Ned O'Keeffe articulated in the Dáil what many people feel – the free-spirited Irish should not be regulated, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
IT IS true that regulation is un-Irish, and anyone who says otherwise is a . . . foreigner. The whole concept of regulation is foreign, as a matter of fact. As foreign as homosexuality, abortion and paying your taxes. We have fought long and hard to keep these concepts from sullying our native shore – yes, the cost of freedom is eternal vigilance – but we are not too proud to say that sometimes the task has proved too much for us.
Irish people are not perfect – just more quixotic and fascinating than anybody else. Consequently, there is many an honest Irish person who has been tempted by the fleshpots of regulation and subsequently come to a cold repentance. It is these poor souls who utter dire warnings as they stand wild-eyed and bare-breasted in their shame, to the rest of Erin’s sons and daughters. “Beware! O, beware, lest regulation be the ruin of ye all!”
This dim view of regulation, so much a part of the tradition which has made us what we are today, is no longer fashionable in these fast times.
But luckily we have Deputy Ned O’Keeffe. It is he who asked in Dáil Éireann some weeks ago whether Matthew Elderfield, our Financial Regulator, really needed another 200 staff. Or as O’Keeffe tactfully put it: “In the name of God Almighty, what will this man do with 700 people in his office in the Central Bank? What are they for?”
In this, as in many things, O’Keeffe is articulating in the Dáil what many people are saying in front of their own televisions. Seven hundred people does seem quite a high number to regulate the economic goings-on of a population which only tops four million on a good day, and does not have an economy on the go at the moment.
O’Keeffe sometimes makes a lot of sense, and his remarks about the role of auditors in Irish commerce in recent years were most informative. If these remarks about auditors were under-reported, however, O’Keeffe has only himself to blame.
On the occasion when he made the observations about the Financial Regulator’s staff, O’Keeffe seems to have been in what can only be described in that lovely Irish phrase as something of a jocker. (Jocker: a negative mental state in which anger, fear or anomie dominates)
Thus O’Keeffe praised the former financial regulator, Patrick Neary, feeling that he had been hard done by in recent times: “Pat Neary was a decent and honest man. I served on the finance committee for two terms. When he appeared before it, he had no staff or legislation.”
This of course is an ancient Irish tradition whereby if someone is known to you personally, and has been pleasant to you, they are a hero who is incapable of making a mistake.
A month ago, O’Keeffe reflected on the fact that Elderfield is British, saying: “We do not want any foreigners in here.”
We’re so romantic, as you know. We are the most romantic people in Europe as well as being the most literate people, the most charming people and the most adventurous people in Europe. We feel regulation as no other nation does. The banal bonds of regulation chafe our skin, which is so easily bruised (Irish skin is the most easily bruised in Europe.) No one feels the lash of regulation as we do, a butterfly broken on a wheel.
Our businessmen and our bankers must continue to be allowed to roam the financial wilderness as free spirits, just as they have done for decades. They must be permitted to head for the horizon with the wind in their hair. Not for them the yoke of the auditor, the humiliation of accountability, the sour predictability of what the businessmen and the bankers, in their adorably flighty way, so rightly call “the blame culture”.
Regulation is for the British and the Germans and possibly the French. We’re too imaginative for regulation. We understand, in an intuitive way – we are, as you are no doubt aware, the most intuitive people in Europe – that regulation is not for us. We’ve never been good at it. Let other people submit to regulation, the Irish will never give in.
So we feel Ned O’Keeffe’s pain. The question is: what are we going to do now? Our allies within Europe do not share our free-spirited views on regulation. No one’s going to lend us the billions of euro we’re entitled to unless we get this situation sorted. It is in this context that Ned O’Keeffe, as a member of Fianna Fáil, the Republican Party, should view Elderfield.
Regulation is a boring old business in which you run the risk of making decisions that will be unpopular with your friends and neighbours. That’s why the Irish don’t like it. We are the most popular people in Europe – or have we said that already?
Let the British do the regulating, and let the Irish do the rebelling. That is the traditional way. That is the fertile soil from which republicanism sprang. Instead of criticising the fact that Elderfield is British – and Elderfield cannot help it, poor fellow – O’Keeffe should be sending him flowers and asking him if he has any friends who would like to come over. Then everything could go back to normal, at last.