Slaves of the City

If we had any courage at all as a nation, and a bit of vision, we could almost certainly solve a number of major social problems at a stroke. For the most part ashamed of our history, we seem to be forever obsessed with looking forward, and loath to admit there are lessons to be learned from the past. Slavery, for example. Now that had its uses.

As a nation, we were unfortunate enough never to be in the mainstream of the slavery trade, either as traders or as slaves. We were always in an in-between sort of state, and State.

Over the centuries, we took a quite ludicrous pride in our supposed status as a free people, though of course we were actually being overrun on all sides every day of the week.

Bloodthirsty "freedom-fighters" like The Bold Fenian Men were our heroes:

Side by side for the cause have our forefathers battled

Where our hills never echo'd the tread of a slave

On many green hills where the leaden hail rattled,

Through the red gap of glory they marched to their grave.

This was all harmless enough, and it makes a damned good drinking song, but it stemmed from a very limited understanding of the nature of slavery. We coulda been a contender. We could have been owners. But not while we imagined that hills could echo the tread of a slave. We just could not see the contradiction.

No wonder we never got our act together.

There are sad similarities across the water. You may have read the other day that the people of West Cumbria are up in arms over the threat to close down Sellafield, as it is in effect their livelihood.

And yet they are at long last beginning to accept that there is no future in reprocessing.

So what future do they now envisage?

The false future of tourism. Sadly, West Cumbria is already being redeveloped for tourism, which of course will ruin its wild beauty in no time, when what the region should be doing is redeveloping its ancestral trade of slavery: as was pointed out in Tuesday's paper, Whitehaven used to be the third biggest port in Britain when it made its money from the slave trade. Here in Ireland, it seems that we are finally beginning to realise that slavery has once again become an economic necessity, just as it did in the 18th century for Britain's Caribbean colonies and the southern states of the US. In an exciting development, we are about to establish the first Irish "flotels", which will replace the slave ships of old.

The earliest ill-judged moves to abolish slavery stemmed from the oddly persistent belief that human beings have a certain innate dignity, and life in a flotel will soon disabuse folk of this foolish notion.

It is an excellent start, and we have given a terrific new Irish twist to the concept of slavery, in that our newly imported slaves are not forced to work, but forced not to work.

Some of my advisers have suggested that we should replace the words "slave" and "slavery" with less emotive nouns, in deference to the times we live in. I reject this covert attempt to sugar things over, though we will take serious issue (or at least pretend to) with anyone publicly referring to the flotels as slave ships. We may of course have to dress the thing up a bit in order to keep the amusing idea going that a person living in a designated flotel, forbidden to work, surviving on food vouchers, with £25 spending money per week, and without a passport, is a "free" person. We will have to emphasise that freedom is there for everyone, like the Ritz Hotel, or perhaps the Morrison.

Meanwhile, we have the people who are already proud to be wage slaves, or would be if they had time. These are the dedicated finance house workers about whom my sometime colleague Sheila O'Flanagan wrote just yesterday, people for whom it is "a badge of honour to be the last to leave the premises at night". She asked if we might be going in the wrong direction completely. No. Surely not. These people have seen the future, and the future is slavery. When they retire, no doubt at the maximum age of 39, they should all be made freemen of the city, and let the rest of us make do with our pathetic nine-to-five, weekend-off, summer-holiday lives.

If we cannot freely embrace slavery in all its glorious manifestations, we have no one to blame but ourselves.