Minister’s use of garlic is by no means cause for a witch-hunt

WE WON’T start with the garlic.

Let’s take an oblique route to David McWilliams’ astonishing revelations about Brian Lenihan’s visit to the McWilliams’ home. Let’s go via Lynn Barber’s memoir, An Education. This is the one containing an account of Barber, at 16, having an affair with a much older guy who turned out to be a conman. It’s also the one that announces Barber slept with 50 men in a couple of years, apparently on the theory it was better to find out whether a man was good in bed before you wasted time getting to know him.

In due course, Barber married a good man and stayed married to him until his death did them part. In the middle of her narrative of their life together, she mentions a dinner party at which one of the guests overturns and breaks a vase. Not to worry, Barber says. Always hated that vase anyway. At which point another guest huffily points out that the vase had been a gift from her to Barber. Lynn Barber may in fact have loved the vase before it was smashed. But she did what most people do. She said whatever she figured would make the other person – in this case the vase-smasher – feel better.

So the Minister for Finance, under extreme pressure at the time and eager to explore the possibilities of exploiting McWilliams’ genius for the national good, may have indicated that not everybody working in the Department of Finance was on top of the crisis. Contrariwise, he may not have said anything like that. His account of the encounter doesn’t match that of his host that night. But if he did, it’s hardly shock/horror stuff.

Nor is the allegation that his tie was undone and his suit somewhat squashy. In fact, if you think about it, undone ties and a somewhat squash suit make sense, at the end of a working day in the middle of a meltdown. The alternative was that before he arrived at the McWilliams’ abode, Brian Lenihan would have had his garda driver take him home, where he would have showered, shaved and dressed in pristine gear for the late night visit. Which would have established him as somewhere between Beau Brummel and barking mad.

The fact that he carried on his person a clove of garlic is the nub of the issue. It is also what will give Brian Lenihan the continuing opportunity to be humorously self-deprecatory when he’s making speeches, for months to come.

Knowing about Brian’s clove of garlic while he’s still Minister for Finance is an aspect of the phenomenal speeding up of communications in recent times. We knew that Richard Nixon popped tranquillisers only after he was dead. It was not clear to Britons during the Second World War that Winston Churchill, their Prime Minister, was a functioning alcoholic who never willingly drew a sober breath. Nor did Americans know at the time about the amphetamine injections provided to President Kennedy by Camelot’s Dr Feelgood. During their working lives, they conveyed the impression of coping with stress by sheer force of will, and, as a result, the public built up the notion that this is how it should be done.

In real life, of course, as opposed to public life, which is not real at all, people have weird and wonderful ways of coping with stress, most of them unhealthy and some of them pretty disgusting. Food, drugs and sex come top of the possibilities, and the fact that our maternity hospitals are currently bursting at the seams suggests that the last of those three is holding its own as a way of dealing with the recession.

Just in case someone ever decides to do a David McWilliams on me, I figure it’s best to get out there first with a full confession. Terror, desolation and despair should evoke a better response than calorie-consumption, I know. One should become a pale wraith, gazing through a rain-stained window or walking a windswept beach. Therein would lie glamour and mystery. But chocolate or chips are a faster fix. Chocolate has some kind of tranquilliser in it, which is the nearest I can come to justifying theft of my offspring’s sweets when he was but a toddler, and, even worse, scavenging the outside off the Turkish Delight favoured by the man in my life, leaving little naked slimy purple pillows in the wrapper.

THE single most disgusting aspect of calm-by-chocolate is that if done in the car, (which is probably frowned on by RSA chairman Gay Byrne) bits of the stuff go everywhere, so not only are your own shirt and suit spattered with brown stains, but anybody unwise enough to take a lift from you in the following week ends up with gruesome and deeply suspect deposits on the seat of their trousers. If you’re a decent person, you tell them about these stains. But if you’re the kind of lowlife who copes with crisis by stealing and scoffing chocolate belonging to family members, are you going to be decent enough to confess to soiling other people’s pants? Of course not. You feel rotten for letting them go off looking as if they’ve made a profound social error. But more chocolate eases the guilt.

Chocolate, particularly if stolen, is reasonably cheap, as a stress-buster. The more costly drugs route to stress management is what keeps the liquor and tobacco industries thriving and the nation on its uppers coping with the resultant morbidity and mortality. Included are prescriptions to dampen anxiety, illegal substances to heighten performance, and perfectly legal over-the-counter stuff, including Solpadeine, to which one public representative in the past was so addicted that they would wake up in the night to take their three-hourly fix.

Against that “normal” pattern of ingesting stuff to help crisis coping skills, carrying a clove of garlic for personal consumption is a cost-effective, natural, non-addictive, low calorie and evidence-based alternative. Garlic is light and cheap and neatly compartmentalised. You can – and Brian Lenihan apparently does – peel it without recourse to mechanical contrivances. It has the added advantage of deterring those political groupies who turn up at public events and want to be seen to hug the minister. (If you’re hugging a raw garlic eater, timing is of the essence. You have to take a huge breath, hold on to it, approach the person, embrace them and retreat to a safe distance while slowly exhaling.) The evidence for garlic as a contributor to health is substantial. It’s an antioxidant, particularly when aged a bit. It’s also a natural antibiotic, albeit somewhat non-specific in its hunting down of germs. There is some evidence to suggest it reduces bad cholesterol. It repels mosquitoes, which, given the northern flight of mosquitoes due to climate change, will become increasingly relevant in future.

Bottom line? Nothing wrong with a minister carrying garlic for his own consumption.

The purpose of sharing the information, on the other hand, is a mystery to be addressed on another day.