Bunker mentality behind golfing excursion

NEWTON'S OPTIC:I AM obviously angered and upset by claims that I sold the country out over a golf game with a bank manager, followed by a meal with his business acquaintances.

This outrageous slur portrays me as some sort of lower middle-class provincial buffoon from a 1970s sitcom, desperate to fit in and impress, yet still outwitted by the barely less parochial oafs in my bourgeois social milieu.

It is a wonder I am not also accused of wearing argyle socks and plus-fours, or eating gammon and pineapple washed down with a bottle of Blue Nun. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let me assure you, the plain people of Ireland, that when I sold this country out it was under the most tasteful, sophisticated and contemporary of circumstances.

Yes, a bank manager was involved but he was a special type of bank manager from a special type of bank, and certainly not the type where anyone can just walk in off the street.

Yes, we were also at a golf club but it was not some ghastly small-town course with a bar full of dentists and solicitors, such as you might belong to yourself.

This was the exclusive golf-spa resort of Dreary Glen, with its five-star presidential suite and award-winning Pan-Asian brasserie, where green fees are quite steep enough to deter all but those at my level.

As for the meal, it was not in some common public restaurant, perhaps distinguished only by the presence of a celebrity chef, where anyone might beg for a reservation. We dined in a private room at a boutique hotel like the bon vivantswe are, ordering the finest food and wines with erudite decorum. Indeed, as I politely but firmly requested my third bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape '57 I could see the waiter was impressed, not that impressing a waiter is de rigueur.

My companions on that evening were so much more than yet more bank managers. They were a glittering assemblage of our new creative class, a veritable Algonquin table of the Celtic Tiger in all its fascinating variety. Some had houses in Donnybrook, others had flats in the docks. All their friends had helicopters and one even had his own plane.

Our conversation sparkled with tales of international finance, industry and bricklaying, with only the most discreet mention of selling out after dessert.

So I am most definitely not like a character from a 1970s sitcom, even if certain clichés of that genre have unfortunately echoed through recent allegations. Despite the coincidence of golf clubs, bank managers and dinner parties my lifestyle is in a completely different league to that of, say, Terry and June.

Yet still, for some unfathomable reason, my accusers ask: Is that it? Are these your tawdry dreams of avarice? Were we brought so low by a clique of grasping philistines, mistaking consumption for culture and rapine for respectability, wide-eyed at mundane luxuries and over-awed by executive toys, lacking any academic, artistic or technical accomplishments of their own?

And I then have to ask, did they not hear me the first time? One of the guys those banker guys knew had a plane.