Gay Mitchell. Gay. Gay. Are you out there? Listen fella, apologies. We take it all back. Pass the humble pie I'll eat it with my hat. The IOC are people we should be in bed with. Your Olympics Games for Dublin proposal, derided by some media smart asses as mere political opportunism when you floated it after Michael Carruth's gold medal in 1992, does in fact makes fine sense. We are off the medication now and we see it your way.

If a dreary saint-ridden little place like Salt Lake City can nab a tidy sporting beanfeast like the Winter Olympics by using $400,000 worth of gifts, scholarships and favours to woo IOC members, is anything not possible for Dublin?

$400,000? Pssshaw!

$400,000 isn't much more than a county councillor would expect in a brown paper bag for sticking his arm in the air on a rezoning application vote. Four hundred thousand? That wouldn't earn you so much as a "thanks big fella" from a leading statesman. What sort of house extension can a man build for $400,000?

In the Salt Lake City affair, IOC member Jean Claude Ganga of the Republic of Congo received free medical care for hepatitis and made $60,000 in local real estate deals. This is all so small time as to be pitiful.

We can do business with these people. Better than that we can milk them. They are our sort. Fixers and chancers. Here in LockerRoom we have been looking at the Olympics from the wrong point of view. It's not sport, sport with all it's drab ideological baggage. Nah, it's big business. It's an IDA sort of thing. Pay lots of public money for a huge multinational to come here and create lots of low paid jobs while getting a few suits rich and then when the fun is over the multinational moves onto some place else. Sure 'tis the mother's milk upon which the Celtic Tiger was nurtured.

And what lucrative by-product do the Olympics always bring? Investigations. Or tribunals as we call them here. The Salt Lake City bid has three investigations ongoing, the latest chaired (and this is significant) by our old friend Senator George Mitchell. We have a logistical head start. We are friendly with an uthoritative figure who will investigate us afterwards. If anybody knows about the Irish genius for deal-making it is George Mitchell.

An Irish Olympic bid is nothing which George and 70 highly paid lawyers couldn't delve into from a suite in Dublin Castle well into the next century. And the beauty is that Olympic investigations, like tribunals never reveal anything. Everyone feels a little heat but nobody takes the rap.

In Salt Lake City at present the sponsors are growing a bit tetchy. They expect their money to buy drugs cover-ups and the appearance of corporately-endorsed global celebration. They take the view that if they wanted to be associated with bribes and greasy tills, they would have stuck to doing big business. Here in Ireland we can offer a unique solution. We have such a blizzard of bribes and corruption stories and such a high calibre of drugs cheat that the story won't even make the papers. It can all be explained away as part of our national ethos. In Ireland it is offensive and bad mannered not to take a bribe. The latest episode in the dazzling history of the International Olympic Committee broke in Salt Lake City when a letter concerning a university scholarship granted to the daughter of the head of the Association of African Olympic Committees was leaked. Chivalrous Olympic knights responded that the scholarship business was merely a humanitarian gesture not a vote-buying exercise. Subtle. Not. Even Jackie Healy-Rae has a lighter touch than that. We can have a huge blow-out of an Olympic celebration paid for by EU grants, leaving two dozen Irish people obscenely rich and the rest of us vaguely cheesed off. We are being hard on ourselves if we think we can't host the Olympics. There are people out there who will help.

Take Olympic bid consultant Mahmoud El Farnawani. Lots of other cities have. He has just resigned as a consultant to the Cairo 2008 team. (He's available guys, he's available.) Mahmoud was a consultant for the Salt Lake City people and he worked on the Sydney 2000 bid. Nobody is saying there is a connection but Salt Lake and Sydney are among the successful bids named by IOC member Marc Hodler as having benefited from the "humanitarian" business.

In Sydney (and again it's probably just coincidence) over $2 million has been funnelled into the establishment of the African Olympic Training Centre where African athletes come and train on Australian Olympic Committee scholarships. As a country which cannot handle the concept of black people who are anything other than athletes or musicians living among us, we are again well placed to launch this sort of operation.

Then there is IOC member David Sibandze of Swaziland whose son worked in City Hall in Salt Lake City for a year in the mid-1990s as well as picking up qualifications from the local technical colleges. Surely we should be talking to these people? Salt Lake City lost narrowly in 1991 when Nagano beat it for the right to host the 1998 Games. They stepped up the heat from then on and the student population of Utah has since been swelled by the progeny of at least half a dozen IOC members. We have so many universities in Dublin that we could give them a college each.

If we are to be successful we must get our hands on "The List". Several bids have spoken of the existence of a list of 18 IOC members who it was known were open to being bribed. These people are our core vote. Buy 18 and lay the blarney business thick on everyone. With an electorate of 115 and at least four or five cities running, the numbers add up.

As they sift back through the rubble in Salt Lake City they have come to realise that the fertilising of rapacious private businessmen as a means of bringing big-time sport to the city has been dangerous and historically dodgy.

The idea for the Salt Lake City Olympics was born in a tigerish period of economic boom which the city experienced after the downtime of the mid-1980s. Sick of bad times and unflattering headlines and with an eye on the main chance Salt Lake City went for it. Sounds familiar doesn't it?

The collective imagination here in Dublin runs no further than the erection of a big shiny spike in O'Connell Street as a celebration of ourselves and our, ahem, possibilities. When it comes to vulgar opportunism we have right to think globally though, and it is time to take our place among the nations of the earth.

Gay was right. Higher. Faster. Greasier.