The Eighty-Five Billion Euro Man

by Donal Conaty

  ‘But you've instructed the AIB to rescind those bonuses,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, unfortunate that,’ he said. ‘Still, onwards and upwards, eh?’

  ‘Well, shouldn't you rescind your bonuses too?’ I asked.

  ‘God no,’ he said. ‘Think how it would look. It would be disastrous. Why it would make us look like the AIB. What possible good would that do? No, like it or not, we're just going to have to accept our bonuses. Take one for the team, eh?’

  I checked out of the Merrion Hotel that evening and took a taxi to my new apartment with my few belongings. On my way to work the following morning I stopped in a café for breakfast. A very friendly woman took my order, gave me the newspaper and said she would drop my eggs and toast down to me. She was welcoming, friendly and efficient and I complimented her on her attitude.

  ‘If all Irish people are prepared to work as hard as you, your country won't be in recession for long,’ I told her.

  ‘I'm from Prague,’ she said.

  As I flicked through the newspaper's angry headlines about the economy I could almost hear the indignant talk around the watercooler in the office. One day runs into another at the Department, each full of high drama as one crisis replaces another. There is a storm over bonuses, followed by a storm over removing the bonuses, followed by a storm over reinstating the bonuses, followed by a storm over taxing bonuses. These stories entertained the Department of Finance staff greatly when they were not otherwise engaged in celebrity tittle-tattle or reality TV. On the whole it was more interesting when people were talking about the snow. Ireland isn't used to snow and isn't good at planning for it either. As we faced into a second week of a winter wonderland in Dublin, I found a clearly agitated Mr Lenihan pacing up and down outside Dermot's office with his fingers crossed.

  ‘Is there something I can help you with, Minister?’ I asked him.

  ‘You could pray,’ he said, ‘and cross your fingers too.

  It's our only hope, otherwise we might run out of grit and the whole country will come to a standstill because of this bloody snow.’

  ‘But I read only this morning that a new shipment was arriving tomorrow. There should be nothing to worry about,’ I reassured him.

  ‘Yes, well, Dermot cancelled that shipment. You see I let the Minister for the Environment order it without first getting Dermot's approval. He's really very annoyed. It's my fault, my fault entirely.’

  There really had been quite a bit of snow and I was surprised to see that most of the staff had made it in. I find it amazing that they would go to such lengths to get to work in appalling conditions and then do absolutely nothing when they get there.

  ‘You made it in, you hardy buck,’ one would say to another.

  ‘Car spun three times but I didn't want to miss work.’

  ‘Good man yourself. What will we do now?’

  ‘Well, frankly I'm up to my eyes. I'm having a terrible time booking our annual ski holiday for the Easter break. All the best hotels are gone.’

  ‘Why risk coming out in this weather?’ I asked one of them. ‘Why not work from home?’

  They stifled laughter and looked at me with pity. ‘As though you'd get anything done at home, what with the tele and everything,’ I was told without a hint of irony.

  The next drama was all to do with Anglo Irish Bank. I thought perhaps Dermot would be pleased to see that there was finally a prospect that some of the bankers who destroyed the country might face charges. I couldn't have been more wrong.

  ‘This is outrageous,’ he said. ‘Outrageous!’

  ‘What is it, Dermot?’ I asked.

  ‘Files from Anglo have been sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions,’ he said, almost in tears. ‘These are shameful times. Last Christmas we exchanged gifts with these good people; this Christmas we are having them arrested. I'm too upset to work,’ he said. ‘Will you come shopping with me?’

  Ajai did tell me not to let Dermot out of my sight, but even I was surprised to find myself in a beautician's with him half an hour later. We had looked at Tag Heuer and Rolex watches in Weir's on Grafton Street but Dermot said his heart wasn't in it.

  ‘We'll go and top up our tans,’ he said. ‘You're looking quite peaky. Come on. The world looks better when you have a tan, don't you think?’ Dermot said. ‘Poor Seanie FitzPatrick has a lovely tan. I hope it's a comfort to him in these difficult times.’

  So the rest of my day was spent listening to Dermot variously sigh and scream as he first had a massage, then what he referred to as a ‘back, sack and crack', and finally a sunbed session. Dermot was peeved that I didn't indulge in any of the sessions but I wasn't prepared to spend half my rent in the space of ninety minutes.

  The following morning, a Saturday, I was reading the newspaper in a café near my apartment when my mobile rang. It was Dermot.

  ‘You're handy, aren't you?’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean by “handy”?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah, you know, if something was broken around the house you'd have a go at fixing it.’

  ‘I guess,’ I said. ‘As long as it wasn't anything major. I'd certainly try not to incur a call out charge.’

  ‘Good man,’ he said. ‘I'll pick you up in twenty minutes.’

  We must have driven for about two hours in heavy snow. Visibility was poor but I knew we were no longer in Dublin. We were driving through hills on a dual carriageway. I was puzzled by a sign that had originally read Welcome to Wicklow, the Garden County. Someone had sprayed a black line through the word garden and written the word garbage instead. Dermot smirked when he saw it. ‘The whole county is full of illegal rubbish dumps. I suppose it has to go somewhere,’ he explained as he threw an empty coffee cup out the window.

  Eventually we pulled onto a side road that twisted and turned ever upward. The snow was heavy here and the car sometimes skidded but Dermot seemed entirely oblivious as he turned once again at a sign that said Kilgrange Boutique Hotel – 1 kilometre. What was Dermot up to now, I wondered.

  We drove along a tree-lined driveway and parked directly in front of the three-storey hotel. It seemed to be completely deserted and reminded me, in the heavy snow, of the hotel in The Shining. It was an impressively tasteless building with pretend-Palladian pillars on either side of the neo-Georgian entrance, and a series of Victorian-style bay windows facing the road in all their pebble-dashed glory. The look was completed by a gigantic Edwardian-esque conservatory tacked onto the side of the building. The architecture was nothing if not eclectic.

  There were no cars in the carpark and the doors were locked with heavy chains. To my surprise Dermot produced a large bunch of keys and began testing them on the lock on the front door. Moments later we were in the main dining hall of the hotel. Although not huge, the room was very grand with rich oak parquet and a fine marble fireplace. A chandelier that was far too big for the room hung from the ceiling. I guessed you could have seated about sixty there, but it looked as though it was a long time since anyone had eaten in the room. Dermot fiddled with fuses and switches for a while and eventually the light from the dust-covered chandelier revealed the dining room to be full of some kind of machinery.

  ‘Where are we Dermot? Why are we here and why are those machines here?’ I asked him.

  ‘This is my hotel. Do you like it? I modelled it on a country house I saw in a magazine at the hairdressers, but I added a few unique touches of my own,’ he said proudly. ‘Then all the tax incentives ended, so I never opened it. Instead I use it to store these things for the Government. There's good money in it – much better than trying to run the place as a hotel.’

  ‘What are those things?’ I asked, pointing to the machines.

  ‘They're electronic voting machines. The best of the best. Top of the range. Sophisticated. Fraud proof. Foolproof. It's a testament to the quality and modernity of our democracy that we have these cutting-edge machines for counting votes,’ he said patriotically.

  ‘So what are they doing
here?’ I asked, perhaps naively.

  ‘Oh we don't use them,’ he said. ‘Never have, never will. We gave them a trial run a few years ago but they proved far too efficient. Poor Nora Owen lost her seat in ten seconds flat. She didn't even have time to put a face on. Great looking machines though, aren't they? Fierce modern.’

  ‘Wait, Dermot,’ I said, ‘I don't understand. These must have cost a fortune. Why on earth wouldn't you use them?’

  ‘Oh they did cost a fortune, about €50 million if I remember correctly. Then there's the cost of storing them. There are 7,000 in total. I don't have all of them, mind. I have roughly half of them stored around the country in different hotels and shopping centres. I get about €300,000 a year for hanging on to them. So you're right, there's nothing cheap about them. They're the best of the best, a credit to the nation.’

  ‘Why aren't they used, Dermot?’ I asked again.

  ‘Democracy is a very fragile thing, you know. Counting votes needs the human touch,’ he told me.

  ‘So why don't you get rid of them then?’ I asked him. I was completely perplexed.

  ‘Get rid of them? Why would we do that? They're practically new. No, we have to store them and keep them in pristine condition, which is why we're here today. We need to check the pipes for leaks. I don't want this place flooding when the thaw comes.’

  ‘Well, why didn't you just send a plumber out?’ I asked.

  Dermot looked at me with pity in his eyes. ‘A plumber?’ he said, incredulous. ‘Sure they're cowboys the lot of them. And anyway, they've all emigrated.’

  It took about an hour to confirm that everything was in order and then we got back in the car and began the long drive home. It was a silent journey. Dermot didn't speak to me after I asked him if it had ever occurred to him that it would be easier to just do things right in the first place.

  We were finally in sight of the apartment building when his phone rang. I looked at the phone in its handsfree cradle and saw the words ‘Biffo calling’ light up on the screen.

  ‘Taoiseach,’ said Dermot. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Good man, Dermot. I want you to pick myself and Lenihan up in ... where are we Brian? ... in the Brazen Head, and take us to Clara. They've been force feeding a bull spuds and it's rat arsed. We're going down to have the craic.’

  I had read about drunken bulls in the newspaper that morning. Farmers were feeding them potatoes and they were turning into moonshine – or poitín as they call it here – in their stomachs.

  ‘I can walk from here,’ I said to Dermot, but he had already executed a U-turn and we were leaving my apartment behind.

  The Taoiseach was in the best humour I had seen him in.

  ‘You're going to love drunk bull baiting,’ he said. ‘I am proud to introduce you to this ancient tradition.’

  ‘Is it really an ancient tradition?’ I asked.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said the Finance Minister. ‘Wasn't it practiced by Fionn MacCumhaill himself on the slopes of Ben Bulben?’

  ‘No,’ said the Taoiseach. ‘We made it up this morning.’

  The gathering in a field in Clara was a Who's Who of the Government and the civil service. All the Chiefs of Staff were there. The Minister for Education, who I had narrowly survived dancing with a few nights previously, was making lewd gestures at the bull. The Minister for Health stood staring grimly at the bull as though daring it to spill her drink. The Finance Minister was chatting animatedly to a figure in a corner of the field that everyone else knew was a scarecrow. Someone had given the Taoiseach a banjo, and, to the delight of the crowd, he was taunting the tortured animal by playing ‘Dueling Banjos’ from the movie Deliverance. Between him and Mary Coughlan, the bull was being driven demented. It made a charge for Coughlan and she just avoided a goring by scrambling over a fence. The bull turned sharply and crashed to the ground. It was clearly extremely drunk. The Taoiseach strolled over, put his foot on the bull's head and played the last chords of the tune. As he reached the finale, he turned to face the crowd and the bull reared its head and knocked the Taoiseach to the ground. He was about to trample on Mr Cowen when I managed to divert him with a blow to the side of the head with a bottle of Jameson.

  ‘Don't waste the good whiskey,’ I heard Mary Coughlan call out. It was the last thing I heard. I turned to run but it was too late. The bull caught me in the buttocks and threw me high in the air.

  The next thing I remember I was blinking in the bright lights of a hospital accident and emergency ward. I was lying face down on a trolley, wearing only a hospital gown, with the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance sitting on the trolley beside me and taking it in turns to apply pressure to my wounded rear. The Taoiseach sang quietly to himself, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings. Dermot was sitting across from us in a comfortable armchair with a pretty nurse on his knee asking him if he was OK. We were also surrounded by police officers and I wondered for a moment if we were under arrest, but Dermot explained that he had called them to protect the Taoiseach and Minister from the doctors and nurses. Initially I was surprised at this, much to Dermot's amusement.

  ‘Surely no doctor or nurse would hurt anyone deliberately, never mind the leader of the Government,’ I said.

  ‘Are you joking? These people work twenty-hour days in appalling conditions only to have their wages cut. No one in their right mind would stand for it,’ said Dermot. ‘If I were you I would take a scalpel to the fecker’ he said cheerfully to the nurse on his knee.

  Eventually a nurse came to see us, but after a cursory examinination she informed us that we weren't drunk enough to be treated. The Taoiseach argued belligerently but she got us to walk a straight line and proved her point. So we had to send the Minister for Finance out with some of the police officers for a few bottles of whiskey. Nearly two bottles later, the nurse checked us again. When she saw that I had vomited and the two Brians were headbutting each other, she finally agreed to have my wound stitched and dressed.

  The sun was rising when we finally left the hospital. Dermot, still inebriated, dropped me home. I invited him and the Brians in but they said they were off to an early house before they lost their buzz. I spent the rest of the weekend face down on the bed trying not to scratch the thirty-seven stitches in my ass.

  FOUR

  DERMOT GETS NAMA'D

  My flight home for Christmas was cancelled because of the snow at Dublin Airport and they couldn't get me on a flight until 27 December. I had been looking forward to enjoying some low-fat American food for a change, but the reality is that there is always a tension in the house when I go home for Christmas. My father and three brothers enjoy a ‘traditional’ Irish Christmas: they start drinking as soon as they get out of bed. I'm the black sheep of the family. They are all firemen and their idea of fun is far removed from mine. As for my ex-fiancee, Lisa, I haven't spoken to her since I walked in on her and my brother Tom in a compromising position.

  Still, the thought of Christmas alone in Dublin didn't exactly fill me full of cheer either. Dermot must have noticed that I was not myself.

  ‘What's wrong with you?’ he asked. ‘Anyone would think it was your money we're spending.’

  I smiled weakly. ‘My flight home for Christmas has been cancelled,’ I explained. ‘I'm at a bit of a loose end.’

  ‘Sure what of it?’ he said. You can spend Christmas with us. Sinéad is dying to meet you. She loves a man with money. And the twins have been pestering me about meeting the man from the IMF.’

  ‘I doubt that, Dermot,’ I said.

  ‘You shouldn't,’ he said, and he mimicked his children. ‘You're, loike, totally famous.’

  I was taken aback by Dermot's kindness. ‘I'd hate to intrude,’ I said.

  ‘Don't be ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Sure, it would be nice to have someone to talk to for a change.’

  ‘Well, if you're sure your wife won't mind ...’ I said.

  ‘Mind? Why would she mind? It's all settled. I'll pick you up on Chris
tmas morning. Now let's go and get some lunch.’

  I looked at my watch. It was 10.45 a.m.

  ‘Isn't it a bit early, Dermot, even for you?’

  Dermot laughed. ‘We're going to swing by the hospital first. A cousin of mine is a surgeon. He'll take a look at our injuries from the crash the other day.’

  ‘What injuries? I don't have any injuries. You don't have any injuries, do you?’

  ‘Look at you bent over your desk like Quasimodo. We have to get you seen to,’ Dermot said. ‘Didn't you tell me yourself that you had a pain in the neck.’

  ‘That was with you when I was trying to figure out why you fund private hospitals through the public health service. I still have a pain in the neck with it. It makes no sense.’

  ‘You see,’ said Dermot. ‘The pain you are suffering is making you cranky. If we don't get it treated you could end up suffering from depression, and God knows there's enough depression in this country. So get your coat. As to the private hospitals, they take care of the sick. It would have been sinful not to help them. Sinful.’

  The waiting room was crowded with pale, gaunt, chronic-pain sufferers. Dermot breezed past them and told me to follow him. I felt uncomfortable skipping past people who were clearly genuinely suffering but I was with Dermot and he seemed to know where he was going. We found ourselves in a room with a small dapper man in his forties, dressed in a beautifully tailored three-piece suit, playing Solitaire on his computer. He initially looked iritated at the intrusion but just as he was about to rebuke us he recognised Dermot. He rose from his chair, came around his desk and shook Dermot's hand warmly.

  ‘Ah, Dermot,’ he said, ‘how have you been? I haven't seen you in an age. When was the last time we had dinner? We must be long overdue. Let's arrange something before you leave. My treat.’

  ‘That's very kind of you, Lorcan,’ said Dermot. ‘I can't think when the last time was. I don't remember seeing you since we played golf in Sandy Lane last year.’