Good morning, and this column comes today from Loiter & Touch-up Consultants, who have taken over the management and production of this newspaper. Thank you, that will be one million euro for the opening sentence. We will continue to bill you as the Diary proceeds, writes Kevin Myers
I bring a massive amount of vital experience to the job. At Sellafield Nuclear Processing Centre, I once leaked 45kgs of plutonium into the Irish Sea. What japes! This explains why Fyfeshire, Down and Louth are now depopulated, and haddock from the Irish Sea now perch in pine-trees, grooming their antlers and whistling "Dixie". More recently, while consulting with the Department of Health, I inadvertently authorised a €1 million payment for two nappies, some false teeth and a splint.
Dear me, how we laughed when we discovered that little error. So the Department threw a party to celebrate, and what a mighty bash it was! We started off with Stevie Wonder, followed by Elton John. U2 came next - we flew them in from Chile on a specially restored Concorde. Next came Rod Stewart - and his duet with Diana Ross, who rushed in from Las Vegas just for the bash, was quite unforgettable. Then came the champagne and caviar reception, and it wasn't long before we saw the FISP computer system slipping off into the K Club shrubbery with the PPARS.
One thing followed another, and now they're going to have a little laptop, and soon we'll wake up to the patter of a tiny keyboard echoing about the Department. They haven't decided whether to call the little mite BILK or SQWANDA. However, they're not the only ones to have reason to remember the party. Because I'm not the better for it even yet, so here I am, not quite sure what I'm supposed to do in this funny little space. Tell you what. The first thing they teach us in management consulting school is: when in doubt, shove in a bill. Hell. I'm feeling generous: we'll just make it half a million euro this time, for work to date. There now. I feel better already.
I can tell you this: being a management consultant gives one a fascinating range of professional experiences. When we in Loiter and Touch-Up first arrived at the Cliffs of Moher interpretative centre, it was intended to be no bigger than a night-watchman's hut, scheduled for completion in 1998. Too modest by half! So we transformed it into a nuclear-powered themed heritage centre with a three-storey restaurant, a Scandinavian sauna complex, three swimming-pools, a bungee-jump and a year-round, artificially-iced ski slope down the cliffs themselves.
Eight years on, nothing had been built, and costs had soared from £75.35 to £150,000,000. After a small disagreement over a party to celebrate the failure for the fifth year in succession to cut the first sod - a modest affair in Versailles featuring Pavarotti and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra - we parted company, but on excellent terms. Last we heard, nothing's been built, so no harm's been done!
We were consultant on Dublin's second airport too. Well, that's what it turned into, sort of. Before we arrived on the project, it was just a scheme to build a kiddies' play-pool in Darndale, which was a nice enough idea. But it was without vision! Without scale! Without imagination! Initially, we envisaged a heliport instead of the car-park, and things just grew from there. Well, they grew on paper, that is, because that's where most management consultancy actually occurs - aside, of course from the parties to celebrate the onset of a new scheme and the abandonment of an old one.
In Darndale, for example, we had a party to celebrate the launch of the east-west runway, and another one to celebrate its cancellation. We had a party to celebrate the north-south runway, and another when it was decided not to proceed with it. We had a marvellous party to mark the beginning the west-north-west/east-south-east runway, and an even better one once we decided not to proceed with that. Then we decided that Darndale didn't need an airport, but a baseball park, and after a couple of years of work on that, it too was cancelled in favour of an Olympic-scale swimming pool.
After a couple of years' consultancy preparatory work, that got the chop, and then we left the project - after a great party, mind - and the last we heard, Darndale is looking for a kiddies' swimming-pool.
Which is all well and good, but it doesn't bring me any closer to what I'm supposed to be doing here. But look. Don't feel in the least concerned for me - this is what management consultancy is all about: waking up regularly on a new assignment, not having the least idea of what is going on, but pretending that you're in charge of everything and the master of every detail. You want to hear a supercilious drawl? Well, we learn that first day in management consultancy class. You want to see impeccable tailoring? Why, our suits make George Clooney's look like Bob Geldof's bed. You want self-confidence? We make Michael McDowell look like Timid Tim, The Compulsive Stutterer. We don't need to know anything. All we need is to be.
Which still doesn't answer my question: what am I doing here? Still don't know, but then I never do. Here. Have a bill. Go on, have a bill. One million smackeroos. But banker's order only, to Loiter and Touch-Up, Consultants - seal view play, as they say in Skerries.
