Hogarth recognised us for what we are ... venal and easily bribed

ONE of the funniest things about the Siteserv kerfuffle is the public indignation that the votes of shareholders in a banjaxed, bust company had to be ‘bought’ for €5m, before its sale could proceed. Imagine that; buying votes! The very thought.

There may be something smelly beneath Siteserv, but banding together, refusing to move on, extracting every last penny from an importuned State sounds more like business as usual than a national crime.

If it is a crime, I have a solution to the incarceration problem. It was beloved by respectable people in Dublin to say that ‘they’ should all be shipped out to Spike Island.

The ‘they’ in question were the disreputable and the gurriers. Spike Island, of course, had particular advantages. Firstly, it was in Cork Harbour, not Dublin Bay.

Secondly, it was an offshore island, and, thirdly, its unfortunate name conjured up images of an especially gruesome form of incarnation that gave smug comfort to the respectable.

‘Spike Island’ implied that whips and chains, and more severe sorts of corporal punishments, were regularly applied. All the better to punish those miscreants.

No, in the ‘New Ireland’, where selling votes and extracting ill-gotten gains as their price is a crime, so few will be innocent that extraordinary arrangements will have to be made.

My suggestion is that Spike Island be turned into luxury, five-star-plus villa accommodation for the very, very few who have never sold their vote. Cork County Council have already taken over the facility from the prison service, and are doing wonderful things there.

But now it’s needed for something more important, and more urgent: to house the innocent. The unblemished deserve only the best. So no expense should be spared.

The rest of us, who have been selling our votes, must remain marooned together on the larger island called Éire, or the bit of it to which we have title.

We will continue Animal Farm-like to gouge each other, and live in a manner utterly inimical to morality.

The joke is that Spike Island will remain uninhabited, and we won’t notice the difference in our own circumstances. Having learnt nothing and forgotten nothing, we will go on as before.

In the immediate aftermath of yesterday’s spring statement and last weekend’s Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis, you could be forgiven for thinking that modern Ireland was a scene in one of William Hogarth’s Humours of an Election series of four great paintings.

Very few of Ireland’s modern political scientists, lacking Hogarth’s insight into man’s fallen nature, come close to his acuity. The four 18th-century paintings are masterpieces of art and ribald satire.

The particular election was in Oxfordshire, in 1754, a seat that had been held by the ‘old-interest’ of the Tories since 1710 and was being contested by the ‘new-interest’ of the Whigs.

Even by the standards of the time, which were notoriously louche, that election scandalised with its levels of bribery.

The paintings were title ‘An Election Entertainment’, ‘Canvassing for Votes’, The Polling’ and ‘Chairing the Member’, and the last of the four will be immediately recognisable to anyone who has ever attended a modern Irish election count.

Delightful scenes in the other three paintings include a mayor collapsed drunk after feasting on oysters and an election agent struck by a brick. Public money, in the form of gold coins, is wildly cast about.

Hogarth wickedly suggests that the Whigs, in government, were bribing not-so-respectable taxpayers with their own money. Perish the thought.

Finally, even the dying are brought to vote, before the successful Tory is hoisted aloft and the delightful debauchery continues.

Hogarth’s paintings may be more than 250 years old, but they are strikingly fresh as a metaphor for the days in which we live.

They were painted both to amuse and appal, and they succeed in both. The irony, however, is intended.

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Those who are frequently most appalled are the tight-lipped, censorious, self-righteous, who have their own snouts deepest in the public trough. It is their sense of entitlement that obscures their own guzzling from themselves.

Our own sense of entitlement has been played on expertly, and to the full, over the past few days. We are predictably falling for it.

We are entitled to pay increases, reduced pension levies and, most importantly, there is always somebody else who should pay.

More mortgage interest relief, a special savings scheme for house-buyers, discounted DIRT tax for the same group, and the list goes on.

All of these are, in one way or another, subsidies from some taxpayers to others.

Those paying include people who can’t afford to save for a house and part of the reason they can’t is because their taxes are so high.

It is not just the unfairness of these subsidy schemes that is blatant. It is that they are illogical. Every State subsidy is intrinsically factored into the selling price by the producer of goods or services in question.

So, just as the previously ridiculous €3,300 subsidy for first-time buyers was abolished on the basis that it was a direct transfer of taxpayers’ money from Government to builders — which did nothing for affordability or first-time buyers — all these new or promised schemes are variations of the same.

One of the benefits of the bust was that a lot of these inflationary subsidies were abolished.

It is hard to fathom that a bereavement grant of €850 was paid as a PRSI benefit until 2013. It operated simply as a subsidy to undertakers who positioned their prices accordingly.

And so it goes on. Except it is now gathering momentum again. And we are lapping it up. We hardly have the first teaspoon of gravy on our lips again and it is dribbling down our chin as we reach for more.

Buying votes indeed; the shame.

What yesterday’s great loosening of the financial undergarments, by Finance Minister Michael Noonan and Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin, signifies is that we are now officially back to the future.

Fianna Fáil feel licensed to fudge, as their leader Micheál Martin did on radio last Sunday, when asked if public sector pay increases should be linked to productivity. You are not being bribed with your own money, if you have to do anything for it.

And the so-called establishment parties are in the halfpenny place compared to Sinn Féin, Anti-Austerity Alliance, and assorted others. Of course, it’s not their fault. It’s ours. Again, we are getting what we want.

Again, we will not be satisfied when we get it. There will be the mother of all blame games acted out when it goes wrong. But, in the meantime, enjoy. It is a peculiar pleasure indeed that combines the gratification of our own illicit gain with the prurient opprobrium of others — peculiarly Irish that is.

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