DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I MET A BANKER on the Shannon one time. I was in my little boat. He was floating past in a cruiser the size of a small hotel, all glass and white plastic. He was pot-bellied, tanned, with greying hair on his tummy and chest. He wore swimming trunks, and held a glass of wine in his hand, writes MICHAEL HARDING

My own vessel was the size of a domestic jacuzzi, with an outboard motor. He waved at me, elegantly, from the roof of his floating hotel, as if acknowledging a native.

Perhaps I should have stripped off and dived into the waters, with a knife in my mouth, and then turned up on the chrome ladder of his floating space shuttle, with a few fresh fish.

It wasn’t difficult to figure out he was a banker. He admitted the fact, on the quay in Dromad Harbour, later that day.

I said, “That’s a great evening!” He agreed.

“Do you live locally?” he inquired.

I confessed that I lived in Co Leitrim. He grimaced; I think he pitied me. So I asked him where he was from. He just said he was on holidays.

“You must have a good job, to be floating up the Shannon in that bus,” I suggested.

“I’m in the banking sector,” he muttered, and squinted, as if the setting sun was hurting his face.

Then he pointed at a smoking barbecue on the far quay, where a woman was frying large lumps of animal flesh, and he said, “I better get back to the grub.”

Emma was the name of the little tub that my beloved and I messed about in, on the shores of the Shannon, supposing happiness to be a natural condition.

Sometimes we moored at an island in Lough Allen where two elderly sisters used to live, many decades ago, in a bushy wilderness. The house lies in ruins, and at the shoreline there are fragments of a giant bell, that once summoned the boatman from the mainland, when the ladies wanted to go shopping in Drumshanbo.

Sometimes we went up the Balinamore Canal to the river Erne, where the Hare Krishna Community owned an island. I saw them once shovelling sand into a boat. They were building a new temple. They chanted Hare Krishna as they shovelled the sand from the quay to the boat and a few local farmers watched in quiet amazement.

I was so fond of Ireland’s hidden waterways, that when I went to work with Travellers in Tullamore one winter I rented a barge on the canal, and brought the wife, the child and the cat.

One night, we were in bed, listening to lapping water, and the cat was plodding about uneasily above us on the roof.

A sudden plop told us she was in the water. We jumped out and got torches and stood on the deck and to our amazement the cat swam around the barge and onto the bank.

She was like a wet bag of bones. And though we towelled her dry and put her in a warm basket, and fed her the best of food for two days, she nonetheless had made up her mind. On Saturday evening she devoured an enormous plate of KiteKat, and then headed out the door and onto dry land. She walked down the path without turning her head, and we never saw her again.

We didn’t feel bad. In those days we considered that even a cat who moved from Leitrim to the Midlands was going up in the world.

I was in Leitrim last week, talking to a long-haired artist, who told me, through a haze of marijuana smoke that Ireland’s present misfortunes were due to the decision to put a road through Tara.

“That’s when all this trouble began,” he said.

“But surely,” I said, “the bankers are the ones responsible for our present economic misfortune?” He said, “Look man, bankers are just lonely men in suits. Sad creeps who didn’t find enough love in life so they turned to money.”

“Just like you,” he added, “You weren’t satisfied with Leitrim. You had to run after the tail of the Celtic Tiger in Mullingar; and now look at you! Stuck in some housing estate, where kids throw snowballs at your jeep.” “Bankers,” he said, “They’re in your head, man! Let them go! It’s your own greed is the problem.”

mharding@irishtimes.com