Am I alone in hearing the sound of a small, sharptoothed saw of disbelief cutting through my cranial bone every time I hear our beloved Minister for Justice discuss our drink laws?
Am I alone in feeling that whenever I hear the word "millennium", it is as if I have just woken up in a country in which overnight there has been a coup by brown-aproned Licensed Vintners Association storm troopers, goose-stepping to the call, Last Orders, Last Orders? Am I alone in feeling that nowadays, if Ministers feel the need to address that thing called the Bar of Public Opinion, they simply speak to the owner?
Licensed trade
Had the whole business not revealed how utterly democracy fails when confronted with the unmitigated muscle of the licensed trade, it would make a delightful story: of how the Minister, apparently reading his script upside down, came to the conclusion that the people of Ireland, and their beloved public servants - otherwise known as publicans - were all raring to have a drinking session lasting until 8.30 in the morning of the first day of the new year. Of how he told a (hushed) Dail, awed by his vision and wisdom, that though he could not quite manage to change the antedeluvian, baroquely incomprehensible drink laws which applied throughout the year to conform either with common sense or popular demand, he could, as a once-off celebration of the millennium, announce that people might drink lawfully in pubs till breakfast-time.
I know nothing about the Minister's glamorous friends, his delightful family or his many charming advisers, and nothing at all about their personal habits. It might very well indeed be their idea of paradise to see the new millennium in with an all-night drinking binge with purpled-faced strangers far from home. So. Let me break this news to them gently. Few of us are howling to be in a pub at six on a new year's morning, surrounded by large varicose veins in vaguely human form.
Yet the offer to us of purple-faced primates at dawn was apparently the minister's quid pro quo for refusing to change the overall licensing laws to reflect market needs. So, we might come to two conclusions about this offer. The first is that this is how the Minister - or the bright lad who briefed him - genuinely sees paradise: being tanked up at sunrise surrounded by humanoid grapes. The second is that the offer was never meant to appeal; it was the equivalent of tantalising a vegetarian with a sausage supper, or giving a hunger-striker tips on how to diet. It was - let me here purse my lips fastidiously - disingenuous.
Then, the withdrawal of the unwanted offer was not so much interesting for what it did but for the language it used. The Irish Times report probably captured the flavour perfectly: "A spokesman for the [National Millennium] Committee, which decides how the millennium should be celebrated officially, said it had advised the the Minister to make closing time 1.30."
No trifling
Should: before my intervention, without italics, one of the great auxiliary verbs of the governing and the advising classes.
No trifling with those weakmooded and indecisive subjunctives, "may" or "might". "Should" says it all, as does the spokesman - alas, unnamed in the report - in the following paragraph: "He said another reason for asking Mr O'Donoghue to choose 1.30 a.m. was that few publicans had shown a willingness to open until 8.30 a.m."
So what? Though the idea of drinking through the night is deeply repellent to some of us, to some gallant few it might seem a vision of paradise. And though most publicans would find the idea of pulling pints as dawn leers gruesomely on a winter horizon perfectly hideous, some might consider it a licensed heaven. So whose business is it anyway if they want to serve drinks at 7 a.m? If other publicans want to go to bed, then let them.
But of course that is what publicans cannot do: the idea that a publican down the road might be coining it while another is trying to get a bit of shut-eye is the great abiding nightmare of the licensed trade. That is what keeps them all awake, plucking at their scalps and their quilts, through the long dark watches after midnight. That is what has them peering through the curtains at 3 a.m., hissing, "Murphy's making money, Murphy's making money." To the publicans must belong the great trade union cry of all time: one out, all out.
Market forces
And so the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform (his title, of course, refers to the justice which publicans invariably feel is uniquely theirs for him to defend, to the involuntary equality his Department will enforce at the expense of market forces, and to the reform of the law as the LVA wants it) has come up with a formula which will please all publicans: ignore market forces, submit to powerful sectional interest.
The mantra of all Fianna Fail governments - which bow as obsequiously to publicans as once Fine Gael collapsed into a heap of hissing submission at the sight of a mitre on the horizon - is: when in doubt, pander to the lads with bellies on the far side of the bar. Oh, indeed, a truly traditional Fianna Fail administration, protected by a PD suicidal praetorian guard whose meaningless battle cry is, "Market forces, market forces".