A chara, - After years of lonely opposition to the headlong rush into rampant consumerism that has characterised the Celtic Tiger, I have finally decided to succumb and make amends for past heresies. Accordingly I am making the following New Year resolutions.
I resolve to borrow massive amounts of money to purchase goods I don't need, and get well over my head into debt in the process. I resolve to fall on shops and stores like a ravenous wolf in a frenzied attempt to purchase everything I can lay my hands on. I resolve to spend money I haven't got purchasing a brand new 01-registered car, even though the car I currently own is perfectly adequate. I resolve to have two televisions, a Playstation and a video in every room in my house. I resolve to believe that the phrase "the future" refers to the end of the January sales, and the term "the distant future" refers to the start of the summer sales.
I further resolve to refuse to believe that anyone in the country is currently earning less than £25,000 a year, and resolve to stop worrying about the poor and marginal who don't really exist, and are all spongers and layabouts anyway. I resolve to firmly believe that all asylum-seekers are either terrorists, thieves or psychopaths, and the very fact that they managed to reach this country in the first place is incontrovertible proof that they couldn't really have been oppressed back home. I resolve to believe that the Irish identity, which survived 700 years of foreign rule and repeated attempts to extirpate it, will collapse around our ears the first time a group of Romanians sing a folk song.
I resolve to believe that the term "socially excluded" refers to the hard-working super-rich of this nation, a sorely oppressed and abused group, whose selfless support of poor politicians and the political process, as revealed through the endless tribunals now entertaining us, justifies their gradual exclusion form the tax system, and that said contributions more than discharge any social obligation which communist types may feel their privileged position places upon them. I further resolve to mortgage my future by staking all on a hi-tech job with an US multinational which will close shop and move to Indonesia at the first hint of recession in America.
Finally, I resolve to believe that the sole purpose of society is to render its citizens amenable to the needs of the business class and free market, and that we must all cheerfully put up with whatever social engineering is thereby required. To assist me in this, I resolve to firmly believe that women who stay at hoe to raise a family are spongers and delinquents, and that the only woman worthy of the name is one who manages to work 45 hours a week for less than the minimum wage and raise a family of seven to meet future labour shortages at the same time. - Is mise,
Brian MacGabhann, Beal an Daingin, Conamara, Co na Gaillimhe.