I should just enjoy the nice thing on holidays instead of using it as a stick to beat Ireland with

THERE comes a time on every holiday — usually about two or three days — and sometimes hours — in, where my wife will have to just issue a gentle warning: “Now Colm. Just be happy for the nice thing that’s here and stop feeling bad because it’s better than Ireland.”

The warning is triggered when I’m in the Old Town of a Continental city, pointing at something that isn’t held in place with bolt-cutter-proof restraints and uttering the phrase: “If that was in Ireland it would be robbed.”

It could be anything — a free newspaper, a flower display, or a four-ton piece of roadside art that contained scrap-able metal.

In Malaga, on holidays last week, the trigger was the sight of unopened bottles of wine placed on tables outside restaurants as an advertisement for what you could drink with your dinner. I couldn’t help myself. The very naivety and faith in human nature that it represented. How that would be punished in Temple Bar by roving gangs of 12- to 18-year-olds I had just dreamt up, off their heads on canal-bank drinking nihilism. “Couldja-magine, what would happen that in ..” I begin before finishing the sentence in my head.

There is another cousin of the ‘Probably Be Robbed’ phrase which relates to a public amenity that is not smothered in Health and Safety: “You couldn’t have that in Ireland because someone would probably fall and cut themselves and then have the hand out. Or else the insurance would be astronomical.”

Ireland’s insurance is indeed astronomical. But, given the fact that companies often make it up as they go along, the insurance here is probably astrological.

However, I don’t actually know what the Continental tradition of claiming compensation is — they could be as litigious as the Irish with the claiming-hand out for every possible scrape. I didn’t look at the stats but you tend not to do due diligence when moaning abroad.

Having slagged the country off, I feel bad though. I’m as patriotic as the next person. I do all the patriotic stuff like shouting at a ‘Generation Emigration’ article if they start slagging off Ireland for not being as good as the Continental city they’re living in.

So I then try to do a sort of running tally of the holiday country versus home to see if actually, it’s not a bad place at all. As well as making excuses for Ireland.

In Spain this runs along the lines of: Yeah well they have bullfighting. At least we don’t have anything like that except maybe for hare coursing and fox hunting and exporting live animals that sometimes die en route. Still bullfighting is worse. And anyway no wonder they’ve lovely marble floored Old Towns. Didn’t they steal an entire mountain of silver off the Incas. And the crowd that colonised them — the Moors — were way smarter than the English and invented maths and shur Henry VIII couldn’t even count his wives.

And the English stole all our timber, otherwise we’d have built nice little towns with narrow streets and courtyards instead of the cattle-mart-towns that we ended up with.

And anyway they don’t have it all sussed. You can’t buy cold milk for the tea ANYWHERE and no one has a kettle and if you wanted a breakfast roll you’d have to go to four different shops to assemble it because the supermarkets are closed on a Sunday and …

This is wasting valuable holiday time. My wife is right. It’s unfair to compare the most picturesque part of a Spanish city to a court report I read once about a bad thing that happened in Ireland and yes, I should just enjoy the nice thing on holidays instead of using it as a stick to beat Ireland with. The bottle of wine would totally be robbed though.