So, as the unexpectedly benign summer reaches the dog days, and the tree fruits start to show their colours, what do we find in Ireland. How fare we? Frankly, I think we've lost it. We are within months of becoming the most highly concentrated location of tossers on earth, and then some!!

Now let's be clear we've always had, ya know, the kind of people who, for example, would take VIP seriously. We've always had our idle ignorant rich (not all of whom are bankers and judges) and we've always had gobshites.
But what's happening now is different. The tossers are growing in numbers, in visibility and in confidence. They are approaching critical mass in Ireland, the point at which a society changes, and they become the dominant presence. Too many Beamers, and way too many jeep-style four-wheel drives. Always a dead give-away.
Is it the point at which we become an urban rather than a rural society? I am not over-fond of the farmy approach, but there's no doubt that the perspective gained by a strong rural presence lends a very healthy contemplative ballast to a society. Once upon a time we didn't need health farms and spiritual trainers, because the hills were always in easy reach and most of us had a family farm somewhere in the background.
No more. We are suburbanised. Look around you. Indistinguishable in most respects from other English-speaking suburban societies. Like, say Jersey. Awful!
I am minded in this direction by two apparently unrelated events. The first is Mary Harney's recent speech in which she came out against further European integration. That's grand, but it was the rest of what she said that caught the eye. She said such integration would be against the interests of Ireland which, in her words, was spiritually 'a lot closer to Boston than Berlin'.
Personally, I feel a lot more at home in Copenhagen, Amsterdam or Barcelona than I do in Boston. No offence to New England, but well, that's the problem, it's New England.
On the political level, the speech might come back to haunt her in Europe. A huge effort went into convincing our European partners of our European credentials. And in survey after survey, even now, we emerge as the most enthusiastic and optimistic Europeans of all. Now the Tenaiste has screwed the pooch. We were only codding them.
But maybe she's right. As flights get cheaper and we start really going on holliers, to places like Ibiza, we are merging with the English. Just as red and just as drunk. If we have a lot in common with Boston, we have even more in common with Liverpool, Leeds and Luton. More's the pity. I mean look at the lunatic situation where tens of thousands of Irish people support British football teams is that independence?!?
But another event on the same day underlined the fact that Mary Harney might actually have her finger on the pulse the arrival of a team from Playboy to audition Irish girls. Make yer hair crawl. Not the women, or even the idea. No, what was really horrible was the gooey, gushing and uncritical media coverage. Isn't it gas? Irish women whipping off their tops wah-hey!
And then there's the frightening statistic that Ireland is one of Playboy's biggest markets per head of population, we buy fifteen times as many as they do in Britain. Either we're entirely short of taste or we're the biggest tossers on the face of the earth. But which is it? And where does this square with Mary Harney's views of our cultural heritage?
Europe, being older and wiser, has a real sense of the decadent! I mean, in Berlin, they have serious nightlife. Strip clubs, red lights. I have fond memories of one, which described itself as a 'hot fleshy disco'. Ah yes. Ya won't find that in stuffy old puritan Boston. No, the decidedly naff coyness of Playboy is more the marker there.
Are we really like that?? Pathetic!
The Hog