An Irish miracle: the buck stops nowhere

OH, children, you should have lived in those days. I am an old man now, and my memory is not what it used to be, but I can see it - all just like it was last Tuesday - that great day when we here, right here in our own little country, found the Holy Grail that had eluded scientists for so long. It was so long ago that that old 2-D film that was on Channel 157 at one o'clock the other night, Michael Collins, was just out then, and everybody was talking about it.

But long ago as it was, could anyone who was there ever forget the time we found the secret of perpetual motion? Of course, you young ones nowadays take perpetual motion for granted, but back then we never even thought it was possible until Cromien and Molloy - yes, the same ones that are shown in the holo statue in O'Connell Street - showed how it could happen.

You know how penicillin was discovered by accident? Well the same thing happened with perpetual motion. It was pure chance that Cromien and Molloy discovered that there is a buck that stops nowhere.

It was staring us in the face, of course, but up till then nobody had really copped on to the way that the buck passes from desk to desk, never landing, always in the air, defying the laws of thermodynamics and of gravity.

We knew about boomerangs, and the way they travel a long way just to end up back in your hand. We knew about frisbees and the way they were always spinning from hand to hand, no sooner touching one but they were off again towards another.

We knew the transporter from Slar Trek where things would dissolve, disappear and instantly reappear somewhere else altogether. But we never realised that the buck was better than the three of them put together.

Where would we be now, if Cromien and Molloy had not been asked to find out how the decision to delist a judge of the Special Criminal Court had slipped through everybody's fingers?

That's how they noticed the great properties of the buck. It arises from the Cabinet table, and spins its way into the Minister's private office. It divides itself into five copies, and they swoop in graceful formation towards the Secretary, the programme manager, and three officials in the courts division.

One of them somersaults towards the desk of a principal officer but then glides beautifully towards a more junior official. Here, it gently dissolves into the realms of pure, abstract possibility, hovering invisibly around three notional centres of responsibility.

BUT it has not stopped moving. It reconstitutes itself in the Attorney General's office and flies back to the Department of Just ice, back to the Minister's private secretary.

Surely now, it must have exhausted the kinetic energy on which it runs? Surely it will give a last slow sigh and flop resignedly on the desk? But from some unknown source the buck gathers new strength. Up she rises, away to flaunt herself before an assistant principal in the courts division, to wink at an acting higher executive officer, to land in the lap of the Minister, to dance on the Cabinet table, to dangle before the Dail, to mock an official inquiry, slip sliding away, so marvellously elusive that awestruck onlookers have to ask themselves: "Was it all a dream? Was there ever really a buck at all?

Now one of the things that confused everybody at the time was that there was a lot of talk just then about a man called Albert. You see Albert, when he was Taoiseach, had a thing he liked to say: "The buck stops here." He said it all the time, and some people thought he must be right, that the buck really did stop whenever a Minister or a Taoiseach held up a hand.

But some people in the Civil Service continued to believe that the buck was in perpetual motion - even in Albert's time. These civil servants had long memories and reckoned that if their political masters could get away with passing the buck, then so could they.

BUT Cromien and Molloy discovered that this could not be true because civil servants had no memories at all. Do you know that story One Hundred Years of Solitude that we read at bedtime, where everybody loses their memory and they have to put a sign saying "Cow" on the cow and one saying "Bucket" on the bucket? Well, believe it or not, it was the same thing in the Department of Justice in those days.

As soon as you walked into the place you would see the signs saying "Table", "Chair", "Door", because the poor creatures could remember nothing. Even the Minister had to wear a sign on her back saying "Minister", but it was no use because no one could remember what the word meant.

A judge sent in a letter, but just six weeks later, nobody could remember ever seeing it. Two copies of the Cabinet decision were passed on by senior officials to somebody else but they could not remember who the somebodies were. Nor could anybody remember receiving them.

The good thing about this amnesia, though, was that it stopped anyone from worrying about whether it was a good idea to have the security of the State in the hands of people who could not remember the events of the previous month. For a month later, this lapse of memory had itself been forgotten.

When they realised that the refusal of the buck to stop anywhere had nothing to do with the long memories of civil servants, Cromien and Molloy had hit on the secret of perpetual motion. They had grasped the fact that the buck would go on forever and ever unless someone went to great pains to stop it - and who would ever want to do that?

After that, the engineers and the scientists came in and developed the power stations that could harness the infinite energy of the passing buck.

A few years later Sellafield and Chernobyl and all the dirty power stations everywhere were closed down. The new clean, green world that you take for granted was born. And it was then that Bord Failte dropped the shamrock as a symbol of Ireland and replaced it with image that we still have today, the male deer with wings stretched out in joyous motion - our own dear flying buck.