Note the story of the unloved £60 million

WITH respect to the authors of English compositions in the fourth classes of national schools all over the country, we felt that hoary old essay title, ‘The Story Of A Pound’, outlining the adventures of a pound note, could do with updating.

Hence the rather strange title to this week’s column.

You can call off the search and get those sniffer dogs back into the kennel. Bring the helicopters with the searchlights back to base and get ready to celebrate. Yours truly, the most valuable £60 million in the Irish Exchequer, was found and rescued by last Wednesday’s Budget! Hurrah!

If you can remember back a few short years, nobody liked me. Everyone thought I was the root of all evil in Irish society. The rise of Westlife and the gradual disappearance of your friendly rural post office, those were all my fault. I was everyone’s least favourite bag of fivers, and all because I had been allocated to the GAA and Croke Park.

I didn’t want to go there but I had no choice. I trudged slowly down Jones Road rather than being used for something useful, like buying voting machines, and I landed into a terrible place. I was kept in a big dungeon in Croke Park and every now and again I was brought out by the evil geniuses in the offices there. They would make me dance and sing and torment the poor rugby and soccer fans crying out for kidney transplants and viable public transport systems in the capital.

Then I would be locked back in the dungeon, while all over Ireland people wept and tore at their clothes, saying: “Oh where will we find the £60 million that will take us away from the greatest period of prosperity in the country’s history and...er...improve things?”

Sometimes I would look out of the windows in the dungeon and wonder if I would ever be used for good instead of being invested in a modern stadium used by hundreds of thousands of people every year. It felt like such a waste.

I wasn’t forgotten, though. People wrote and spoke about me all the time, because they knew I was being held against my will, and that helped me. The fact that I wasn’t forgotten kept me going.

Then I had a ray of hope. I was transformed, as though a fairy godmother flew through the bars of my dungeon and hit me a slap of her magic wand.

Abracadabra! Suddenly I wasn’t the £60 million nobody loved, because my fairy godmother had magically transformed me into €76 million for the redevelopment of another old stadium, Lansdowne Road!

Everything changed — I wasn’t being used to refurbish some place that would only be used by selfish people; I was going to clean up a stadium that would be open to all sports, and everyone would be happy.

But when I was set free, I became confused. Why was nobody talking about me? Why was my old home, Croke Park, suddenly everyone’s favourite place? I realised that people felt differently about Croker because other sports were welcome there. And then, to confuse everything further, my new home wasn’t going to let in any sports apart from the same old rugby and soccer! What was going on?

Oh, my head hurt and I felt neglected. I thought that once I became good money that everyone would cheer and be my friend. But nobody seemed to notice that I was moving house. I wondered why everybody had been shouting when I lived in Croke Park but didn’t want to say anything when I went to live in Lansdowne Road. When I was a prisoner everyone spoke about me but now it was as if I didn’t exist.

Could it be that I was just a handy reason for commentators to complain about the evil geniuses up in Croke Park — that that was the reason nobody wanted to celebrate my arrival in Lansdowne?

I felt sad, but I also felt grown up. This is what it’s like to be an adult, I thought. This is what it means to be part of the real world.

Just as I had those grown-up thoughts I felt someone tugging at my sleeve. I looked down and it was a new friend I had made.

“Hello,” said my new little friend, looking up at me with an innocent smile. “I’m the €30m to be spent on the first phase of the Sports Campus at Abbotstown. But I don’t know what I’m doing or where to go. Can you help me, please?”

I smiled: “You’re on your own, bud. It’s every man for himself in this racket.”

And I lived happily ever after.

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