Go away Bertie, like the Riordans your muck-spreading days are over

Sunday Tribune, 15 February

"Geddup the yard, there's a smell of Benjy off you." Remember that schoolyard insult? If you were a child in the 1970s, you probably will. It referred to farmer Benjy from popular RTÉ soap The Riordans and the fact that you smelled like him – ie of cow dung.
The soap was revisited last week in the excellent RTÉ documentary Tea, Taboos and Tractors. It brought back memories of Sunday evenings with tea and jam sponge, and no homework done, listening to Tom blathering on about "sarcoptic mangemites" and "worm drench". They were simpler days, when no one locked their front doors. The world was a happier place, wasn't it?
Of course it wasn't. The North was ablaze, there were oil shortages, strikes and no money. That's the great thing about nostalgia: it rinses the crappy bits off the past and hoses them down the slurry pit. Probably the kindest thing to say about Riordans' Ireland is that it was less pretentious. There was no micro-celebrity circuit inhabited by people like, say, Rosanna Davison.
Rosanna's face is everywhere. On the day The Riordans documentary was aired, one paper reported
that she would be announcing her plans for St Valentine's night at a photoshoot in Dublin.
Wow. Was the shoot for Vogue? Harpers? Elle? No, it was for… pizza. Rosanna and her boyfriend would recreate the iconic John and Yoko
'bed-in' to advertise pizza. 'Give pizza a chance' was the slogan.
Now I like pizza, but the sight of Rosanna and her boyfriend nibbling it in bed turned my stomach. They represent everything I disliked about the Celtic Tiger, which made "celebs" out of models and created a "social scene" out of PR launches.
Rosanna is queen of the celebrity/models and regularly gets to voice her opinions. Such as this one on Tuesday: "Photocalls are useful. They only last for an hour or two, then you're free for the rest of the day." (Sounds a bit like signing on.)
And this last July, when she 'revealed' she had taken a 'cheapo' flight to Marbella: "We came over on a whim. It was a particularly rainy day in Dublin when we decided… All the talk of the recession does make you more careful. We were very careful to get a good deal." Last Sunday, Rosanna
spoke about the economy again. I'm not going to tell
you what she thinks because, frankly, I don't care. She
spent last Christmas in Mauritius and has a daddy who's richer than Croesus (Croesus de Burgh). She doesn't need to worry about the recession.
Neither does former taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who has a nice fat pension. Like fellow Tiger celebrity Rosanna, he is omnipresent in the media. Last week, he was pictured at a launch in the Burlington Hotel, grinning like a man bursting to tell a private joke. He looks like
that all the time now as he smugly waits to be made president.
Bertie's joke was about the recession. He told guests at the hotel, "If the economy had kept going the way I had left it, this place [the Burlington] wouldn't be here because they [property developers] were going to knock it down." Ho, ho, ho. Burlington Bertie, what a card. "The way I had left it." If Bertie was at the helm, we'd still be afloat.
Many people hanker for the Bertie days. Like The Riordans, he reminds them of happier times. That's if you forget that he led us into a property boom which has now imploded, causing misery to hundreds of thousands of people.
A boom that saw the reckless over-development of land for the benefit of his party's friends and where fortunes were squandered. The economy he "left behind" was a time-bomb, primed by him and the man currently trying to douse the flames that followed its explosion, Brian Cowen.
Bertie obviously still hurts over his demotion and consoles himself by thinking that we, secretly, want him back.
We don't, Bertie. Your Ireland is dead. If Rosanna Davison represents the superficial celebrity of the Tiger years, then you represent the avarice and cronyism. Your comments on the economy are as irrelevant to most of us as hers are.
Things are bad enough for the country without a has-been taoiseach hanging around making snide comments. Like The Riordans, Bertie, your muck-spreading days are over. Now shut up.