Swept away on tide of public opinion

Comment/Andrew Whittaker: Martin Cullen's review of the Retail Planning Guidelines is to facilitate IKEA.

"The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government has initiated a review of the Retail Planning Guidelines in so far as they relate to the floorspace cap on retail warehouses \ came into effect on 1 January, 2001." This was an advertisement in The Irish Times on August 19th.

May I sympathise just a little with Minister for Environment, Mr Cullen? Not for his smoking habit, nor for the drip of complaints he suffers from Fianna Fáil colleagues about their constituency boundaries. Maybe a little for his square-footage problem with the size that retail warehouses should be allowed to grow to. But certainly for his failure to grasp the true meaning of the story of King Canute.

The Minister is not principally to blame for our misunderstanding of the predicament of the late and little-lamented Viking king, who died in 1035. A few have portrayed him as a Christian realist ("Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name but God, whom heaven, earth and sea obey"). More mock him and ignore the source of his difficulty with the waves.

Canute has commonly been represented as sitting upon a severe and uncomfortable throne, really a thickly hewn dining chair with imprisoning arms. These used to be called "carvers". Men at the heads of tables stood up from carvers and, having said grace, tried to sever overcooked joints of meat using blunt knives.

Canute is represented as staring down with surprise and in discomfort and dismay, to where his feet are now immersed in sea water. The king is sitting in his carver on a beach whereon the tide has flooded in.

An idea bubble floats above his simple indeed crude crown of Viking iron. It says "Stay", "Stop" or "Go out" as he injuncts the tide.

Today we know more than he did about tides, the moon, gravity and suchlike. We snigger at Canute and regard him as a dolt, really just an average party politician, likely to be reshuffled, indeed recycled, into the dunes of history.

I should like you to think of Canute differently, and also Minister Cullen. They were both servants of their people and men bound in duty to follow the recommendations of their constitutional advisers.

These advisers used to be called druids. People nowadays think of druids as some class of priests who probably should be called "Your Grace". That is over-simplified history. Druids may have been religious leaders but, in seeking for a modern understanding of their role, we do better to think of them as the educated and often subtle (yet of course dynamic) leaders of their civilisation. Today we would call them "secretary general" of a government department. We would give them benchmarked pay rises whether the tide came in or went out.

See Canute rise from his chair and admonish the oncoming waves of the Ikean sea: "Stop! I have decided to revise the statutory instrument by which I forbade you to inundate my citizens' domestically constructed sandcastles, beds, wardrobes and kitchen cabinets with your flood of imports.

"I did forbid you. Now, out of political and electoral necessity, I have changed my mind. Of course, I cannot openly say that, so I have set up a review committee. But I can confess to you (dear waves) in the privacy of this bath, that my voters want more choices of imported furniture, which they crave in fashionable Scandinavian styles and at competitive prices. They tell me they can get these only by travelling across your wine-dark waters to IKEA stores in England or Scotland.

"That (as you and I know) means a potential loss to GDP in my kingdom and a net transfer of potential jobs to abroad. My co-ruler, the Tánaiste and Queen of the Dodder, Mary Harney, often goes abroad to treat with dark rulers who wish to erect castles within our shores and give employment to our people. She tells me 'Martin, do the same for IKEA'. I have no answer, how can I refuse her?

"In addition to these political and macroeconomic considerations, dear waves, my voters are banging their pint glasses rudely on their tables - as if we were in Temple Bar - and demanding of me that I let the rakish Ikean ships dock here. Let them land their flat packs of furniture, let them, let them, they cry. Let IKEA's furniture be carried to some great sales arena beside an Irish motorway, where we can buy, buy, buy.

"Can I deny my voters' wishes? I am their leader so I must follow them. If, in the past, my druids told me that I should lose votes by letting the Ikeans land, they must have been mistaken.

"Please be patient, my waves. We are members of one party. I am setting up a review committee. I confess that it will be staffed by my druids; but who else could do such work? The statutory instrument must be re-written. It is a slow and costly method of confessing my mistakes, I admit, but fortunately the slowness and cost are borne not by the party but by the Irish voters. The slower the reform, the greater the cost? Yes, but that's our secret.

"By the way," he said, tossing an envelope into the waves, "here is a promise not to legislate again to forbid the tide to rise on these shores."

So died good Canute, a cigarette angled jauntily between his honest lips, the tide lapping greedily up and around the legs of his throne until he was sucked remorselessly under the sands of public opinion.

The king is dead. Long live IKEA!

Andrew Whittaker (compete@ clubi.ie) is editor & publisher of Competition journal.