, a disdain for personal ambition, and a virulent dislike of higher education (heaven help that hypothetical creature as he walks home each evening, the lad from Darndale who gets a scholarship to Trinity).
Monsieur Smurfeet's suggestion of "social legislation" whatever that is to remedy the problem of poverty in Irish life would, if it simply meant the disbursal of more money to the unemployed, only compound that estate culture. We might rightly dislike the vulgar whiff of KKK far more insidious is the stench of the culture of low expectations.
If anything is worth spending public money on, the destruction of that culture certainly is.