What Mary Lou said

You probably know or know of Miriam Lord. She’s the woman who writes the funny column in the Irish Times about the goings-on in the Dail. This morning she is casting her beady eye over Mary Lou McDonald. Mary Lou, as you probably know again, yesterday listed the names of alleged Ansbacher account holders. Does the term ‘Ansbacher account holder’ have a  familiar ring? You’re showing your age. The reference is to off-shore accounts that were said to be held by a number of prominent and wealthy Irish notables, who were busy stashing their cash there to avoid the taxman. Mary Lou, using the protection of the Dail, listed names named by a whistleblower whom he claimed held offshore Ansbacher accounts. Miriam Lord, being the witty woman she is, spoke of Mary Lou ‘detonating’ this list and producing ‘a spectacular’.

It certainly got the attention of the people named, who rushed into print to deny that they ever had or now have or ever will have an Ansbacher account. I was waiting for some of them to do a Bertie and say they hadn’t a bank account at all at all. Even the Ceann Comhairle was at pains to point out that the ‘S. Barrett’ referred to on the list wasn’t him. It seems the whistleblower had tried all sorts of authoritative places to do something about this list but with no luck. Yesterday afternoon he got lucky with Mary Lou.

There followed a good bit of tut-tutting and faux outrage that Mary Lou should have done such a thing. The Ceann Comhairle put it down to her youth, that she should name names of people who might have done bad things. But his voice was drowned by the sound of background cheering throughout the land, as republicans from Malin Head to Mizzen Head broke into choruses of ‘How Does It Feel?’ and ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’  For so long it’s been Enda and the lads who have been lobbing unsubstantiated claims of  wrong-doing at Mary Lou’s party. Sometimes the lobbing went on for weeks, complete with photo-shoots featuring the Taoiseach. Now at last the Shinners had got round to lobbing a few of their own and you could tell from the squawks of denial that not only those named but political opponents in the Dail were feeling the force of the onslaught.

It was appropriate, in a macabre way, that the names of alleged tax-dodgers was made in the week when a homeless man died as near as dammit on the steps outside the Oireachtas. And not just any man – an articulate man whom RTÉ had interviewed a while back and who will feature on a homelessness documentary that RTÉ can’t wait to get airing. The Ansbacher accounts were needed by their holders because they were earning so much money, they didn’t want the rotten old state to be dipping into it and taking thousands or maybe millions from them in tax. Shades of the roaring, mighty Celtic Tiger. And meanwhile a homeless man is found huddled and dead in a doorway about fifty yards from the centre of government: just one more fragment of the huge collateral damage created in a state where a  small minority, many with political connections or even politicians themselves,  go on living lives wonderfully well insulated from the razor slashes of poverty.  One of Sinn Féin’s big ideas is that there must be a drive, north and south, towards equality. The size of the task was spectacularly obvious this week outside and inside the Dail.