The Nice Treaty Neverendum, is it? Don't be talking, man. Have you been down to Nice recently? I was there just the other week, and it's not what it used to be - far from it. Never mind the luxury, the ridiculous prices, the ostentatious yachts, the pretentious hotels, the fawning yet supercilious waiters and the greatly overrated beach: these aspects of Nice will never change. No, it's the spirit of the place that has gone. The glory days of the Riviera, the fabulous Cote d'Azur, those happy gin-drenched playgrounds from St Tropez to Cannes, and Antibes (oh, Juanles-Pins, and Dominique, Cecile, Mariette . . .) to Monte Carlo, when we hung out with Scott and Zelda, Gerald and Sara, Winston and Clementine, and talked all day and drank all night, are so long gone, it is as if they never existed. In Nice and its sun-blessed environs today nothing talks but money, and it screams.
And this is the city whose treaty we are now expected to ratify. Can Europe, and our own politicians, be serious? Would we ratify the Medellin Treaty on Drug Abuse? The Las Vegas Treaty on Poker Ethics? The Kerry Treaty on Planning?
Look: let us get down to relevant facts. We are talking about corruption. And when it comes to Nice, we have short memories. It is not very long since Nice was a byword for corruption. Back in the 1980s, the city was run by the mayor "King" Jacques Medecin as a hereditary fiefdom. Hereditary is right - Jacques's da before him ran the place from city hall for a full 38 years, while Jacques himself managed 24 years in the same position.
He did well for himself. But to maintain his luxurious lifestyle, Jacques needed a little more than his mayor's salary and generous expenses. So, over the years, he siphoned off some two million francs from the municipal opera house. Supposedly used to recruit singers who never performed in Nice, the money ended up in Medecin's personal bank account in the US. But by 1990 the game was up, and Medecin fled to Paraguay. From there he was extradited in 1994, thrown in a Grenoble jail for seven months and finally sentenced to two years in prison, with a fine of 200,000 francs.
The stench still lingers over Nice. Worse, you will find plenty of people there who recall Jacques Medecin most fondly, citing the way he stood up to the Paris government, his firm stance against immigration and his generosity in sending boxes of chocolates to the elderly residents of the city. They don't normally mention his friendships with Mafia bosses and his association with the ultra-right National Front.
So, once again, do we really want to ratify a treaty agreed in such a discredited city? Should we tempt fate in this way? What do you mean, irrelevant?
Just the other day, a contributor to the letters page informed us that the European Union project "represents the political destiny of the Irish nation". I don't know about you but this is the sort of assertion that makes me instantly check on my wallet. The same gentleman informed us (blithely, no doubt) that "the modern and the national have passed: Nice represents the political future of the republic, negotiated in good faith".
What Nice actually represents is outlined above. But the notion about the passing away of "the modern and the national" is good. Never mind the modern - even the post-modern is in decline and out of fashion. The word "national" however is always good for a row.
For some odd reason, many Irish people imagine themselves to have sole rights to nationalism, though a handful of other countries - the smaller the better - are often allowed to make pitiful pleas and assertions too, depending on how many enemies they have had to fight off. Other Irish people prefer to exert a stranglehold on the whole concept, associating nationalism with shleveenism, i.e. everything that is supposedly backward and/or embarrassing in our culture (such as our language).
It's interesting that in his major speech on European integration last Monday, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin should say, almost as an afterthought, "I remain attached to my nation." You don't expect that sort of remark from the sophisticated French, do you? Far-seeing Europeans, long-standing integrationists and all that? Somebody, perhaps our letter-writer, really should take him aside and tell Mr Jospin that "the modern and national have passed". He just might think he was being patronised, but it is surely a risk worth taking.
bglacken@irish-times.ie