You’re right, minister, middle-class complacency is the way to go

I NEED to testify. I want to recant. I want to tell the minister it’s all that dreadful Fintan O’Toole’s fault.

I promise there'll be no more whingeing from me, no more suffocating dishonesty and self-loathing in the guise of social commentary. I know when I've been well and truly rumbled.

I should have known that when our great and revered Minister for Justice, long may he reign, was going to the MacGill Summer School, that he would bring with him his unbending commitment to justice and truth. It must have been inconvenient for him to have to deal there with the McBrearty family, and, indeed, to admit that justice and truth had been lacking in the State's dealings with that family. But once he had ringingly declared that he wouldn't be bullied by the McBreartys (thereby demonstrating a hitherto unsuspected gift for irony, to add to his many other talents), he set about exposing the evils of left-wing commentary.

He compared a lot of this dreadful left-wing stuff to George Orwell. He said there was a strong element of an Orwellian "left good, right bad" theme to much of what was to be read and heard in some media. "The 'left' is never reactionary; the 'right' always is," he said. "Holding on to the 'left' positions is never 'conservative', challenging them always is."

The great and revered minister said that self-questioning and self-doubt were necessary actors on the social stage. But, and thanks be to God for this, he did expose the whole business of what he called "self-loathing masquerading as moral superiority". And he told his hushed and reverent audience: "I also have a problem with intellectual self-indulgence posing as serious social commentary. I have a problem, too, with the internal anger of those who suffer from middle-class self-loathing being directed against everyone who questions the moral orthodoxy of the politically correct self-appointed lay hierarchy who direct modern Ireland's moral inquisition."

Thank God there's none of that in this newspaper. Fellas like me might like to have an odd tilt at the establishment, but we want to assure the revered minister that we never meant any harm. It's all Fintan O'Toole, your honour. It's really him you should be naming and shaming.

He's the leader of the politically correct hierarchy. He's the one who has led the rest of us down the wrong path, the path of questioning and criticising the infallible decisions made by the minister and his colleagues. Without O'Toole and his small band of followers, there'd be none of this middle-class self-loathing.

I admit it took a while for it to sink in to my thick skull that my silly concerns about the direction of Government policy were no more than intellectual self-indulgence. It's not that long ago that our beloved Taoiseach described people with those kind of concerns as "creeping jesus's". I just dismissed the smear as a political cheap shot. The great and now gone Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy, labelled us all as left-wing pinkos, and it still didn't dawn on me that I was going wrong.

Even the perfectly-formed Minster for Transport, Martin Cullen, had a go a few weeks ago, attacking the tripes out of people who protested against Government projects that were threatening to damage the environment. With a gift for irony almost equal to the great and revered Minster for Justice's, the former Minster for e-voting accused people who delayed such projects of robbing the taxpayer. And still it didn't sink in that the likes of me needed to recant.

But when the great and revered Minister for Justice speaks, he must be listened to. He may occasionally get a few of his facts wrong, like his oft-repeated claim that low tax started the Celtic Tiger, but there can be no denying the essential goodness and wisdom of his position. This is the man, after all, who has pricked the bubble of those who campaign for greater equality within our society. We now know, and thank goodness it has become established Government policy, that a good healthy dollop of inequality is what we all need. And what's more, we know (because the great and revered minister has told us incessantly) that a policy of inequality is entirely compatible with a true definition of republicanism. And that true definition is, of course, the great and revered minister's own.

AND, of course, he must be right when he goes on to say that those of us who sometimes questioned his obsession with low tax rates were nothing more than "moral inquisitors". His triumphant and high-minded assertion that the lowering of capital gains and corporation taxes had actually produced a higher yield is always a great slap in the face to these moral inquisitors who object to lower taxes for richer people. The fact that tax yields always increase in a rapidly-growing economy might be an inconvenient little fact that undermines his position somewhat, but thank God the middle-class self-loathers are usually too polite to mention it.

And although I've never heard them at it myself, I'm sure the minister is on even stronger ground when he criticises the "Irish social moralists who claim to speak with moral authority on economic questions but resolutely refuse to dirty their hands intellectually with base and profane issues such as incentive, enterprise or growth. The factors that create prosperity, and differentiate between the successful, or sluggish or failing economies, are simply beneath their moral radar and intellectual gaze, and are far too tedious and distasteful to warrant their study or understanding."

Quite right too. The likes of me might have gone on bleating about the importance of enterprise and development, but our insistence on linking it to better public services, good quality education, and other namby-pamby concepts like fairness, means that we don't really believe in enterprise at all. As the minister says, we're just knockers. When we're not knocking him personally, we're knocking the economy or the country.

So, no more about crumbling classrooms, or kids going to bed hungry, or the hospitals falling apart. That's just middle-class self-loathing. No more about ministers wasting millions by buying fields for prisons and the like. That's just petty jealousy. No more about cronyism or arrogance or the Government being totally out of touch. That's just middle-class self-indulgence. That might be all right for Fintan O'Toole and his mob. But I'm out of here. I've seen the light.

I hope you're listening, Fintan O'Toole. You and your likes can go on moaning and whingeing about inequality and waste and mismanagement (at least until the net finally closes in on ye). But I know the right way to go from now on. Middle-class complacency. That's what we need, and plenty of it.

And that's what the minister is going to get from me. No more questioning, no more self-doubt, no more of this dreadful knocking. A good old-fashioned respectable blind eye, that's what I'm going to be turning to things from now on. Is that OK, oh great and revered minister?