WHEN Donald Trump, American developer, property magnate, business icon and someone persistently followed by accusations of racism, arrived in Ireland he was met on coming down from the plane by a harpist, a violinist and a singer.
All women, all wearing flowing red dresses. He was also greeted shortly afterwards by Michael Noonan, the Minister for Finance. He was also granted huge media coverage and, at least one, fawning press interview. It was, and I’ve searched hard for the right words here and kept coming back to the same ones, utterly nauseating.
The bowing and scraping that we delivered for Donald Trump made us look like a nation that consisted of villagers from one of those Hollywood Oirish films of the 1950s. A rich American turns up in his own plane throwing the money around and we turn in to Darby O’Gill and The Little People.
Our elected Minister of Finance joining in the buffoonery and putting aside a day in his busy schedule, to make sure of what exactly? That Donald had everything he needed? That everything was to his satisfaction? That there wasn’t a hair out of place?
Sometime back in the ’90s I happened to be inside a British Army base in the North of Ireland. We had been around the Falls, the Shankill, south Armagh on an educational trip and the Army base was the latest in our stop.
The details aren’t really relevant here but of the many things on that visit that stick in my mind, one is of being in the officers’ mess as a public school educated officer, for laughs, ordered one of the soldiers who was going around serving drinks to dance like a Cossack. Which the young soldier, a Geordie, immediately did.
It was excruciating. It was debasing. It was skin-crawlingly embarrassing to see someone perform like that for their ‘superiors’. It said something about the structure of the Army and the experience of it for working-class kids from British streets and public school kids from British elite training bases.
Something about that came to mind as I watched, not one individual, but the representatives of a country flock to Donald Trump’s plane. He’d been on the telly, he was immensely rich and he’d done us all the service of buying a golf course at a knockdown price, the way venture capitalists patrol the world taking advantage of capitalism’s various collapses, and a nation stopped just short of tucking its forelock.
We haven’t learnt much have we? Even though, ironically enough, around the same time as Donald Trump was arriving, back in America David Drumm, the former CEO of Anglo-Irish Bank was in court dealing with his application for bankruptcy.
Drumm acts as a healthy reminder to us all of the few short years ago when wealth and its high priests, and Drumm was one of the highest, were unquestioningly worshipped in this country.
Now he is in court in America, after leaving behind the huge and society-destroying mess that was his bank, trying to explain away things, such as his wife’s opening of 15 different bank accounts in a short period of time into which he pumped money even though prior to this and throughout their marriage she had never had her own bank account.
Drumm denies that this was a way of hiding money but was because he was worried about his health and the state of his marriage.
Donald Trump told us all that he planned to “turn the Doonbeg golf course into one of the most iconic golf courses in the world”. About a week later he was in Dubai telling them that his golf course there was “going to be the best golf course in the region, in the world”.
The simple truth is that this property developer bought a golf course at a knockdown price and may or may not pump money into it and may or may not create a lot of local employment.
Why though, even after everything that has happened, even after all of the lessons about wealth and the wealthy that the Celtic Tiger taught us and continues to teach us, why do we as a country still feel the need to debase ourselves and act the grateful fools because another wealthy celebrity deigns to visit and needs in doing so his ego flattered. Can’t we just grow up?
