The quotation is attributable to Scott Fitzgerald .
I don’t know how much the leader-writer/s of The Irish Times is/are paid today but it has been said that one Editor, called Kennedy, was paid as much as the Editor of Britain’s Daily Telegraph, when the Telegraph had a circulation of 9 times that of our home-grown anti-Irish paper of record.
These thoughts are prompted by Jude’s Blog (6 November) on the Irish Times Editorial suggesting that the average Sean or Maire Citizen has lashings of money to buy electric cars and home adaptations to halt climate change.
When Garrett FitzGerald (brought up in comfortable circumstances) was Taoiseach, he appointed John Bruton as Finance Minister. Both men were intelligent and highly educated, but Bruton came from a caste of Graziers in the County Meath who, quite literally, had more Bullocks than Brains. I once knew a fellow from that Royal County, whose many sisters were given wedding presents by their parents of freehold houses with no mortgages to pay.
Fitzgerald led a coalition Government (the only kind his party ever led) and it fell in January 1982 over the Budget introduced by John Bruton, which introduced a so-called Value Added Tax “VAT” on shoes. A less Orwellian, less cynical, term would be Price Added Tax. For cynics know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
I believe Fitzgerald’s Labour partners under Dick Spring appealed for children’s shoes to be exempted from the tax, Fitzgerald may have sympathised with their plea in theory, but in practice shot it down, on the grounds that women with small feet would evade the tax,
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