Each autumn this newspaper offers career guidance to our readers. People who have severed their fingers using a pencil sharpener are advised not to become carpenters, and those with a penchant for sticking their tongues into power-points are set firmly in the direction of needlepoint rather than electrics.
We break with tradition now to provide some springtime career advice to our younger readers. If you want riches, you should take either of two paths. The first is to join a religious order. They still own vast amounts of property across Ireland, and most of them haven't had an ordination in over 30 years. If you join one now, and are prepared to be sexually abstemious for a few years - although I'm told even celibacy tends to be rather optional these days - one day soon you will be the only still-breathing member of the Little Brothers Of St Anselm the Pure, and be the sole heir to 500 acres of prime Foxrock land. Party time.
However, if someone else has taken this advice before you, there's no point in joining. Moreover, if the order has a branch in India or Africa, where vocations are pouring in, pretty soon you'll find you're just the local boy in a Nigerian or Keralan mission to bring Christianity to the heathen Irish.
So what else can you do? You can join Fine Gael. The party has a choice headquarters in Dublin, and party offices in prime land all over the country, which soon could one day be yours. For membership of the party these days does give one a sense of what life must have been like for a hermit on Rockall in the early middle ages. But for all his loneliness, that hermit had backed a winner: Christianity, which was going to be around for another 1500 years (and still counting). Fine Gael isn't.
The Fine Gael leader, Enda Kenny did two things last weekend. He called on the Government to close Shannon Airport to the US in the event of war, and he announced a recruitment drive for his party. The first merely proves one thing: the poor creature has an addled pate, which therefore makes joining his party an eminently sound career move.
What is the likely outcome of this war? Certainly, if Saddam's going to be the winner, by backing him Enda Kenny has struck a shrewd blow in our national interest, and we'll be able to sell him every heifer we breed.
But in the - admittedly - unlikely event that the US wins, what will its response be if we closed down Shannon? Do you know, Enda? No? OK, for the sake of the leader of Fine Gael, who probably would have trouble identifying an Orange pipe band in the Vatican, we're going to make that question just a little easier, with multiple choice answers.
So, if we take sides against a firm friend which is also the mightiest country in the world, one which has a GDP five times that of Britain and France combined, at the end of the war will a victorious US government: (a) Declare an aid package for Ireland worth $10 billion? (b) Lift all import duties on Irish goods? (c) Announce Irish passport-holders need no visas to enter the US? (d) Name Ireland as a hostile power in time of war, with fierce economic consequences?
It's a hard question for someone like Enda Kenny to answer, I know, but here's a hint: it's not (A); and nor is it (b). You want another clue? OK, it's not (c) either. Which leaves, well? Which one? You still don't know, Enda? Well, it's the letter on the cap you used to wear at school.
Defending your national interest with vision and courage and realism is not the same as proclaiming soupy and emotionally satisfying pieties in a college debating society - which is what the Dáil has often sounded like recently on this issue.
Naturally, the lefty-greens were crowing most loudly; but that's what you'd expect from that nursery of babbling infants, where green tree-shaggers, green kneecappers and green Stalinists have recently been performing a Riverdance of sanctimony.
From Fine Gael, the party which made the Irish Free State, one might have expected rather more measured wisdom. But not, clearly, under Enda Kenny's sublime leadership.
National interest. It is a strange reptile, and you need calm intelligence to detect its path. It is certainly not the same thing as nationalism: that was the insanity which prompted the blatant and cynical macchiavellianism of President Chirac, who, having demanded a second motion in the UN Security Council, then publicly promised to oppose it, no matter the circumstances. To be sure, Chirac's reputation soared in Chad and Niger, and no doubt sales of French sandals there will double over the coming decade. In the meantime, some investment advice: don't buy into this year's vintage of claret and burgundy.
And as you observe the French economy imitate Albania, with its wines unsold, the Renaults and the Citroens rusting in their vast factory car parks, you might remind yourselves that this is what Enda Kenny wanted to do to Ireland. Which brings us back the beginning. If you're not going to make your fortune by entering the Devoted Sisters of Lourdes, or the Warbling Friars of Fatima, join Fine Gael. In no time at all, you'll be the proud owner of a delightful town house in Mount Street, and be able to pop into the Dáil to watch Brian Cowen be elected next Taoiseach: Biffo I.
