Here we ago again: ‘Look as foolish as you can and call every man sir’

THE then German ambassador to Ireland, Christian Pauls, made the mistake of laughing at our folly when addressing a group of German businessmen in Clontarf Castle more than three years ago, almost exactly a year before the banking crisis in the US became world news.

Ambassador Pauls depicted Ireland as a “coarse” country dominated by avarice. He pulled no punches, providing examples of a small country with a population of four million top-heavy with overpaid ministers, junior ministers and a retinue of others in political life living high on the hog.

The ambassador also spoke of medical professionals who dismissed the €200,000 offered to them to tend patients in public hospitals, as “Mickey Mouse money”. He raised a laugh among the Germans in the audience when he spoke of the vehicular vanity of the Irish, recalling an occasion when he attended a concert performance. A public announcement was made to the effect that a 1993 car was causing an obstruction outside the hall. Nobody left the hall to move it and Herr Pauls’ conclusion was, right or wrong, that we had reached such a level of snobbery that to be associated with a 1993 clunker would mean social death.