WITH what relish did we all sign up for the lynch-mob out to get the Dunnes and not just Ben, but any Dunne we could get our sights on? We all did, myself included. We wanted to prove that the Dunne family was the worst, the most corrupt, the most unprincipled, the most vulgar, the most worthless tribe in Ireland.
And now, as the first flush of the scandal has passed and chat we are in the middle of a grave scandal is indeed beyond question - we might just ask: why are we so eager to destroy the Dunnes?
To my knowledge, I have never met a Dunne, good, bad or indifferent. On the face of it, I should have no feelings about them all - but I recognise a visceral dislike for them. And this is absurd, but it is not unique. it is general throughout Irish life, especially amongst the bien-pensant Marksandsparxists who have been chortling hugely that the mighty have fallen so spectacularly.
If the Weston family who own Quinnsworth had come such a cropper, we would not be beside ourselves with mirth and engaging in smug orgies of Schadenfreude. We reserve our dislike and disdain for a successful Irish family, without whom the foreign-owned Quinnsworth would have almost a total supermarket monopoly.
This is odd, but it is not unusual. It belongs to a tradition of begrudgery which we like to think is over - but it clearly isn't. We wanted to hear the worst about the Dunnes; we wanted them to be shown to be flawed; we wanted the taint of allegation to spread to Margaret Heffernan; and again, we must ask, why?
Poolside tan
No doubt her perpetual poolside tan and the lingering impression of a neck weighed down by gold is one reason why so many people wish her ill. Yet she is not the first millionairess whose taste is different from our own.
Spend an afternoon on the Cap d'Antibes, and you will see 1,000 women like her. They are not likely to be the butt of scorn and envy and rank dislike by the French people, nor by us. But Margaret Heffernan we dislike because she is Irish and is successful and is untransformed into something she is not - one of the knowing and sophisticated creatures who set the style of Dublin society.
To her credit, she remains what she wants to be. She has not tried, and does not try, to curry favour with what passes for the intelligentsia in Irish life.
She does not appear at first nights at the theatre. She does not make herself out to be a patron of the arts. She does not organise skiing parties to Zermatt, or wherever is fashionable this year. She is what she is - a supermarket tycoon who engages in no pretension and who has no public-relations consultant advising her on her dress or when and where she should make her public appearances and, by God, we hate her for her honesty.
it would be a fool who would deny the rottenness that the recent scandal has uncovered, and it would be a complete and utter fool who could find the welcome in Thurles given to the returning Michael Lowry anything other than thoroughly un-edifying. That particular evening was a sobering reminder of the Come-on-ya-boy-yah! idiocy which still exists in Irish life.
But acknowledging that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark does not mean that we should wish to see Denmark, or even Dunnes Stores, destroyed. Yet that is somehow on people's unspoken and, perhaps, even undiscovered agendas.
Public ruin
Again. why? Where would we be without Dunnes Stores? It is true that the Dunne family is unlikely to be driven by altruistic motives, but who in commercial life is? Thousands of people are employed by Dunnes Stores and it could be a national calamity if Dunnes was to go out of business. Am I alone in detecting a widespread, subliminal desire to see the entire Dunne family brought to public ruin and humiliation?
The reason for this is that they did not conform with our expectations of how second-generation money should behave. They did not buy into Enniskerry or Dalkey. They did not conceal their money, yet nor did they feign elegance. There was a frank vulgarity which we found risible and which offended our profoundly snobbish and extremely elaborate social codes.
We know how money should behave - preferably it should distance itself from the squalid business of making more money. Or, if it were to continue to make money, it should set itself up in lofty exile in Monte Carlo, where it would be beyond the scope of our contempt.
The Dunnes didn't do that. They ran their supermarkets, stayed in Ireland and remained fiercely and ferociously unfashionable.
What we resented most about them was their rejection of the social norms of indolent elegance which we expect from the rich. We wanted idle parasites with gracious manners and elegance and wit; and then we could have forgiven them anything.
Inexcusable degree
But the Dunnes did not conform with our expectations, and we hated them for it - and to a quite inexcusable degree. Even the appalling personal tragedies which have befallen the family do not seem to lighten the disdain people feel for them.
Anybody else who has suffered as much as Margaret Heffernan - she has lost two siblings in quite dreadful circumstances - would normally be the subject of much pity, as, for example, the family of the current US Ambassador rightly is. But no pity is directed at Margaret Heffernan or her family; she has not the Kennedy charm nor the Kennedy smile.
In Irish life, charm is all and leisured charm opens all doors and enchants all hearts.
Charm is not a word which springs to mind with the Dunnes. They are a mercantile family who will never make merchant princes. They are what they are and that is plain - and that plainness is touched with more than a hint of what many of us regard as vulgarity.
Does that matter? No. Let us by all means get to the heart of the money-scandal, but let us not judge the Dunne family by the values of a meretricious snobbery passing for sophistication, for that is no more than begrudgery by another name.
Few people have come out well of the enfolding scandal, least of all the nudging, smirking Marksandsparxists of the chattering classes.