Any Other Business | 4 December 2010

What Ireland lacks now are statesmen who can make the case that recovery is possible

The screen at Manchester airport tells me I’m about to board an Aer Lingus flight to Dublin, but there’s a Lufthansa plane at the gate. ‘Blimey,’ I mutter, ‘this bailout’s moving fast.’ I’m looking at the wrong gate, however, and it’s an Aer Lingus stewardess who becomes the first of many people during my 36-hour visit to wish me ‘the best of luck’. Luck looms large in the Irish psyche and it’s what they long for right now — an oil find would help, I hear one passenger remark — plus a bit less attention from world markets and media. For a country whose economy is little bigger than Manchester’s, the glare of global attention is traumatic. The last thing they’ll welcome, I guess, is another doorstepping foreign columnist.

So thank goodness for talkative taxi drivers. The first gives me a vernacular version of Kevin Myers’s recent Spectator rant about the cronyism of the Irish political class.