Out walking one morning last week, I was approaching the footbridge to White Rock beach, Killiney, when I noticed a man trying to attract my attention. I was at that moment listening to Eamon Dunphy interviewing Eddie Hobbs and was not in the mood for conversation, and so with some irritation removed my earphones, writes John Waters
Nobody was drowning: the man simply wanted to remark on the gloriousness of the morning and the beauty of the place. He waved his arm across the horizon, taking in the sweep of the bay from Dalkey Island to Bray Head, the low-tide serenity of the seascape veiled in a thin heat-haze.
"Look at it," he said. "You wouldn't know whether to eat it or drink it or ride it. But I have to go to work now. If only there was some kind of a pause button you could press and then come back later." With that he walked away, having extinguished my interest in Eddie Hobbs.
He stayed in my head for most of the day. The frustration he had so eloquently articulated goes deeper than having to work on a sunny day. I feel it myself, a lot of the time; it's part of the human condition. But it seems conspicuously to be a part of the human condition in Ireland, and more so now than ever. He was saying, for himself and for me, that we have been caught in a trap.
Peace and happiness are much of the time right there in front of our noses, but going around in circles trying to find them elsewhere, we miss them and walk past. The modern economy is good at getting us to postpone our lives little by little in the expectation that, sometime, maybe soon, we will be able to let go and enjoy the world in a free and unbounded way.
Money is the technology we use for achieving this postponement: it stores up our credits and deep-freezes our hopes until the time comes when we can permit ourselves to live. We turn our backs on the present so we can focus on accumulation, projecting forward to Christmas, summer holidays, retirement, but all the time with this gnawing sense that we could be living right now for next to nothing, if only we could see things half straight.
To see the Rip-off Republic phenomenon as a simple outburst at a handful of stealth taxes is to misunder- stand things profoundly. Eddie Hobbs awakened in us something much more potent than consumer dissatisfaction.
Only at a very superficial level is this about economics, and then only because this commodity we use for deep-freezing our capacity for happiness turns out to be deeply inefficient and liable to all kinds of encroachment.
You cannot steal the sunshine, but there are a million ways to steal a hard-earned cent. The clue is in the programme's title. It could have been called Rip-off Ireland, or The Rip-off Economy, or, if these seemed to lack punch, it might have with justification been called The Pickpocket Economy.
But Rip-off Republic smacks of a deeper kind of disillusion, moving beyond the economic, the fiscal, even the political, into the realm of the spirit.
Hobbs has been described as a cross between a journalist and a comedian. But really he's a shaman, a preacher-teacher who has this summer brought us a great deal closer to something fundamental about ourselves.
The feeling he has exposed is not simply of being ripped-off. The feeling is of being part of a machine, a machine that grinds mercilessly week after week; demanding of us that we put our lives on hold, dump our children in the creche, mortgage ourselves to the hairline and run ever faster to stand still on the M50.
We want to stop and get off, but the moment never seems to be right.
The machine trundles on and we live in fear that if we lose our footing it will grind us between its wheels. It bullies us with pace and bribes us with promises to persuade us that, if we keep faith with it, it will take us to the Promised Land.
And all the time, even as we grow wearier and angrier, the promises become louder and louder, so that, though dispirited and exhausted, we consent to go on once again.
But more and more the feeling grows that we are going nowhere rather than somewhere, that we live in a land where the miracle of the loaves and fishes has been put into reverse and that the more we pedal the less we achieve.
What Eddie Hobbs has uncovered will not be addressed by ditching the Government or establishing a public inquiry.
The problem is that when we were poor we thought everything would be okay if we got rich. Then we cast off our ancient pieties in return for the baubles of a superficial prosperity and found that the pain we thought would disappear simply became more inscrutable.
Eddie Hobbs hasn't really given us an answer, but Rip-off Republic will not have been in vain if it leaves us with some different questions.