Dear Santa, please can we have a government? I’m sorry for asking
Obviously, there's as good a chance of getting a proper one by shoving a letter up the chimney as there is by shoving a voting card into a ballot box.
It's just that we haven't tried it yet. It's a method that has worked for the Vatican for centuries, so there must be something to be said for it.
Children, too, know the up-the-chimney method is a tried and tested system that works year after year because they usually get what they ask for.
On the other hand, the ballot box is used about once every five years and it rarely works because we get the same old box of Soldiers of Destiny, with their draftees in the PDs.
We also get surprises we never asked for which are invariably useless and vastly expensive, such as the €50 million electronic non-voting system that is still stored somewhere in its box, and the notorious PPARS that proved to be the best ever Christmas box for computer consultants, but nobody else.
Oh, the list is endless.
Instead of cowboy outfits, there will be huge demand this year on Santa's list for policemen's uniforms, with the promise to be delivered next year by Justice Minister Michael McDowell in the shape of Garda reservists.
It may be an unseasonable thought, but if you want to settle an old score on that neighbour with the barking dog, or the builder you haven't seen for ages, now is the time to start thinking about it.
The gardaí certainly are, and they are worried about it.
The president of the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors Joe Dirwan's immediate reaction to an unpaid posse was that it would become a haven for people attracted to the prospect of giving their neighbours their comeuppance.
He didn't quite put it like that. He just said it would attract people who fancied the idea of having police powers over their neighbours in order to settle old scores. After the last general election, Mr McDowell seemed to tell us a porky about the 2,000 extra gardaí he promised and promptly forgot about, unless they're all on undercover work in Roosky.
He said the economy wasn't great after the general election, so the wealthiest country in Europe, if not in the whole wide world, just couldn't afford them.
Now, according to Joe Dirwan, the justice minister could have them churned out within 24 hours, armed with their power of arrest, like battery hens. Just one day's training and they can be in the front line of law and order giving out parking fines, speeding fines and settling old scores.
Let's face it, there's only one thing that separates the rest of us from gardaí, apart from kiss-o-gram outfits, and that's the power to arrest someone and haul them off to the nearest nick one that's open. Much has been made of the fact that other European countries have a similar police reserve system. So what? I'm sure those countries also have a proper health service, but there's no great rush to provide one here as well.
THE following perennial, has been requested. On September 21, 1897, the New York Sun published an editorial headlined 'Is There a Santa Claus?' Virginia O'Hanlon had written to the editor and asked if the famous old man really existed, for her father told her that if she read it in a newspaper, it must be so.
Leader writer Francis Pharcellus Church was given the job of answering Virginia. Having attacked scepticism, Francis Pharcellus wrote:
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.
"Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We would have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
"Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to watch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Clause, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus.
"The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
"You tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart.
"Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there nothing else real and abiding.
"No, Santa Claus! Thank God he lives, and he lives forever.
"A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."
DURING a Seanad debate on the Government's support for the US war in Iraq, including rendition flights, House leader Mary O'Rourke made one or two very pertinent observations. She said there had been incidents of which we would not be proud as a country.
"The democratic process benefits from people questioning things. We're not cloned Dolly sheep bobbing our heads up and down," she said, which was reassuring in light of the rush to stifle Frank Connolly, who was neither charged with nor convicted of anything, and the Centre for Public Inquiry.
It should be framed and displayed in every ministerial office, from the Taoiseach down.
Maybe it is not extraordinary that her party colleague in the Seanad, Paschal Mooney, said he accepted assurances from the Irish and US governments that Shannon was not being used for rendition flights, until there was evidence to the contrary.
I fail to understand how he imagines he can accept assurances from the our Government because all they have is the word of the US government, which Foreign Affairs Minister Dermot Ahern has accepted unquestioningly from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
I THOUGHT the standards in Time magazine were slipping this year with the inclusion of Bono as one of their Persons of the Year.
I was wrong; the slide started last year when they nominated George Dubya Bush.
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