You think you've got problems?

Most of you probably don't pay much attention to Ireland except when your teams lose at rugby, football, guerilla warfare and so on.

So you'll have missed a wonderful real-life soap opera recently: TDs (=MPs) resigning because they've not been made party leader in their first year, the Minister of Defence resigning in disgrace, the Minister for Potatoes resigning in disgrace, another TD resigning in a huff, all the banks going bust, the Prime Minister admitting that he regularly carried round suitcases of cash donated by property developers (while he was the Finance Minister he claims not to have had a bank account, the former Prime Minister who imported weapons for the IRA, who owned an island, a fleet of helicopters which he used to visit his shirtmaker in Paris and a €45 million estate while earning £IR3500 and tapped the phones of opponents and journalists… loads more.

The problem is that because it's next door and white, nobody thinks of Ireland as a postcolonial nation. In reality, it's just like the other colonies you were thrown out of: a foreign élite was replaced by an incredibly tight group of people who controlled the government, the judiciary, the law, business, industry, education and local government. They all went to Trinity College Dublin or UCD after attending two or three schools. The little people don't and never have got a look-in. Their job is to vote for the party their great-grandparents fought for in the Civil War (Fianna Fail, who accepted what the British gave them, or Fine Gael, who liked what the British gave them) without regard for the rotten economic and political state of the country.

The politicians are the bankers are the developers are the businessmen are the clergy are the politicians and round and round it goes in a carousel of complacency, greed and selfishness.

While minor weirdoes resign, have any ministers, developers or bankers gone to prison or really paid for their mistakes or crimes? No. No they haven't.

In the words of a recent Kenyan government minister: 'Now it is our turn to eat'. In Ireland, it's potato blight for most and banquets for a few. 'Twas ever thus.