You Can't Beat the Feeling

Like many South Africans, I hire a domestic worker to come and help us with the ironing once a week. This morning, as I worked from home, I heard her chuckling away to herself in my living room where, it turned out, she'd just finished a t-shirt belonging to me that reads: Enjoy Corruption: You Can't Beat the Stealing. It sparked an interesting conversation.

Minnie asked if I'd bought the shirt in Ireland. Initially, I thought she'd been reading up on the tribunal circus that continues to follow Taoiseach Bertie Ahern around like the proverbial bad smell. But no: she thought it was a statement from the rest of the world indicating how they viewed South Africa.

She was even more surprised when I told her that the t-shirt would resonate as much in my home country as it does here. She looked at me with disbelief (and no small amount of pleasure) when I told her that we too had a healthy supply of corrupt politicians and officials, all stuffing their pockets as full of cash as possible even as ordinary citizens, becoming accustomed to lying on trolleys in over-crowded hospital corridors are being asked to give even these up because of over-crowding.

“But Ireland is a rich country, no?”

Well yes. If you factor in things like good employment levels and a merciful lack of shack dwellers. But if it's a case study in the shameless waste of resources, mismanagement, arrogance and a complete disregard for the lives of those who for some reason continue to vote for you like sheep you're after, look no further than Ireland. The country where the Prime Minister, about to award himself a generous pay rise (read 38 000 Euros – that's the increase, by the way) and under fire from outraged citizens, pleaded poverty, saying that compared to other leaders in the world, he was “poverty stricken.” They, he told fellow parliamentarians, had things like yachts and posh places to go on holidays, unlike poor Bertie who, it seems, has been forced to go cap-in-hand to property developers in search of envelopes containing “contributions” to keep him going. The nature and size of these contributions is, as we speak, the subject of a Tribunal of Inquiry. Ireland's answer to Jarndyce and Jarndyce, it's been staggering on for years, not least because there's no shortage of public representatives to put under the spotlight.

Depressing as it might be for Irish people at the moment, this kind of news put a smile on at least one face today...