Where is the principled McDowell from the summer of 1994?

IN the good old days, there was always one thing on which you could rely. It was up there with the soothing quality of Barry’s Tea, the freshness of Brennan’s Bread, the reliability of Dunnes Stores prices.

Whenever there was a crisis in standards, the moral and intellectual superiority of our now Tánaiste, Michael McDowell, was guaranteed to come to the rescue.

It was never more evident than in the summer of 1994, when Ireland faced a standards crisis over the issue of passports to a wealthy family. Younger readers may not remember that Ireland operated a scheme then, whereby wealthy people from abroad could buy Irish citizenship by simply “making an investment” in an Irish company. We’ve tightened things up a lot since then, thank goodness, especially since we began to operate under the moral guidance of the Tánaiste. It’s certainly not easy to get hold of Irish citizenship these days — why, you can’t even become a citizen if you were born here nowadays, especially if your parents are those foreign types.