Friday, February 5, 2010

Pink cocktails and the Duffy Principle


The Board loves slow news weeks. Honest.

True, they often turn him greener than Ed Begley Jr at a climate camp, but they provide wonderful proof of how obsessive and easily distracted the media can be.

Take the recent hokum over the new president's residence in UL, and how it is a religious disgrace that about €2 million snots can be spent on such a frivolous, horribly angular building in this time of Great Depression.

As The Board's colleague and chief malteser thief Lady Sheridan puts it in her riposte here, this was never an issue while everyone had anything to talk about. Less than four years ago €17.8 million was spent on a bridge across the Shannon without a single peep from Batt O'Keeffe or the Mayor of Limerick or anyone else.

That's because nobody cared. This time next week, no one will care either. The Board never cared at any stage.

There's a weekly quota for public rage in this country. In the absence of easy, pick-up-and-play outrage (the trashing of John Gormley's entire emissions and waste treatment policy is too blasé, natch), the media will pick on whatever target we can find, and the easier the better.

Call it the Duffy principle.

As a dusty child of fortune, The Board prefers more romantic sources of angst. The cost of the new hot air balloon rides in Adare, for one.



A wonderful way to spend 90 minutes, of course. The trip of a lifetime, maybe. But €240? Really? The Board would rather waste it on elaborately-shaped breads and pink cocktails which, as evident in the picture below, he first sampled on a recent trip to Lahndan.


It was mostly Jack Daniels and therefore not at all feminine. Honest.