What a wry look, a smile emerging from beneath a funeral shroud, must have risen on the face of the US Ambassador last Tuesday morning as he gazed through his bedroom window and the smell of coffee shimmered through his nostrils. For finally the sun was shining. The Phoenix Park glowed. Leaves were finally sprouting greenly on the trees. He could abandon the thermal underwear and Navy Seal outer clothing with which he had been lagging himself since he arrived. At last, the Ireland posting was no longer like being consul general to the Pitcairn Islands.
But the pleasure the gentleman got from seeing a May that behaved as the prime month of spring rather than a subjunctive conditional offering the weather of almost any other season - you may have rain, and you may have snow, and you may have frost - was nothing compared with the news that this country is almost the European champion for the emission of greenhouse gases.
What an ambassadorial chuckle must have greeted that revelation. No need to kick the cat this fine morning; no need to drive a motorbike into the Minister for Foreign Affairs and claim diplomatic immunity; no need to have to endure witless lectures from complete strangers, columnists and letter writers to newspapers, that the reason President Bush had abandoned Kyoto was that it was payback time for his big backers.
Dear me, how he must have loved penning his morning dispatch to the State Department in Washington. How lovingly he must have reported that Ireland's overall production of greenhouse gases went up 22 per cent in the past decade, nearly double what we are allowed under the Kyoto Protocol. And I dare say tears of the purest joy were running down his cheeks as he contemplated the the truth that Ireland's carbon dioxide production rose by nearly one third, the highest in Europe.
Mr Ambassador, let me tell you something. The figures aren't nearly as bad as the reality. We create far more pollution than they suggest, for this country is a pollution exporter. We don't like big industries contaminating our countryside, but we do like what big industry makes. So we have no large car plants or aircraft manufacturers or bitumen processing plants or steel mills, but we do want motor cars in vast numbers, cheap flights, new roads and inexpensive girders.
We can get round this problem by means of a very simple arrangement: we allow other people to pollute their environment by making things, and we import the finished product, such as Boeings and Jeeps from your country. And then we give pious homilies to people like you about how the US is polluting the planet, and how government is in thrall to big business, and every other cliche about the US which passes for informed opinion in this country.
Diplomatic immunity
Your Excellency, how many times have you been tempted to test the outer limits of diplomatic immunity by punching someone in the nose? A lot since you arrived here, I dare say, and understandably. Firstly, no one could remain cheerful with the endless winter that has just passed, with each day gift-wrapped at dawn in a soggy, cold, grey fleece, permitting as much sunlight to seep through as penetrates the clouds on one of Jupiter's moons. It's a well known truth that the odd bop on somebody's else's nasal septum can be wonderfully therapeutic. Socrates swore by it. Plato too. As did the Virgin Mary.
Secondly, before you came here, I'll bet you had no idea that holier-than-thouness was such a prevalent Irish characteristic. And now you know. The funny thing is that the hthan-t attitude co-exists with a deep belief that the Irish are the most hypocritical, untrustworthy people in Europe - and that belief is every bit as unwarranted as the belief in our innate moral superiority.
Keep that smile with which you began this column fixed firmly in place as the debate over the Nice Treaty gets underway. The other day some character in a slouch hat stood up at an anti-Nice rally and solemnly paraphrased James Connolly: instead of fealty to neither king nor kaiser, he declared: "We serve neither Nice nor NATO" - and he managed to keep his face straight.
Moral superiority
As a matter of fact, Connolly went on to serve the Kaiser, rather faithfully: he called him a gallant ally and, much to Kaiser Bill's pleasure, started bumping people off in the centre of Dublin. But more to the point for our purposes is that this is the only free country in the world where a bloodthirsty proponent of violent Marxism is still spoken of with respect. The invocation of the name Connolly in any argument is one of the early symptoms of another onset of the endemic national illness of Posturing Moral Superiority - now not on Kyoto, but NATO.
Unbelievably, in certain chic quarters in this country, the alliance which defended Europe from communist tyranny for 40 years is regarded as being evil; and that flimsy and meaningless gauze called "neutrality" - made possible by NATO - is viewed as The One True Cross. Now we know we're the largest polluter in Europe, you probably won't hear too much about Kyoto any more. Instead, we'll be fiddling around on the radio dial looking for station Neutrality-PMS, and what you heard about US greenhouse gas emissions will be absolutely nothing compared with the piffle you're going to hear about the wickedness of Nice & NATO. Just keep smiling is my advice.