Part 4 In the Public Domain

Bishop’s Move

“If Eamonn Casey came back and faced everything and raised a quarter of a million pounds for it, that would really be paying his dues”

It’s no use talking about what he should or shouldn’t have done in the past. The past is over. What should he do today? I think he should get on a plane and come home from wherever he is. He won’t have to call a press conference because it will be known that he’s coming, and there will be plenty of people waiting. Then he should say very simply that he was sorry for running away and that he’s back now, he’d like a job somewhere in some parish but not for the next three weeks. He should explain that for the next three weeks he will be very busy indeed. Writing his own book. There are very many publishers who have desk-top publishing and could have the book out in no time. It would be announced from the word go that all the royalties would go to Trocaire.

He should not listen to anyone who says that it’s more dignified to stay away. There is little dignity in being an exile from your own country when everyone is reading and tutting over your escapades. What extra dignity do you get by not being there to avoid their eyes?

None.

People are not going to forget him because he’s not here. On the contrary. They are going to be talking about him anyway when Annie Murphy’s book is published, even more than they talked about him last May, if that were possible. But if he’s not here, he’s even fairer game to tut-tut over than if he were seen to have the courage to come back and face it.

Eamonn Casey would do well to remember two people at this time; they are John Profumo and Ben Dunne. You don’t hear many people attacking either of those lads today.

When Profumo is mentioned, people remember that he stood his ground, did social work in the East End of London, craved no publicity, and behaved with extreme dignity. Ben Dunne behaved like a big innocent child who was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He said he was desperately sorry, he had made an eejit out of himself and he wouldn’t do it again.

Fair enough. Those were the words you heard every time Ben Dunne’s name was mentioned thereafter. Fair enough, or fair dues to him. The facing of it was bigger than the doing of it, and the second seemed to wipe out the first.

Now both John Profumo and Ben Dunne had a wife each to help them. And things being as they are in the clerical celibacy business, Eamonn Casey does not, which makes him all alone. He must rely on people whom he trusts are out for his good.

A lot of these people are those who believe that the less said the better, and that it will all be forgotten and become yesterday’s news, if no further fuel is added. This could be the well-meaning and sincere, cautious advice of those who truly think that it’s a nine day wonder and will blow away.

But Eamonn Casey was always a showman, a larger-than-life person who was not known for treading the cautious path. When other bishops would wonder about the gravitas of singing a song on the Late Late Show, he was able to sing one, or tell a joke or laugh like a big jolly friar of old, and people loved him for it.

He shouldn’t heed those who say that coming home would give scandal. To whom would it give scandal? There can hardly be anyone over three years of age who doesn’t know about it already.

What started as a private affair has become a public one and it doesn’t do a bit of good for his friends to whinge about this and say it’s his own business and encourage him to be an ostrich. He has a couple of decades left: why spend them in hiding from people who would definitely forgive him if he played it straight, from people who would say fair enough, and, particularly, from his own son?

The best thing, surely, for that boy would be to hear his father say publicly that it was an era of huge confusion and hypocrisy and that he hoped and prayed that the years to come will not be so small-minded. If he were to say to Peter Murphy that he was sorry for denying him all those years, then the boy might well have the big heart to think that his father had been punished enough, and to accept what he had to give now.

And because of the way things turned out, he will not need to give Peter any money. Peter’s mother’s book has organised that for him. So he can give all the money to a charity that suffered very much and very unfairly because of him. Nobody ever said that Trocaire was to blame for what happened, nor that it wasn’t doing great work, but somehow people hadn’t the heart to support it, in the way they used to, for a few months after the story first broke. If Eamonn Casey came back and faced everything and raised a quarter of a million pounds for it, that would really be paying his dues.

To do this he would have to write a really spectacular book that people would want to read.

It couldn’t be a Holy Joe job, not a list of vague regrets about being unworthy, nor a smiting of his breast about being a sinner. There are no sales in that. It couldn’t be a self-justification book – that really would be undignified. Nor could it be full of denial or nit-picking – it wasn’t Thursday it was Friday, it wasn’t this number of times it was that number of times – no repeat of Adam’s poor script in the Garden of Eden about it being the Woman who made me do it.

Nor should he run her down, say she was like a sack of potatoes in bed, that she was loopy. In her book, it is understood that she says all the time how much she loved him.

Maybe he should say how much he loved her, if he did. He could write of the expectations people have of their clergy and whether these are realistic or not. Or about the whole celibacy argument: would priests be better, stronger men if they were allowed to share a life and love with a mate? He could tell of the effect Annie had on him, the wish to see his child grow up, which was almost stifled by the fear that anyone should know the child existed.

Bishop Casey could always tell a good story and tell it well. The main thing he must do is tell this one quickly – while there is still money to be made from his side of things, money that can be spent doing good.

And, if he wants to test the water, he could try it out in a newspaper interview, prove that there is no virtue in this so-called dignity of silence.

This paper has treated him honourably. He knows the telephone number.

(We’ll never know how things might stand now for Eamonn Casey had he followed my advice immediately, and to the letter. As it turned out, Annie Murphy’s book didn’t do him anything like the insurmountable damage some people feared, and lots of others began calling for his return, including the Archbishop of Tuam who said he’d dearly love to see Bishop Casey come home.

But the Bishop delayed and then began making forays back, gave a couple of lengthy interviews, signed some autographs in Florida where he arrived for the World Cup, and his brothers in the hierarchy are taking a somewhat different line. They’re complaining about his excessively high profile and the wisdom of his wearing his Episcopal attire on the altar in Cork. The Archbishop of Dublin observed in August of 1994 that these sporadic appearances seemed simply to “tear open the wounds again”.

Trocaire soldiers on through famines and wars. )

On the Line

“The land he wants to rule is a talkative land, where people value their conversations and do not like them cut short”

If he were to analyse the poison in the chalice, Brian Cowen would probably find that the most dangerous section is the statistics. There is no way that anyone in this country believes that 72 per cent of local calls are of less than three minutes’ duration. When Brian had to respond to the rebalancing tariff proposals presented to him by Telecom, he knew he would have to wear a flak jacket. If you are in cabinet, presumably you can’t say that you don’t want to be associated with something that is going to draw the fire of every consumer group in the country, but Brian should have refused that particular figure. He must know that, unless you live in a world where people bark “Buy or Sell” down phones, conversations go on much longer.

And it’s not too late. He could say that new information has come to his attention and that in the light of this . . . and that would be true. He would be quite truthful in saying this because the man must be deafened with the sounds of disbelief. None of us will accept the assurances that it has all been measured scientifically. There are some things that will never be believed.

I am in a fairly good position to report on this since I listen to a great many crossed lines. These people do not hang up in three minutes. They go on and on and on. They tell each other about the everyday business of living. They tell of housework and hangovers and heartbreak and harassment at work. And these are not just the famous teenagers who are meant to be the only ones who want to yak on for hours. They are friends relaxing after a day’s work, they are sisters talking about their families, they are colleagues talking about new schemes at work, they are golfers re-living every hole. They are people who are going to make a pudding who want advice on the recipe, they are tellers of interminable tales about traffic jams or trains that were late. It is to our everlasting credit as a nation that we are never short of a word.

Who are these snappish people who get onto a phone and are off it again before they have time to say anything more than a greeting? They do not exist, and Brian Cowen, who is a man with the words “leadership material” written in the pupils of both eyes, should question these three-minute myths.

And suppose there are some short conversations in your life, like ringing a bank or an organisation. By the time you have sung along with Alas my Love you do me wrong from the Greensleeves tape, or the singularly inappropriate Where the Deer and the Antelope Play that I get when I ring a place where the clouds are pretty threatening all day, then your three minutes are often up before you get connected.

Brian Cowen has been told about the old and the lonely. He has been at pains to say that these were not his target and I’m sure he is truthful in this. After all even if you didn’t have “leadership material” tattooed on your chest, you wouldn’t be likely to say that you were setting out to penalise the old and the lonely. It would not be a good career move.

But if he paused to think, he would realise that the old and the lonely are not a market segment who will want to hang up after three minutes. I am not very old and lonely yet, but when I am, if I get there, I would like to think that there was time to ramble on a bit without people thinking what a pathetic spendthrift lonely old fool I was. I don’t want to feel I have to return everyone’s calls saying that I would prefer to initiate them myself and be in charge of the duration in case I wasted anyone’s money. I don’t want to hear warning pings when I am coming to the end of my allotted time of chat.

Did Brian ask for proof that 72 per cent of people hung up in under three minutes? If I were in his position I wouldn’t have opened my little beak until I had been shown the machinery that recorded it, and checked it out for myself. Perhaps, in his world, people bark staccato ministerial things at each other and hang up. I doubt it though. And anyway politicians are meant to have an understanding about the way we live. He must have noticed the way people talk, he must have seen enough of it to demand that the statistics be double-checked.

The telephone used to be a luxury, people will tell you, wagging metaphorical fingers. I don’t like that line. It is so patronising to tell people that they should be grateful for a development in communications, and be prepared to get off the phone before they have got on, just because it’s far from telephones many of the previous generation were reared. The telephone is a comfort and a friend. A caring society should ensure that it remains so at some acceptable cost, without all this preaching and pontificating and telling us to be grateful that long-distance deals can now be done more cheaply from the Financial Services Centre.

Brian hasn’t told us all to get up and get cracking before eight which is probably another sensible career move. The number of people who would like to be lifted from the bed for a pleasant aimless chat at seven is a limited one. Then at night people are often tired and busy or are with friends or watching television.

I could tell him a heap of stories. An old man phones his daughter at lunch-time. She has the phone in the kitchen, she chops and peels and cleans as she talks. He is on for about half an hour. It’s great. It won’t be any more.

A widow is worried about money. She drives her children mad by saying “this is costing a fortune”. About a year ago they got her off that, they told her proudly that local call charges were not related to time. Not any more. A kind woman keeps in touch with a proud neighbour by ringing her each day and discussing the bridge problem in The Irish Times. It’s only kindness really, an excuse to keep in touch. But from now on it would smack of charity.

I am leaving out the life and death phone calls because it is assumed that the endless good and helpful Samaritans and other helplines will be looked after.

I am really asking Brian Cowen to find who these short-callers are, the folks who are gone before you know they are there. If they exist, then it will be such an interesting piece of research. If they don’t, he can be magnanimous and say that he decided to look into it. After all there is a precedent in Fianna Fáil. De Valera was known to look into his heart about things and didn’t suffer for it. The leadership lights in Minister Cowen’s eyes could well turn out to be in brightest neon if he plays this one properly. If he remembers that the land he wants to rule is a talkative land where people value their conversations and do not like them cut short by any rebalancing tariff proposals whatsoever.

(Mr Cowen did not talk much about figures or phones in his latter days as minister. This could be because business people who make a lot of long-distance phone calls do seem to be doing better on the bills, of course, and also because Telecom Eireann made a profit of £81 million last year).

Screenstruck

“Michael D Higgins always says that he prides himself on doing things quickly”

It doesn’t matter if it goes off half cock; the main thing is that it gets started. People’s memories are short. Soon the great triumphant picture of Neil Jordan standing there holding the Oscar will fade or just be crowded out by pictures of other people holding their awards. The iron doesn’t stay hot forever.

The main thing is to get everyone into a lather of excitement about it, to let there be a huge amount of hope where once there was a blank wall. There shouldn’t be months of deliberation about how it is to be composed and what voice it will speak with. There’s no point in getting the Row started and the Split organised before it’s appointed.

The bad news has been that, since 1987, there has been nowhere that could act as a kind of focus, a channel for the dreams and plans of Irish film-makers. The good news is that there will be one again. It would be a great pity to waste endless hours wondering and speculating about its composition. It should meet next week.

You see there’s no way it’s going to please everyone. It can’t possibly do that. The main thing is to make it wide-ranging and give it a lot of money. And then the legitimate long-running complaint, that our country doesn’t give a damn about one of the main art and entertainment forms of our day, can be stilled. For a while. It can be replaced, of course, with many equally legitimate complaints about the people who are running it. The lot they let in, the lot they excluded and whether it knows any part of itself from its elbow in terms of making films.

At least it will be there, and all the talented Irish people who have had to fight to work in film industries outside this country will be able to fight with it and challenge it and picket it and denounce it. But there will be something there to acknowledge the huge impact of Irish people in the film industry all over the world.

When I was roaming around the planet for four months I was not moving at all in film circles, but in every place I went they were talking about Irish films.

Many people knew about Ireland only through their visits to the cinema or the video rental shop: they thought there must be a great dynamism about the place and said that the government was very enlightened to promote it so much. Loyalty to my own country and rage with the political party that had killed the Film Board warred within me, and I used to say that it was all done very much against the odds. They had to find finance from the trees.

This caused a lot of head-shaking. They thought it was like the palmy days of Gough Whitlam, when suddenly the world knew about Australia through a series of glorious Australian films. Now, not every Australian liked things like Sunday Too Far Away, full of grog-obsessed sheep shearers. It gave a down-market impression of the place, they said. But it also showed a world of enthusiasm, colour, light and love that made people begin to understand the many sides of their country.

It wasn’t paid for by the Australian Tourist Board, any more than the marvellous Commitments was financed by Bórd Fáilte, but that’s not the point. A film industry is not a propaganda wing of the government. There were a lot of people who thought the Abbey Theatre shouldn’t produce plays set in Dublin slums, where drink and violence were accepted as the norm. And fortunately nobody took that kind of view seriously enough to bypass O’Casey.

Of course, the Film Board will not have an easy road. We’ll all think our projects are being passed over because they’re too serious, too popular, too intellectual or too down-market.

There will not be a person in the country who has written a book or even hatched an idea who will not believe that, if that shower were out and proper reasonable people in, then it would all be perfect.

There will be those who will want to judge it by its commercial success, others by its artistic merit. Some by the box office, some by the film festival awards.

We don’t get any wiser by speculating and coming up with one format after another. There is no Dream Team. It may be better to have real practitioners, people who know how to do it and have done it with success, on the Film Board. Then is there a fear that they would want to allot all the money to themselves and their friends?

And are they right? Maybe they are the people who should have the funds instead of a crowd of amateurs with big notions and no talent.

But this is a problem that has never been solved. Should there be hoteliers on the board of Bórd Fáilte, or even as its chairmen? Wouldn’t that mean an unfair advantage for that person’s hotels? But then, if you have people who don’t know one end of a hotel from another, isn’t that equally cracked?

Bórd Fáilte didn’t break up in disarray; the problem was addressed in a different way. But the really stupid thing would have been to have had no Bórd Fáilte, no tourist office to let people know about our land.

Michael D Higgins always says that he prides himself on doing things quickly. I’m sure he’ll do this one very quickly altogether. I bet we’ll all be reading and disagreeing with his choice on Monday morning over breakfast.

(Michael D proved very amenable to suggestions and moved at the speed of fast forward, and as a result Bórd Scannáin na hEireann is one of the great success stories of our times. Financial investment in Irish films in 1993 and 1994 soared to £29 million, compared to £11.5 million in the previous six years, and at the last count 30 films were either completed, underway or on schedule for those two years.)

Gamblers Anonymous

“People thought the Names were like benevolent despots who left their money there in case the Titanic sank again”

So there are over 300 Irish Names in Lloyds. And they may be in financial difficulty. Why is it so hard to be sympathetic? I mean, you’d be a little sorry for some halfwit who lost his salary on a horse that was not as fleet of foot as had been hoped. You’d have a bit of pity for the fools flung over machines in Las Vegas, and the card-players with dulled eyes trying to fill a straight yet again. Why is it hard to feel anything for the Names?

Possibly because, with a few exceptions, they are not Names at all; they are Anons. There was a meeting of Irish Names a while back, and they were all rushing out of the door of the hotel with newspapers over their heads and their faces stuck under the armpits of their coats in case anyone would know who they were. Lord Mountcharles, Lord Killanin and Dr Edmond O’Flaherty have always “outed” themselves about being Names and it was assumed that most Irish business people, who can lay their hands easily on a quarter of a million so that they can afford to “sort of let it lie there”, are in Lloyds. But it was as secret as the Masons and the Knights, with an added aura of incredible financial rectitude.

A Name was a person who Kept Things Going. And they did very nicely out of it. The point about being a Name was that you had to tell Lloyds you had £250,000 which they could call on if needs be.

You had to do more than tell them, I imagine – I think you had to show it to them.

But the great advantage was you didn’t have to give it to them: you could invest it in something else and every year you got your interest on that investment. And, because Lloyds knew that your money was always there to call on if ever they needed it, they paid you as well. Around 10 per cent. So it worked out that you got about £25,000 a year from them as well as what you got from your deposit account or whatever it was.

It was nice work being a Name. It was, of course, perfectly legal. More than legal: people thought that Names were like benevolent despots who left their money there in case the Titanic sank again.

And, as the years went on, the Names must have been excused for thinking that this was money for old rope – every year the interest came in on their investments as usual, and every year there was the nice little earner from Lloyds. And I am absolutely certain that many Names did very good things with their money: I don’t see them all as bad barons twirling their moustaches and grinding the poor ever further into the ground.

But if a Name had two brain cells to rub together then, somewhere along the line, it must have crossed his happy mind that there was some risk involved in this.

Ever since the confused aristocracy babbled their way to the guillotine, there can’t have been anyone who believed that there was some kind of system which allowed the rich to get richer with no risk until the end of time. They must have said, even in the privacy of the boudoir, that this caper was too good to be true. Surely a cliché about the bubble being bound to burst might have slid into the subconscious?

But I have never known such bellyaching among Names, and Friends of Names. There are accusations of Insider Trading, Double Dealing, People in the Know, a Golden Circle which steered newcomers into dangerous areas and let them become involved in potential powder kegs – such as the US environmental lobby and all the upcoming claims because of asbestos policies.

If there is an Inner Circle, and it has been in no way proved . . . so what? You don’t hear anyone being outraged on behalf of the eejit who lost his money because he hadn’t as much info about the state of mind and the state of fetlock of some horse. The only thing I see to praise in those who gamble heavily at the races and the card tables is that they know they are gambling.

What kind of brain-fade made the Names unaware of this?

People who suspect that horses are held back and that decks are rigged still put their money at risk. Those who know that the bank must win in a casino still lay their counters on the red and the black. Anyone with stocks and shares knows they can go up or down.

Why did the Names stand alone in the commercial world and not understand that some day this capital they had pledged might be called in? Lloyds is very old-fashioned; therein lay a lot of its charm. It’s full of ponderous old-chap tradition, and manages to preserve, amid the new architecture and high technology of the City of London, a sort of superior let’s-not-be-vulgar-and-talk-about-trade-and-money-or-anything-sordid atmosphere.

It’s nearly 200 years since a ship wrecked on the Zuider Zee; it was called HMS Lutine. Everyone in Lloyds was nearly wiped out over that one, and the sum was half a million. Years later they found its plunder and made it into a chair for Lloyds’ Chairmen, and they hung up its bell – which was rung once when a shipwreck was reported and rung twice when a ship was overdue. That was fairly mind-blowing as well.

Last week in a restaurant in Dublin, I heard a group of diners sympathising with a Name. You would have thought that he been made redundant through no fault of own. You would have believed that his hard-worked-for earnings had been abstracted by a crooked accountant. You would have thought that a conman had sold him a property that did not exist.

But no, all that had happened to him was that he had gambled. And the Lutine bell began ringing for almost £3 billion. And he had to pay his share.

I was longing to tell them not to cry for him. That other people have had to move to smaller houses and live a very different lifestyle. But I wouldn’t interrupt their dinner. And anyway, I could tell them today.

(Some Names have banded together and are taking all kinds of legal action in the British courts alleging malpractice, negligence and other dire practices on the part of the enterprises they were persuaded to underwrite. Other Names have just gone down the tubes. Lloyds of London is still going strong. The chaps wouldn’t let a bit of unpleasantness set the old institution back.)

Queen’s Move

“Unlike the rest of the team . . . she gives good value for her civil list payment”

If I were an old friend of the Queen Mother I would come and have a nice gin with her this weekend and suggest quite seriously that she take over the throne.

Her daughter, the present Queen of England, is having a bad time: she has begun to talk in Latin, she is aching to retire and can’t because all her children have gone off the rails and the grandchildren are too young.

Who would be a more suitable person to put on the throne than her mother? The only Royal not to have been toppled from the pedestals of yesteryear, the only one who knows that the main qualification for being a Royal at all is to smile constantly and pretend you are having a great time everywhere.

There is another advantage about the Queen Mother taking over. At the age of 94, her life-expectancy would not be enormous and even the most dedicated anti-monarchist could hardly object to her serving her term.

And then, in the fullness of time when she is about 100, and the new millennium dawns, the monarchy could come to a gracious and logical end without any revolution, and there could be a glut of nostalgic books about how wonderful they all were in their time.

The Queen Mother has a nice soothing aura about her. I have seen her at the races presenting cups and talking to trainers and discussing the water jump with jockeys as if she might be saddling up herself a bit later in the afternoon. The older she gets, the more pastel her clothes become and the more feathers and fringes appear in her hats. She is like a marvellous mad bird of paradise in any crowd, her hand raised in automatic wave position, her smile wider and wider, her corgis growling contentedly at her feet, and a look of great regret when she has to leave whatever housing estate, memorial ceremony, shipyard or sports event that they have wheeled her out to that day. Unlike the rest of the team – who seem to be pawing at the ground, looking over their shoulders and sighing – she gives good value for her civil list payment.

She is a loved old-fashioned relic of a time gone by. And so, in many ways, is the monarchy itself. If they were united in one person, it would be a spectacular way to draw it all to a close.

Look at all the crises that would be solved at one swoop. The present Queen, who seems to have a very sincere sense of duty about the whole thing, would feel secure if she let her mother take over. It would end all this angst about whether Di can be crowned or not, or whether it should skip Charles and go to the little prince. You get the feeling that she is hanging on in there until the little prince becomes a big enough prince to take over.

But if she were to look not to far-distant generations but instead look back one, she has the perfect candidate waiting in the wings.

Presumably the Queen Mother wouldn’t be having embarrassing conversations on mobile phones. She wouldn’t give rise to endless speculation like the next lot down the line do, making the British public ask seriously in pubs and in acres of print: Are They Worth It? or Is Their Day Over?

If the Queen Mother were to be crowned with the tacit – or maybe even formal – agreement that she were to be the last of the line, then it would mean that Charles could marry Camilla, which he really should do fairly smartish anyway. Not just because it’s the only honourable and gentlemanly sort of thing to do if a lady’s name has been mentioned and rather more than mentioned, but because Camilla is taking on all the appearances of a very loose cannon indeed on the deck. I have seen photographs of her glaring at things in general that would unhinge me if I were Charles. And if one’s grandmother were safely crowned and anointed and there were no question of one having to stand in readiness for it, one could get on with doing The Right Thing.

And those little boys could have a normal life if they didn’t have to think about shouldering responsibilities and taking over a job that Daddy should have done and didn’t, and in general having to sort out the mess that Mummy and Daddy and all the silly uncles and aunties got them into. What a huge relief to them it would be to see Great-Grandmother smiling away with a crown on over her hat, and Grandma looking happy out with her corgis in the rain while Grandfather growled and shot small birds all day. The whole scheme has so much to recommend it the Queen Mother would be surprised that she hadn’t thought of it before.

But – and it’s always wise, when giving advice, to anticipate the argument – but, she might say, perhaps it would be an imposition, maybe they mightn’t like an elderly relative moving in on them all and taking things over?

This is where I would lean over confidentially and say: So what?

They all purport to take this monarchy business seriously but the Queen Mother is the only one who actually went out and worked at it. She was never expecting it; the others were born to it or married into it or discovered that they were stuck with it at an early age. But the Queen Mother thought she was marrying a nice younger son, a duke certainly, but had not a notion of his turning into a king until all that Bad Behaviour back in the 1930s when Edward went off course.

And she stuck to it all, helping a nervous man with a speech impediment make broadcasts to the nation – which frightened him to death – and she was always there smiling through air raids and more and more impossible weddings. They even brought her to Scotland to give a bit of respectability to Anne’s second wedding and what thanks does she get for it?

None at all.

Normally I wouldn’t inflame a friend against the family, I see my role more as soother of ruffled feelings and patter-down of possible rows.

But honestly. The woman is 93. She choked and was taken to hospital. You couldn’t get into the place with all the flowers from well-wishers. But did her family come to see her? No, they did not.

She has two daughters, six grandchildren. And for three days the news bulletins of the BBC led with a health report on her. And then it dawned on some clouded PR brain that common people go to see their relatives in hospital and the Duke of York was rustled up for a photocall.

I’d say to the Queen Mother, don’t waste any time worrying about their sensitivities, they seem to have lost them.

And then we would plan what we’d both wear for the Coronation.

Road to Rome

“The whole dangerous business of bells and smells”

When Katherine Worseley married the Duke of Kent in 1961, she was a nice ladylike girl from an upper-class family in Yorkshire and there was a sigh of relief because she was good-looking, quiet and she wasn’t a Catholic.

That was over 30 years ago when a great many real people still thought it was terribly important that the monarchy shouldn’t be tied to Rome’s apron strings with overtones of Armadas and Counter-Reformations, and the whole dangerous business of bells and smells. Life was complicated then for royalists, because the tragic fact was that the only suitable spouses for the Windsors and their cousins seemed to be – perish the thought – Catholic monarchies. There were dozens of likely starters in the crumbling palaces of Europe, whose lineage was fine and royal but who dug with the wrong foot.

Nowadays surely it couldn’t matter less, or so you might think. Normal people would be forgiven for thinking that the British royal family has given such unwilling entertainment over the last few years, in so many spheres, that the mere conversion to Catholicism of a woman who is married to someone 18th in line to the throne should pass without comment. But they would be wrong. It has been analysed and argued down to the bone: it has been made into a drama, a threat, a straw in the wind. They say it has all to do with the Church of England’s confusion over the ordination of women priests. They say the floodgates are about to open and that hordes of upper-crust Anglicans are about to defect. They don’t see a tired, pleasant, quiet woman who obviously seriously thinks that her way to God is clearer and more satisfying through membership of the Catholic Church. They have turned the whole thing into a circus.

I have great sympathy for the Duchess of Kent. With over half her lifetime lived in a goldfish bowl, she couldn’t even have a miscarriage or a depression in private. When she agreed to be a patron of the Samaritans, she also wanted to work with them as a sympathetic listening voice on the phone. But then, when it leaked out that Samaritan Katie was really her Royal Highness, it changed everything. She was in the limelight when her son married what was thought to be an unsuitable bride. Canadian, Catholic, divorced. Then her other son was caught with a teeny bit of cannabis – the first royal drugs bust. Everything she did, or her family did, was a matter for public attention.

The tabloids said alternately that she was caring or unstable, depending on how they felt about her. She felt human sympathy and sorrow for the Czech tennis player, Jana Novotna, who burst into tears in front of everyone at Wimbledon. She hugged the girl with the kind of response that most of us would think was good, rather than staring frostily past her and pretending it wasn’t happening, like many other royals would have done. But the tabloids blew it all up to the skies; either she was as caring as Mother Teresa, a totally inappropriate comparison, or she was definitely unstable, her own tears never being far from the surface. At least Katherine Worseley’s husband, who is Grand Master of Britain’s Freemasons, would have the huge advantage of secrecy on his side.

She was always a religious Anglican and, as many felt before her, she must have felt that she could take a further step and moved from her high church practice of the Protestant faith to joining the Church of Rome. At the same time as she was making that decision, there were also Catholics who left the Church of Rome because they disapproved of some Papal teachings. All these are people of good faith and honour, following their consciences. All over the world, people are finding personal roads to Damascus, seeing salvation, seeing a better way to live or a hope and a promise by taking a different route. In general, people wish them well and they get on with it. But then they are not duchesses. Katherine Worseley isn’t allowed to get on with it.

Among the upper-class Catholics in England there is a triumphalism that is as irritating as the frightened braying of those who regard the conversion as a defection. The Brompton Oratory set, the Farm Street set, the Saint Ethelreda or Hatton Garden set all hope that the Duchess will be part of their lot.

All the various Catholic charities are clamouring to have her name on their notepaper; there is a feeling of having arrived, being accepted, given a belated pat on the back for being part of a tribe once in the wilderness but now acceptable to royal duchesses. Not one bit of this is the Duchess of Kent’s fault. She was quiet and unobtrusive about it all. She asked Queen Elizabeth’s permission quietly in advance because she didn’t want the Niagara Falls of a reaction if she did it off her own bat. She couldn’t become a secret Catholic; that’s not how to do things if she had the courage and the faith to want to join openly. The early Christians, who hid their faith rather than be eaten by lions, weren’t considered much of an advertisement for their religion. But it has become a huge political football. People are very busy attributing motives to her that she may never have had. It’s her anti-abortion stance that made her take the final leap, they say. It’s a protest about the way society in general, and the royal family in particular, have been behaving. It’s giving Queen Elizabeth the opportunity to show how private faith and the established Church of England do not have to go hand in hand. It’s part of the slow process to disestablish the Church of England and allow Charles, as a divorced man, to be crowned king.

There are growlings, too, among many ordinary British Catholics; why did she have to have a cardinal do the receiving into the Church bit? Wouldn’t an ordinary priest have done? I don’t find a great difficulty with that. If you accept that it is a class-dominated society, and that she’s in the top drawer and that he is a prince of the church, it is probably the correct diplomatic procedure. Anyway, she knows him and he is a friend and he’s not out looking for more limelight at this stage in his life. What I do object to is the way everyone is reading so much into it on a political, social and tribal level. We have to assume that these people read some of the papers some of the time. I’d like to think that she might find peace and hope, and would wish that for anyone who makes a decision based on faith. I hope that she will be able to ignore all the ballyhoo, and stories of the Gunpowder Plot, and rumours of her being a Pied Piper about to lead all the other confused members of the royal family on the road to Rome.

Horse Laugh

“Stewards with Attitude have run things for far too long”

The ludicrous and upsetting farce when the Grand National did not start at Aintree might have some good results if the control of the whole thing can be finally wrested from all these pompous, self-important people in hats who prance around, delighted with themselves, until something happens and then fall apart like broken biscuits.

Racing, which is meant to be democratic, a good day out for all, a sport enjoyed by rich and poor, is in fact nothing of the sort. There is a class structure in racing which would make the hair stand up on your head if you were to think about it. From the gear they wear to the price of tickets to the various enclosures, from the different bars for different drinks to the railed-off areas for royalty over there, and corporate entertaining over here, how can anyone think it’s an egalitarian outing?

There was a time within recent memory when divorced people couldn’t go into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. Admittedly that was before such a ruling would exclude almost the entire royal family, but this was an example of the pretentious and repressive legislation that those who ran racing were able to get away with.

Stewards with Attitude have run things for far too long. Last week their cover was blown and it’s time for the people who actually do give the public what they want to take over their own sport.

God knows I’m not an enthusiastic gambler, as the State of Nevada could tell you – it didn’t lose serious money until I went to Las Vegas and drank the drink and watched the lavish spectacles without consigning anything significant to the slot machines or blackjack tables. But I have been to the races in all kinds of places and I’ve enjoyed them in spite of bullying-looking people with badges and bowlers and serious sense-of-humour failure.

The guys who are meant to run things are the only people who appear to be having no fun at all at the races. They have a particular gesture. It’s an outstretched arm and a pointing finger, a bit like generals. They move in twos and threes, pointing, hissing, frowning. They seem to know everything and disapprove of most of it. When races do start, which is most of the time, they sort of glower after the departing horses as if they were letting the place down.

When races don’t start, like last Saturday, they turn ashen white and start pointing and gesturing and opening rule books and shouting and reading out rules to people in the aggrieved tones of tyrannical schoolmasters who can’t believe that the Lower Fourth are a crowd of dunderheads. Then they go into conclave and come out shouting a totally different decision from the one they had pointed out previously with such pained and speaking-to-slow-learner delivery.

This is a deeply silly class of person and should not be in charge for much longer.

Even those of us who had only put a pound each way on Kildimo for the sociability of it all, who had come in, drawn the curtains against the bright April sunlight and sat down to watch the race, could see that we were watching the dying whimper of a breed that will be less credible than any of the strange dinosaurs recreated for us these days.

Gesturing and arrogant, they were unable to admit that anything had, or could possibly have, gone wrong. Later they searched like mad for a scapegoat in the form of a man with a flag, a figure who seemed to step straight out of the past – when he would have run in front of the horseless carriages to give the news that a machine was in the road.

Maybe it needed that shambles to show what a pathetic set-up it all was. But it was a hard price to have to pay. I found myself in tears with John White and, in the usual fit of parallelism I get about almost every aspect or life, I thought myself into the position of being bent over the neck of Esha Ness and going ba-doom ba-doom ba-doom past the winning post, saying to myself won’t Jenny Pitman be pleased and isn’t this great and I wonder why the crowd are booing instead of cheering?

And then I thought myself into the position of being one of the ones who didn’t start and saying to myself: “Well, Maeve, aren’t you the bright little jockey. Now we only have to run nine of us and maybe I’ll win in a smaller field.” Because that’s what the nine were told would happen.

The Jockey Club is not really the Jockey Club in anything except name; it’s not a trade union for jockeys. The whole language of this sport is very suspect. They talk about my head lad, and the stable lad and I know, I know they will say that these are the terms, these are official titles with their own dignity and I am just splitting hairs and not understanding - but words have a history, and I don’t think you can talk about racing, the sport of the masses, if it has such a hierarchical structure.

I remember objecting to the words of All Things Bright and Beautiful once because of its theory that God made everyone and gave them a position to be in: the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate. People said it was just a hymn, that was all. That made it 20 times worse to me, and it doesn’t improve the class-ridden vocabulary of racing when anyone says it’s just the jargon and everyone loves it.

The horses don’t have much say; the people who ride them and who train them and those who own them all claim to love these animals and I’m sure they do. The people who handed over those staggering millions, that we are all trooping back to the bookies to collect, claim to think it’s a great sport and well worth anyone’s investment.

Let them rise against the Hats, the gesturers, the pointers, the people who are too steeped in tradition to put in a screen or a Tannoy or something from the 20th century that might let the horses and their riders know what’s happening. We probably needed the raw hysteria and naked disappointment – making people babble inanities about Ireland being a Third World country and still being able to stop a horse race – to show what a farce it is to let old-fashioned nobs run things because they have always done so.

It’s a bit hard on the few who were responsible for the particular cock-up on Saturday, but only a bit hard. Their day had to come and it was fortunate that it came so publicly, causing such rage and reaction. There’s nothing left for that lot to defend. My advice is that they should come out sobbing with repentance from the inquiry and declare a new era for racing.

And maybe the backward little country here could give them some pointers about the way to go.

Retiring Types

“Maybe Des O’Malley means it when he says it is time

for young people to take the helm”

Most people agree that women retire much more positively than men. It has nothing to do with gurgling grandchildren, coffee mornings or hours spent sitting down, doing tapestry. It has a lot to do with attitude. With the exception of Margaret Thatcher, who never lived a real life anyway and so hangs on in there pathetically like an old actor who won’t leave the theatre, women see work as a phase in their lives. They don’t see retirement as a yawning emptiness; they see it as a beginning.

Perhaps men of this generation are beginning to see the light and maybe Des O’Malley means it when he says it is time for young people to take the helm. It would be cheering if he does mean it and if he isn’t looking for new helms to hold on to. It would be a positive inspiration if he decided not to root for some other job, if he were to make a statement that life was not all about work and power and achievement; cheering if he could be a man who does not define himself by his work.

Because men have been very guilty of doing that. The job c’est moi mentality has destroyed the lives of many men who should have had a perfectly happy 20 years or more after their retirement date but who instead believe that they have been somehow cast adrift when they still have a lot to contribute.

Of course they have a lot to contribute. It would be barking mad to get out the slippers and the secateurs and long woolly cardigan, but why does the contribution have to be only in the workplace? It’s a pretty poor definition of life and hope and the time we spend between being a baby and dying, if the only meaningful bit of it is actually spent away from the home, the chosen mate and the children that resulted, away from them in a competitive scoring work situation.

I know Des O’Malley is young; he’s a contemporary of my own for heaven’s sake. We started out in UCD on the same day. He is, by our standards, very young indeed. He has always been vastly energetic; even at College he seemed to be involved in everything. There was nothing languid about Des. He doesn’t need to have another job to define him. He is the sum of what he has done. Those who admire him, and I am one, will continue to admire him. And isn’t being a TD enough? Most of us would consider that a fairly energetic way of spending dawn to dusk.

Why does there have to be huge speculation about what job he will have next, whether it’s Europe or a series of directorships? Why does there have to be such analysis about his motives for going now, as if only a raving lunatic would leave a position of power unless prodded firmly by the threat of a coup?

Everyone is wailing about how the young have to emigrate and how we are educating the country’s youth and have no jobs to give them. Would it not be a very positive example indeed if those who could afford to do so, and who truly believe it’s time to let younger people in, actually did let them in? But for this we need a change of attitude and maybe Des is of the right generation to start that change.

Years ago, you never saw a man wheeling a pram in Ireland, you never heard of men taking paternity leave, you never believed that a man might change his job and his place of living because his wife got promoted. These things happen now all around us and we take it for granted.

Des O’Malley and I were born into a world where girls cleaned their brothers’ shoes, where a man felt threatened if he could not provide for his family and he had to send his wife out to work. We have lived through decades during which the family was put under enormous strain all over Ireland because men had to work too hard and too long and were not able to enjoy their leisure. Retirement was always celebrated in a singularly inappropriate way by the presentation of a clock or a watch to mark the time that would now tick slowly past, since the meaning of life was over.

People are living longer; they don’t want to go into their dotage the day they leave a job. Sensible workers are already planning schemes much more enthralling than the old-style image of making home-made wine in a potting shed and shuffling off to a local pub at lunch-time to bore everyone rigid with tales of how it used to be in the old days. Des O’Malley was always proud of what he considered to be breaking the mould in Irish politics. Let him try to do the same for Irish lifestyles as well.

No sane person would think that 54 was old, or past it, or time to settle down into some kind of reminiscent phase. But equally, no sane person would think you have to have another and better and more thrusting and eager job to be still considered an important person. If he really wants to break another mould or two, then perhaps he might consider spearheading a campaign that says you are not your job.

Lady in Waiting

“It’s very hard for a hyperactive person to be quiet”

Margaret Thatcher used to be terrifying. I’m talking serious fear here. On the one occasion I had to ask her a question at a press conference, I was awake all night clearing my throat for it and when I did get the words out, I heard a roaring in my ears and couldn’t make out what she had replied.

Heads of other governments, her own ministers, the royal family, people in showbiz all reeled backwards in terror of her. I once saw a waiter fall out a window – and only saved from death by a strategically placed flower box – when she was power-walking through a dining-room looking to left and right of her with demon intent.

But now it’s over. Now she should be doing something else. I’ve often had this fantasy that she would consult me about her next career move. That she might phone me and ask me over for a bit of girl talk. I would be offered one Scotch whisky and English Malvern water. No nasty European habits like wine.

And she would look at me with burning sincerity and want to know what would I do now, if I were her. And I’m such a big softie I’d try to give her genuine advice. I’d suggest that we look at a video of the House of Lords debate where she seems to be taking part in a sort of a pantomime.

There she was in her blue suit. Like the old days, the well-coiffed blonde hair, the mannered gestures, the total conviction that she was right. And she was talking and talking and laying down the law and booming about diminishing democracy and substituting bureaucracy. Her eyes were getting that dangerous glint as she talked of Eurospeak and drivel and fingers being burned. But, though all the lights were on, there was every sign that there was no one at home.

The House of Lords was full and, as the camera went from one face to another, they all looked embarrassed for her. Shifty almost. There they were – blasts from the past. People that you thought were dead. All the people she had raised up and then clubbed down with her handbag. Willie Whitelaw, Geoffrey Howe, Norman Tebbit. All of them shaking their locks regretfully at her.

Of course she lost the vote. And she lost a lot of friends. For the first time in 34 years she voted against her party. They won’t like that.

But it’s no use telling her she shouldn’t have done it. It’s done. It’s like the times when a friend has been very drunk: you don’t say she should have drunk more water in between the glasses of wine to avoid the boiled eyes and thumping head, she knows that so well. The question is: Do you give her a Bloody Mary, get her to sign the pledge or help her write the letter of apology?

What do you do for Lady Thatcher? Ask her to do the thing she’s worst at. Tell her the only hope is to lie low. Even the newspapers that used to stand up for her are full of criticism these days. Increasingly they use words like manic to describe her.

She was always manic, but they didn’t see it; it’s just that it is entirely inappropriate to be manic if you’re not running the shop any more.

You’re meant to be gracious. Resigned, weary, sad, head-shaking, but not ranting.

It’s very hard for a hyperactive person to be quiet. It’s hard for a bossyboots to let other people run things when she thinks they’re running it all into the ground. Let nobody mention things like having a nice rest, or gardening, or being a proper granny, or having time for her friends to Lady Thatcher. She would look at you with mystification. She still thinks there’s going to be a chance to lock horns with someone, stand like a prow, being Joan of Arcish about something, or start a good war.

No, I think if you were her friends, and had her interests at heart, you would tell her that there was something big coming up on the horizon and she should save her strength for it.

And in a way, for her, there is something coming up. Her memoirs. Called The Downing Street Years, as if nobody else had ever had any. Downing Street Years will be published on October 18th. If she had a titter of sense she would go into hiding now until the book comes out.

There will be some interest in it when it appears. To be fair, there will be considerable interest. People will want to know what she thought of others. They will read it to find out if she justifies every single thing she did or actually acknowledges the odd mistake. They will rake it for a hint of a private life or a passing involvement with her twin children anywhere along the line. They will hope that she says something cheering about Denis and not too much about Ronald Reagan.

But there are three months to go. And if she’s going to be popping up burning ever more brightly, and always more meaninglessly about Europe, she’s going to diminish her currency and weaken her appeal.

She doesn’t need a rest. The woman only sleeps four hours a night as it is. She’d be dead in two minutes if you sent her to bed. She needs something to do to keep her from driving everyone mad.

I’d advise her to go on a three-month tour of Europe with the intention of writing a book about how much she hates everything – frogs’ legs and paella and bouzouki music and Dutch cheese and Bernini statues. She’d have a great time. No one would know where she was and, when she came back to do her dinner circuit and to flog the book, they would have all forgotten how embarrassing and silly she had been this past week in the House of Lords.

In fact while she was gone, fuming up and down the Alps, muttering on Autoroutes, grumbling on Paradors, Major might have dirtied his bib more and they’d be thinking she wasn’t as bad as they remembered.

It’s tough, Margaret, but you did ask me round to advise you. And the best thing I can say is: Let’s not hear a squeak out of you. And maybe the book on Europe will turn out to be a great success and you’ll go to it with your nice closed mind and there will be no danger that you might get any nasty surprises and enjoy the place.

Colour her Grey

“There has been a bit too much colour in Britain of late. They want something muted and gentle now.”

If I were Norma Major, I would make a positive virtue out of being Grey. I would make Greyness the in thing, the class-act of the decade. And I would become the high priestess of it. The Greyest of all.

The country that her husband rules over is actually dying for a bit of peaceful greyness if she only knew it. She should listen to no advisers telling her to wear bright colours and come out with bright utterances.

There has been a bit too much colour in Britain of late. They want something muted and gentle now. They want background people, and Norma could be leader of the pack.

Norma was 51 last month. Nice and quietly. Good.

There is no need for the image-makers to dredge up exciting things to feed to the press about her. Every now and then, when they think she’s getting too grey, they tell us: about the oops-oops time she once said that she was “sick of her husband bringing all the official boxes home to bed with them with a clatter and a crash which was bloody selfish of him really”.

Never has a phrase been so often quoted: it’s as if to prove that she has spark and fire so that the great electorate won’t think she is ordinary and stop voting for her husband.

But this is where they have got it so wrong. People are dying for somebody ordinary. Everyone else lives fairly dreary lives; they want leaders to be dreary too.

They are sick of flash-harry people like Norman Lamont and Fergie. They are tired of revelations about Prince Charles’s friend Camilla and Fergie’s father’s love life. Deep down they are looking for someone gracious and non-showy, someone respectable and understated.

They have lost Queen Elizabeth. First of all her family is out of control; then she has started quibbling about the taxes she did agree to pay. No: it’s Norma’s big chance.

And this is how I’d do it.

I’d surround myself with the loudest and most colourful people in the land, or indeed any land. I would engineer and manipulate some kind of public event where they would all show themselves up to be deafening and vulgar and ultimately tiresome.

It might be an event in aid of a charity or a good cause and she could assemble a team of people like Fergie and Ruby Wax and Ben Elton and Lenny Henry and Jeffrey Archer and Twink – and many, many more people, good and bad, who would have one thing in common: they would all be colourful and vocal. Then she should let them loose on the media. All together.

And because they are all such troopers, people like myself, who can’t abide a silence, and who rush to fill the vacuum – they will feel that things need to be said, and follow that awful principle that the Show Must Go On. And they’ll be so noisy and plain tiring that the people will turn to Norma as they once turned to Eva Peron.

Don’t forget Evita gave the Argentines what they didn’t have, which was a bit of glamour. Norma could give the British a rest from colour and drama; she could give them a lovely safe grey haven.

If I were Norma, I would realise that I had done everything right so far. She has perfect credentials. She had a job as a domestic science teacher in various London schools. She met her husband not in a topless bar or in an eyeball-to-eyeball conflict over a boardroom table but doing constituency work, ferrying voters to and from the polls.

She has brought up her two children quietly and normally and well out of the public eye; hardly anyone knows anything about Elizabeth and James Major which is a plus for her. She has an endearing habit of saying things that turn out to be absolutely untrue.

Like saying, in 1990, that things couldn’t be as bad as in 1989 when her husband had been Foreign Secretary. She thought things were going to quieten down a bit.

Then, when asked what his chances were of becoming Prime Minister she said: “That kind of thing doesn’t happen to people like us.”

She has laid an excellent foundation for greatness. Let her take no heed of those who want to give her public speaking lessons and assertiveness training. Instead she should be seen daily in the company of anyone whose main claim to fame is that they’re a bit of a mouth. It will be such a comfort not to have to listen to anyone else with instant attitude on everything that the people will cleave to her.

The memories of being handbagged to death will only be a bad dream; the Hillary factor will not hang over them; the relief that they might have escaped being lectured by Glenys Kinnock will be extreme. Andrew Lloyd Webber could be waiting in the wings:

Don’t cry because you’re grey Normita.

The truth is, that’s the colour they want you.

Lilac Buggy

“Aer Rianta doesn’t really mind if we take off or land on an emu as long as we use their airports”

Now it is never the fault of Aer Lingus, you must understand that as you fight for breath and hold on to passing strangers for support. Because it’s actually true. Aer Lingus only runs the airline. The bad guys are the British Airport Authority and Aer Rianta; their remit is all about airport management and duty-free shops and design and planning and duty-free shops and car parking and catering and duty-free shops and fire-fighting and rescue and duty-free shops.

So when Heathrow became off limits for those of us without the long, loping gait of the athlete, the stamina of the Alaskan husky and the spare canister of oxygen at the ready, a lot of us chose to use British provincial airports instead.

I picked Bristol because we have friends who live near it and it’s a great excuse to go and see them and it’s a dotey little airport anyway. It’s like a holiday airport in Greece 30 years ago: you get off the plane and walk a short distance into a small building while your luggage chugs along beside you on a trailer. And that’s it. No tunnels, no turning corners and saying “I don’t believe this . . .” There’s no labyrinth, no miles of terrible, menacing carpet, no series of 4,000 glossy advertisements to darken your brow. (If all these advertisers pay real money for this airport space then maybe, you fear to yourself, the journey will be twice the length next year).

So I felt a lot better, selfishly. I felt that I had found a solution to the problems posed by Heathrow’s interminable terminal. And, in Dublin, there was a nice buggy that drove you down the long journey to Pier A. And all kinds of able-bodied people travelled on this buggy, so you didn’t feel as if you’d thrown in the towel by getting into it.

So far, so good.

And then a few months ago, there was no buggy. Very disappointed indeed, I asked what had happened to it. They thought it might be off for the day. That was bad luck, I thought, and crawled off to make the journey down the miles of Pier A. I didn’t make a federal case out of it at the time because a buggy could break down or a driver could be sick.

Two weeks later there was no buggy again. They hadn’t seen one for days, people told me, so I rang Aer Rianta. It was all the work being done in the area, they said, lots of building, and it would be difficult for the buggy to navigate through all the great works that were going on to enhance Pier A. When would it eventually be enhanced, I asked? Stage One was going according to plan, I was told.

I went out to the airport last week. Stage One had gone according to plan: a gleaming duty-free shop had opened, naturally. Heavy priority. No workmen around with their bums in the air to be mown down by those travelling in buggies like they had feared before. But not a buggy to be seen.

I rang Aer Rianta again when I had recovered from the journey. It’s a bit too crowded for the buggies I was told, too many people around the place. Most of them concerned about chest pains, I said.

The spokesman went away to get a ruling. The ruling came back. There were too many people around Pier A, they said, that was the problem. People coming both ways – departing and arriving. When there were only departing passengers, it meant they were all going in one direction and you could sort of skirt them in the buggy but now you’d be crashing into them and the place would be strewn with bodies. I am paraphrasing their answer.

I did suggest, mildly, that an airport authority might, in fact, expect people to be travelling in both directions, it being the nature of things. People arrive, people leave. They took this on board and said that soon, quite soon, a travelator would arrive, at enormous cost, to carry people the long, long way to Pier A. Could they hazard a guess as to how soon? The inside of a year, they hoped. And would the travelator go all the way or just a silly cosmetic little distance like at Heathrow? Nearly all the way, they hoped. But until then, would Pier A be buggyless?

Had I noticed the nice, new, little trolley things they had introduced, they wondered? To be strictly fair, I had. But I considered them a very poor substitute for our friend the buggy.

I asked why it was that, sometimes, when you came back from Bristol or Birmingham, you found yourself by a miracle in the Arrivals Hall and other times you had the Long March. It was a question of docking, they said, it all depended where the plane docked.

Now my advice to Aer Rianta is to get real. They are meant to be a service industry. They do all sorts of passenger surveys and claim that they read customer complaint cards. The profile of visitors surely includes the maturing traveller as well as those armies of lithe little back-packers who leap from every flying machine only dying to stretch their long limbs by doing a few laps around the circular terminal building. There must be many, like myself, who are not disabled enough for a wheelchair but not strong enough to fly from Pier B (which is normal) to Heathrow (which is not). And not able now to fly to Bristol or Stansted (which are normal), because it means going through Pier A in Dublin, which is getting less normal every week Next time I’ll try CityJet to London City Airport to measure the normality factors.

But, you see, Aer Rianta doesn’t really mind if we take off or land on an emu as long as we use their airports – and that just isn’t fair. Truly, it isn’t fair just to ignore the people who drag themselves along saying “It can’t be much further now and it’ll be over by this time tomorrow”.

This is a public limited company which is meant to be working in our interests, helping us to travel to and from our own island, and helping visitors to get in and out of the place with some kind of feeling of well-being rather than submitting them to an endurance test.

I have been studying the pictures of Dermot O’Leary (Acting Chairman) and Derek Keogh (Chief Executive) in the IPA Yearbook and Diary. From the small, postage stamp-sized images they look like men with perfectly clear and open expressions. You can’t see any sadism in their smiles.

But they cannot be reasonable men if they cancel passenger services such as buggy cars – especially when all they need to do is put bells on them to alert pedestrians, for heaven’s sake. They can’t be open and fair if they hide behind explanations about passengers travelling in both directions as if this was some sort of freaky complication – in an airport.

I advise Aer Rianta that the tumbrels could well come for them one day. Tumbrels with lovely, big, comfortable buggy wheels and seats and engines. Let them act now before it is too late.

July 16, 1994

(Aer Rianta moved with speed to restore the buggy. Indeed, they didn’t even stop to do more than give it a quick wipedown before they wheeled in onto the Pier A route, which is why it is still a pallid yellow as we go to print. However, they assure me that the minute there’s a let-up in the customer traffic they are going to paint it, and you can send me a thought of gratitude as you glide up and down in the Lilac Buggy. This is the kind of response that makes giving unasked-for advice totally worthwhile.)

The End