An Irishman's Diary

BRITAIN’S POLITICAL expenses scandal goes from bad to worse. I read the following sentence yesterday in the Daily Telegraph, in a story about Tory “grandees” facing deselection for the use of taxpayers’ money to subsidise their country estates: “The MPs include Douglas Hogg, whose expenses claim included clearing his moat and a housekeeper.”

The moat clearance I can understand. I’m sure we’re all familiar with the problems of moat upkeep on our country estates: the weeds; marauding wildlife; the inevitable peasants who have be fished out days after after falling in while drunk during the harvest festival; and so on.

But how far had Mr Hogg’s housekeeper degenerated that he or she needed clearing, at a cost to the British taxpayer? Were there weeds involved? Or – perish the thought – wildlife? Was it a case of stagnant water, with the housekeeper requiring some form of drainage? Could it have it a simple pipe blockage; or full-scale colonic irrigation? I ask the questions, and yet I’m not sure I want to know the answers. In fact, I rather sympathise with the House of Commons expense checkers if they just waved this claim through, without demanding to know the gory details. Maybe they were about to have lunch at the time, in which case their reluctance to investigate would have been perfectly understandable.

SPEAKING OF FOOD, and of hogs on spits (near enough), there was something reassuring about that farmers’ market at the Bank of Ireland in College Green on Wednesday. It was as if the real economy was reasserting itself at the expense of derivatives, structured finance packages, and all the other abstractions of the banking sector that we were persuaded to wear for the past decade until we ended up buck naked like the emperor in the story.

The Irish economic miracle might have been a mirage, those stallholders seemed to be saying; but we can still grow food. I think shareholders at the AIB meeting in Ballsbridge were making a similar point, albeit with less subtlety, when they threw eggs at the directors.

The Bank of Ireland event was doubly apt, because it recalled the famous market held at the same venue in its last days as the old House of Lords. That was of course a clearance sale. Everything had to go, including the parliament itself, to make way for the Act of Union. And for months on end, the British taxpayer was spared no expense in buying up the produce.

There was brisk trading in many commodities: even newspapers and pamphleteers who supported the union were bought and paid for. But food was always central to the proceedings. Supporters of the bill were wined and dined so lavishly that, as Sir Jonah Barrington recalled: “Every man became in a prosperous state of official pregnancy . . . fully resolved to eat, drink, speak, and fight for Lord Castlereagh”.

Even so, the essayist Thomas De Quincey, who as a teenager attended the final sitting, was at a loss to understand how the house had so quietly acquiesced in its own abolition. “By what unaccountable magic,” he wondered, had the British government prevailed on all these patrician families “to part with their birthright, and to cashier themselves and their children forever into mere titular Lords?” When the final vote passed, he studied them with disgust as “a pack of vagabonds henceforward, and interlopers, with no more right to be here than myself”.

And they seemed to share his opinion: “Having no farther title to their robes (for which I could not help wishing that a

party of Jewish old-clothesmen would at this moment have appeared, and made a loud bidding), [they] made what haste they could to lay them aside forever.” Then, as always, the eternal human question arose: where everybody’s next meal would come from. “The house dispersed much more rapidly than it had assembled,” wrote De Quincey; “and all parties adjourned to find what consolation they might get in the great evening event of dinner.”

OUR MODERN House of Lords, the Seanad, should stop apologising for its failure to sit last Tuesday, whether or not this was to facilitate the members playing golf. At least the event got the chamber noticed for a change, as Marc MacSharry said. So maybe it should consider other group outings, such as paintball or karting, and this time invite the media along.

There is too much emphasis on the Oireachtas “sitting” anyway. Sedentary lifestyles are half the reason for the obesity epidemic. If the Seanad can do its business while also getting exercise, so much the better. I’m told by those who play it that golf is a very social game. And although a plenary session might not be feasible out on the course, the four-ball format is perfectly suited to committee work.

It would be no harm, either, for the upper house to get around the country a bit and bring democracy closer to the people. To this end, I suggest that the Seanad leader, Donie Cassidy, could start the process with a group tour of his country estate in Westmeath. It’s well known that, a bit like Douglas Hogg, he has a Moate there. I bet the senators wouldn’t be long clearing it.