1989, Communism rules from the Baltic to the Barents, and Ireland's national debt is greater than Poland's. Moreover, we have just won the Jules Rimet Cup for running The Most Risible Economy in the World for the third time, and accordingly, keep it, writes Kevin Myers.
At which point we decided we were tired of being compared unfavourably with Chad and Niger and other bits of desert with gaudy flags, a couple of sleeping sentries and a lot of flies that called themselves countries. We decided to pull up our socks. And just about the same time, someone in the Law Reform Commission spotted a serious loophole in our commercial tenancy laws, which allowed a tenant in a State property to buy it for just 15 times the annual rent.
But the Government did not close the loophole, which maybe made sense back in 1989, because who would want to buy property in Ireland, ha ha ha? But three years later, when the economy was visibly rising, the commission once again pointed out the perils implicit in the loophole. But again, nothing was done.
A dozen years later - a long time: as much as elapsed between Hitler's accession to power and the arrival of Soviet tanks at the Reichstag - the loophole is still open, and because of it, South Wharf plc might possibly buy a tract of State land actually worth €300 million for two conkers, a dead mouse and a furry gobstopper.
And at this point, we might hear the usual refrain: Just think about how many hospitals we could build for the lost money! Think of the chemotherapy and radiotherapy centres! Think of the maternity hospitals! In the Department of Health, the refrain is: Just think of the extra, index-linked civil servants' pensions we could have! Actually, there's no evidence whatsoever that the State would use the proceeds from a proper commercial sale of the South Wharf site any more sensibly than it spends any of its money. The State which allowed such a ruinous loophole to remain open is hardly likely overnight to mend its ways in other areas. Indeed, arguments about the good that the lost money could do the health service not merely miss the point: they confound the real truth, which is that we have no health service.
Instead, we have a Great Barrier Reef of short-term bureaucratic decisions and lazy, half-witted, and immoral election-winning health policies that have cumulatively gathered on one another over the decades. The result is a great sub-continent of calcareous incompetence, swarming with strange illogical life-forms unknown to any other modern civilisation.
Take dentistry. The extraction of a wisdom tooth can be charged to the VHI, but not the extraction of any other tooth. The cost of filling a nerve cavity during root canal treatment is tax-deductible, but the cost of filling a tooth cavity is not. The cost of capping a tooth is tax-deductible, but the cost of replacing it with a denture is not. Orthodontistry on a child's front teeth is free, but not on the back teeth.
What is this but, yet again, evidence of the Great Carnivorous White Slug of State ineptitude, the only large animal which can survive and prosper on the vast reef of policy-by-accident, and at a truly stunning cost to the taxpayers. We could - and perhaps should - have put Dalkey on the moon for the money we have spent on health; and what have we got for the Golconda thus squandered? Why, some cretinous dolt sitting in an office in Dublin deciding that extracting wisdoms is VHI-chargeable, but not bicuspids, and filling a root canal cavity is tax-deductible but filling a tooth cavity is not. (His drooling cousin down the corridor is the lad who never got round to closing the commercial tenancy loophole.)
And teeth are just a tiny corner of this vast continent of Procrustean coral, the greatest scandal in Irish life. Firstly the State, with a perfectly murderous piety, claims an effective legal monopoly over health care, and thereby the supervision of the most critical and dangerous moments in a person's life. And then it proceeds to mismanage everything, from top to bottom, not just once, but systematically, and repeatedly, for decade after decade.
Stranded on those reefs of ineptitude and banks of fiscal incompetence, people are dying, prematurely, in needless agony, in hospital linen cupboards. Yet far from the existence of this monstrous monopoly enraging the electorate into a limestone-smashing frenzy, just about the only political debate about it is about how much larger the monopoly should be, and how much more money should be pumped into it to allow even larger numbers of people to have free access to it, to clog its corridors and lengthen its forlorn, purposeless queues.
Unless stopped, this pathologically dysfunctional monolith will continue to grow until, finally and inevitably, it collapses in ruins under the combined weight of bureaucratic ineptitude and the imbecilic expectations of a medico-illiterate public.
This column opened in 1989, when the State decided to reduce its role in the economy, to cut taxes, and to let private enterprise prosper. The result was the greatest economic miracle in European history. So the real lesson from these 16 years is that, though Irish people are economically innovative and intelligent, the Irish State is not. Far from doing things well, it does them appallingly.
The solution to our health crisis is straightforward. Get the State out of the health business. Now. Sell our hospitals. The lot. Privatise medicine.
Give free health care to children and the chronically ill, but that's it.
Simple.