Kevin Myers: Reality is indeed stranger than the maddest fiction
Thursday November 26 2009
Alice was looking pale and sullen and her cucumber sandwiches lay uneaten before her.
"Alice," declared the Mad Hatter. "You are sulking. You are remote. I do not like a display of either. Please be a good little girl by being a good little girl again."
"Off with her head," said the Queen. "Pass the honey please, Alice."
"Shan't," said Alice. "I'm on strike."
The March Hare's ears shot up. The dormouse fell over. The King sighed. The Duchess shed a tear. "Why are you on strike?" asked the White Queen sternly.
"Because no one will believe me any more. Once upon a time, that line from 'Through the Looking Glass', was funny and amazing, really rather clever, the one that went: 'Why, sometimes I've believed six impossible things before breakfast'. And everyone laughed and fell about the place and said how ridiculous it was."
She threw down the newspaper. "They can't any more. Anything's believable. Anything! Just look at the stories for a single morning!"
And Alice's companions gazed at the newspaper as it lay before them, and it did indeed seem that all their adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass were tame affairs indeed, compared to an average day in Ireland.
The Mad Hatter perused one story thoughtfully before speaking.
"They've had 12 winters of heavy rains and high winds unprecedented in history. Two provinces are now under water. The Republic's second city is now twinned with Atlantis. Ennis would by this time have been renamed Vennis, only they couldn't find it. And I see here that the Minister of State for the Office of Public Works announced on Tuesday, with much of the island now a seaweed farm, that the Government would shortly tender for a 'strategic review of the costs and benefits of a national flood warning system'."
"A strategic review of the costs and benefits of a national flood warning system, and all for the very first time", intoned the March Hare, plucking a trout from behind an ear. "Quite. I understand the delay. For up until recently, Ireland has been running Chad a close second for being the driest country in the world."
"Off with his head," said the White Queen, who hated sarcasm of any kind. Alice filled the ensuing silence with a verse.
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking with their daughter
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of water
"If our TDs were wont to please
"And mopped for half a year
"Do you suppose," the Walrus said,
"That they could get Cork clear?"
"I doubt it," sobbed the Carpenter,
Before drowning in Dunleer.
Alice stamped her foot. "It's not just the floods," she protested. "The only people with guaranteed employment and pensions in the entire Republic are in the public service. And they all went on strike on Tuesday."
'The whole caboodle. And on that very same day, there occurred the largest-ever cross-border shopping bonanza in history," observed the King.
"A pure coincidence, of course."
"All the schools closed too. Every single one, so that the few parents who still had jobs working in the private sector had to arrange minders for their children," said the dormouse, suddenly waking up. "Or not go to work, like me."
"And look!" said Walrus. "Even the staff members of the Department of Foreign Affairs, who have tax-free allowances for living abroad, picketed their own diplomatic offices in London and Brussels. These are the diplomats who represent Ireland, remember!"
"Do none of these strikers remember the 1980s?" asked Alice crossly.
"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," declared a newcomer at the table.
"Who are you?" asked the Queen, testily.
"Tweedlsiptu," he said. "You see, the kind of memory we need today is not the reactionary kind that looks to the past, but a socialist one that creates the perfect future, in which everyone belongs to a unionised public service, there is no private sector with horrid profit-making companies like Ryanair, and everything is run from Liberty Hall and from government offices."
"You see?" said Alice despairingly. "How can I compete with madness like this?"
But the truth was that she really couldn't.
So as the waters rose, Alice sent out for Lewis Carroll to write a new book about her Irish adventures, to be called 'Alice in Blunderland'. But it was a commercial disaster, because no one outside the Republic of Direland could believe any of it, while no one living in the Republic of Direland could possibly afford to buy it.
And so they all lived crappily ever after.
Abroad, mostly.
kmyers@independent.ie
- Kevin Myers
Irish Independent
