How sensible of Fianna Fáil to seek the counsel of Sean Healy of CORI as it seeks to revive its electoral fortunes. No better man! He is, after all, the fine fellow who has never been elected to anything and who has spent the past dozen years criticising budget after budget, warning that doom and gloom, poverty, war and famine would follow if we continued on our existing trajectory, writes Kevin Myers.
And by Jove, his extraordinarily sage forecasts were right in every detail, as history has shown! In the past 15 years, poverty has swept the land and emigration denuded our towns and townlands. Rickets and scurvy have rampaged through the slums and tenements of Ranelagh and Rathgar. Wellington Road and Waterloo Road have been abandoned, and Dalkey is a ghost town where the wind rattles the broken doors hanging off their hinges. Well, almost. . .
Five years ago, Sean Healy forecast that the latest budget would cause an increase in poverty and reduce the incentive to work. In that half-decade, thanks to policies like the one he denounced, we have become the second richest country in Europe, and our workplaces ring to the languages of the UN. So for Fianna Fáil to turn to Sean Healy in its hour of need is rather like NASA calling the Flat Earth Society to help it solve its problems with the space shuttle, or Hamas consulting the Chief Rabbi on suicide bombing.
Meanwhile, CORI - which endlessly scolds us about our moral obligations to others, regardless of mere law or base politics - was negotiating a swingeing deal with the Government by which the people of Ireland (namely you and I, gentle reader) would pay out the vast bulk of the compensation to victims of child abuse by members of its affiliate congregations.
I especially liked the small print which allowed part of the religious orders' "contribution" to the settlement to consist of the donation of economically worthless church properties, such as school lands, to the State. Of course, such orders largely enjoy tax-free status, so other tracts of church land around the country were simultaneously being been rezoned and sold - at vast, untaxed profit.
Now I don't blame the Church and the religious orders for protecting their own financial interests, and if CORI could pull a fast one with a particularly stupid Minister in compensation for all those children raped, buggered and abused by its members, well, that's life. We each have our little corners to mind, and CORI is remarkably good at minding its own. All I ask in return is: no homilies, please, on matters of social justice from an organisation which fought so ruthlessly to protect the financial interests of its members which make such minimal financial contributions to the State.
But far from getting silence, we find that Fianna Fáil is now gathering at the feet of that mighty CORI guru Sean Healy, looking for advice on how to get re-elected. I know what he'll tell them: that we spend too little on welfare, not enough on social inclusiveness, that our taxation policy is Thatcherite, and we need economic policies based on mainland European models of social justice, not ones which allow the rich to get richer.
We've been here before. Administration after administration throughout the sordid decades of the 1970s and 1980s chose to spend extravagantly on welfare, paid for by borrowing and by high taxes, until we became the great open-air lunatic asylum of Europe: outsiders would pay their groat to come and gawk at the gibbering inmates within.
A return to those times is absolutely fine, if you have no children, if you're not paying taxes and if your ambition is to emulate the pious, almost zero growth of the mainland European economies over the past 15 years, during which time we performed an economic miracle. Resulting from that miracle, tens of thousands of Irish people know something about those economies at first hand, because they've bought holiday homes abroad - but one thing they're not doing is moving their tax-base there.
Wisdom isn't necessarily permanent. Lessons painfully learnt can be swiftly forgotten. Argentina once nearly rivalled the economic might of the United States; now it would have trouble rivalling Leitrim. Ireland in 1910 was richer than Norway, Sweden, Italy or Finland. Self-governing Ireland revered book-keeping but regarded economics as a form of witchcraft, and meanwhile dutifully followed the precepts of the Catholic Church towards population control, even as it created huge tax loopholes for the Catholic Church (which still exist). In due course, it achieved both the highest emigration and the highest unemployment levels simultaneously within the OECD. Logically, the two should not co-exist: only economic inanities of a distinctly Hibernian malignancy could have caused the patient to perish of both heat-stroke and hypothermia at the same time.
Sean Healy is no doubt a nice man, and certainly the media love him: although he represents a handful of dog-collared or wimpled OAPs of almost no importance in modern Ireland, his opinions on the economy are regularly and feverishly sought as if he were Alan Greenspan or Milton Friedman. Now Fianna Fáil is to imbibe at this font of budgetary wisdom, apparently looking for ways to head off the electoral threat from Shinn Pain, which is what you feel when your kneecap has been blown off.
Know-nothing, populist promises to abolish poverty by government decree might win elections: God knows they have done so in the past, unfailingly resulting in even greater poverty. And if to that wretched past Fianna Fáil now wishes to return, then it's certainly listening to the right lad this weekend.