Cormac MacConnell: Legal tender, love me tender, send me home
I was brought to damp, cold miserable Ireland against my will, when I was only a year in circulation, and by God have I suffered since.
Even though I know I was made round, to go round the place, as coins do, it is still the pure truth that I have travelled an extremely difficult road so far.
It is perhaps significant, I suppose, that I entered this bloody republic in the jacket pocket of one of the troika lads who came to your land to save ye all from ruin after the death of the Celtic Tiger, and all the misery and hardship around that business.
My first transaction after that was when the moneyman reluctantly shoved me into a parking meter in Dublin city centre the following day. That meter was freezing, and I have been chilled ever since, frozen and deeply unhappy and abused.
I have been driven to about every county in Ireland for my penance. It has been awful.
I’ve spent time in the trouser pockets of Dublin gangsters, alongside clips of bullets. I have been used to buy drugs by poor addicts that robbed me from the tills of petrol stations.
I had to go out to the deep seas four years ago, with a drunken fisherman based in some wild, cold port, called Killybegs.
I was drenched one Saturday, in a busker’s cap on the pavement in Galway City, and myself and four or five similar siblings from all over Europe have been used thousands of times in bars to buy pints of some sticky black stuff, which I think is called Guinness.
When we come back as change on top of the bar, the drinkers always spill some of that stuff on top of us at the end of the night.
I have been used, again with sundry companions, to buy poitín away out in Connemara at least three times.
I have plumbed all your depths. I was once even lost for a full month in what they call the Members’ Bar in Leinster House. A cleaning lady found me in the end, under the stools. She inserted me into a cold brass box in some chapel on her way home, after she lit a candle to pray she could hold on to her job.
At the other end of what ye call the social scale, I was transported to some place called Cheltenham last year by some real wealthy guy that everybody called JP. I thought I might have a chance to escape home to Spain from there but, no, JP won a pile of paper money that he crushed down on top of me and brought me back to Ireland on a frosty evening.
The closest I ever got to escaping from here was when an American couple had me in their possession, when they were deserting Ireland after three days for sunny Spain.
I was so happy on the way out to Dublin Airport, you wouldn’t believe it.
Sadly, tragically, the taxi driver robbed them blind by driving through every suburb instead of straight to the airport, and they had to use all their coinage, including my poor self of course, to escape from the wastard.
On my travels, I have briefly been possessed by some well-known Irish people.
A fallen idol called Ahern, I think a former leader of your country, used myself and a sibling one morning to buy a newspaper in which he was being bitterly attacked.
A hairy lad called Wallace had me in his pocket when he spent a half-day in jail for invading Shannon Airport.
I was shoved into a parking meter by the current caretaker leader, Kenny, back home in Mayo on a break, but hiding from some class of folk he had called whingers.
What is a whinger? I still don’t know, after all these years of suffering.
Another class of politician called Adams had me in his breast pocket along with a wad of sterling money and some other coins when he crossed the Border up to Belfast lately.
It was uncomfortable to be so close to what felt like a bulletproof vest, and I was delighted when he freed me, to purchase an Easter lily.
The vendor of that brought me down to Croke Park two days later, for some big football game there.
I had been in Croke Park before, of course, because I was the coin tossed into the air by the referee on the day when the team from Dublin won something called the Sam Maguire.
Finally, I am currently in the pocket of some mad old hack called MacConnell, in some dank and flooded region of the West, beside the Shannon.
I heard him saying yesterday that he has no intention of going to Spain anytime soon either, so I hope he frees me very soon.
Shannon Airport is only down the road, and maybe, after all my suffering, I will get back to Spain in the pocket of some tourist before the summer is over.
One circulates in hope...
