let them eat pork chops

 

The woman was involved in a food distribution programme in the nearby town of Newbridge.

"Are you encountering any genuine hardship?" I asked her.

"James you wouldn't be believe the hardship that's out there," she answered.

Back home I found two letters on my kitchen table.

The first was a bill from the electricity company for eleven hundred Euro.

My usual bill would be about 150 Euro and, given it takes me a while to pay it off, the bi monthly total is often hovering at an accumulated debt of 400.

So the new bill is quite a leap.

And this is before the electricity companies much telegraphed price rises which are due to kick in later this month.

"Well, well, well," I murmured. "This is a pickle."

The other letter was a Census Form for a government mandated nationwide survey currently underway.

The Census Form informs me that the whole process will be "quick, easy and compulsory."

See how they just slipped compulsory in there with quick and easy.

Like a woman mentioning her boyfriend in casual conversation five minutes after she first meets me.

Just slipped it in there.

Fiendishly cunning these Irish government Mandarins.

"How compulsory is compulsory?" I asked myself aloud being in no way inclined to jump through hoops for any known brand of governmental citrus fruit.

Reading the census form I saw the vital bit of information in the form of a threat: Non compliance, ie failure to fill out the form, may result in a fine of 44,400 Euro.

Ha, ha, ha, I thought defiantly, they've about as much chance of collecting that from me as the electricity company has of getting paid their fantasy football league bill.

But what's with the amount?

I mean how did they decide what would be the appropriate punishment for a felon refusing to fill out a census form?

44,400 Euro.

Some grand panjandrum with a bit of a fetish for the number four in the Department of Fines thinks I, reaching for a pen and filling out the census.

I resisted the urge to write "Mind your own ****ing business," to various intrusive questions including some real posers about the number of rooms, the heating system, insulation and date of construction of my house.

My eyebrows went up a notch for the bit of the form that asked me to define myself in racial terms.

The form prompted me with choices like: White Irish, Black Irish, White Irish Traveller and other more exotic variants.

Not since the Department of Social Welfare asked me a few months ago on an Unemployment Benefit form about something they referreed to as my sexual orientation, have I been so struck by the strange quasi mystical vicissitudes which gild the under testicles of my existence.

I mean I'd understand if Department of Social Welfare were trying to set me up with a date or something.

But for an unemployment claim!

At the time as with the Census Form today, I'm wondering what agenda we are catering to here.

Whose agenda?

In any case I don't define myself in terms of ethnicity.

I'm Irish.

We're all Irish.

If I was to answer the question precisely as to skin colour I would have needed an option for Generally Red Faced Occasionally Sallow With Purplish Cheeks In Cold Weather.

At the end of the Census Form there is a space for the citizen to comment on the Ireland of today.

These comments will be part of a time capsule for future generations to read but which is not to be opened for a hundred years.

Gentle travellers of the internet, you don't have to wait a hundred years to read mine.

I wrote in the time capsule segment of the Irish government Census Form:

"The fact that you are threatening people with impoverishing fines if they do not wish to take part in your increasingly frivolous and increasing frequent Censuses is an indicator of the creeping Sovietism in Irish society and government. As is your legalisation of abortion and the current de facto practice of Euthanasia by the Health Boards hospice service."