Irish victim mentality of the powerful is absurd

Towards the end of the last century, or to put it more plainly, shortly before Christmas, I had a letter from Dermot Desmond. I had written about the Telecom scandal of 1990, in the course of which Mr Desmond made, and the public lost, several million pounds.

Though he vehemently denied it, the High Court inspector John Glackin found that Dermot Desmond was the beneficial owner of the offshore company at the centre of the transactions surrounding the sale of a site in Ballsbridge to Telecom Eireann for over £5 million more than it cost a few months previously.

I suggested that since the Moriarty tribunal had discovered that the same company, Freezone, had paid for the refurbishment of Charles Haughey's yacht, the whole saga should be looked at again.

Dermot Desmond's letter in reply provides a remarkable insight into the mentality of those business people who were close to Charles Haughey and who saw nothing wrong in making large personal donations to the then Taoiseach. It says simply: "When you write or talk about me, now or in the future, my reaction is reflected in this poem."

Enclosed is the full text of a poem called Still I Rise. Its first verses seem appropriate to the context, a two-fingered salute to his critics:

You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may tread me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

Cause I walk like I've got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

This goes on for a few verses and builds up to a fine outburst of egomania and self-infatuation: Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I've got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?

Personally, I find Marks and Spencer's 100 per cent cotton rather more comfortable. But this is the third millennium, and who am I to question whatever it is that makes the lovely Dermot dance so divinely?

FOR A moment, as I read, I thought that Dermot Desmond himself had written this stuff. His text fails to credit an author. But as I read on, I began to recognise the piece and remember its source. It is the work of Maya Angelou, the African American poet, teacher and civil rights activist, whom many readers may remember from her performance at Bill Clinton's first inauguration as President in 1993.

Still I Rise is actually a poem about slavery and the oppression of women, an outcry in celebration of the survival of the despised and oppressed. Its last line is: "I am the dream and the hope of the slave" and its culminating images are of "the huts of history's shame", "a past that's rooted in pain", "nights of terror and fear" and the "black ocean, leaping and wide".

It may not be great poetry, but it is the real voice of a woman whose ancestors were slaves, who grew up black in segregated Arkansas, who suffered the double discrimination of race and gender, who struggled for justice with Martin Luther King and who rose out of poverty and oppression to command attention and respect. Its defiant swagger has been earned by defeating the legacy of enslavement and suppression.

Just consider the monumental impertinence of a vastly wealthy, white, male financier who expropriates this voice as his own. The gesture is at once grotesque, absurd and hilarious, but wonderfully revealing nevertheless. In its own way it says almost as much about the people for whom this country has been run as the more prosaic details that are emerging from tribunals and investigations.

The tribunals tell us what these people did. Dermot Desmond's ability to imagine himself as a black woman from the Deep South tells us something of how they live with what they did. For hard as it may be for mere mortals to credit, the truth is that these people genuinely and sincerely think of themselves as victims. They see themselves as the sassy, sexy, beautiful people oppressed by the mean-minded tyranny of grubby little mediocrities maddened by envy of the diamonds between their thighs.

And this mentality has a very specific Irish dimension. It arises in part from the lurid self-pity of nationalist mythology, the well-known MOPE (Most Oppressed People Ever) syndrome. The notion (perhaps not incidentally encouraged by Charles Haughey) that "the Irish" as an entity are the children of slaves rising up to claim what is theirs gave the new elite of the 1980s a kind of plenary indulgence for all sins.

In the peculiar recesses of their own minds, they as Irish people could not possibly be a ruling class, with all the responsibilities, as well as all the privileges, that such a status might imply. The rise to riches could be envisaged as a kind of continuation of the Easter Rising, the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs.

I first got a glimpse of this strange mental universe while watching Larry Goodman give evidence to the beef tribunal. Here was a man who controlled about 4 per cent of the entire Gross National Product, who could drop in to Kinsealy for private chats with the Taoiseach on Saturday mornings, who could leave instructions for government ministers to ring him at home over the weekend in the confident expectation that they would be carried out. Yet he kept referring in an antagonistic way to "The Establishment" as something out there beyond himself, a nebulous entity of which he was the self-pitying victim.

In this mentality, you might, like Haughey himself, have more real loyalty to the Cayman Islands than to Ireland. You might, like Larry Goodman, create a situation in which the Irish taxpayer is supposed to pay for the export of non-Irish goods. You might, like Dermot Desmond, conduct your more interesting operations from the Isle of Man. But you could still be the great, quintessentially Irish victim of oppression by The Establishment.

Victims, of course, don't have to apologise or explain. And, it is worth remembering, they can't be shamed. The notion that they can be embarrassed by mere revelations is naively wide of the mark. Unless the revelations have real consequences, they merely confirm them in their ludicrous but pleasantly complacent sense of self-pity.