One of the unexpected characteristics that newly-accredited foreign ambassadors to Ireland report to their governments is the extraordinary levels of self-satisfaction exuded by Irish civil servants, politicians and even business leaders. Ireland’s reputation for cavalier eccentricity and individual courage is based on the behavior of the Irish abroad, especially as soldiers: the Irish in Ireland tend to be collective, conservative and surprisingly, even odiously, smug. The influence of the Catholic Church was believed to be responsible for this. But the church is now gone, yet the smugness remains, So is smugness a self-sustaining characteristic, like cork, and possibly why that Munster city was so named?
This smugness is not the polished, urbanely subcutaneous variety that infests Whitehall’s corridors, but swaggering and shamlessly explicit: hence Jack Chambers, 16, assuming the newly-assembled portfolio of Finance, Defence, Foreign Affairs and Supranational Vanity. The other day, Saint Jack was standing a-tiptoe in the pulpit, a halo around his temples, one thumb behind a lapel, the other hand waving a righteous digit in the air, as he declaimed –
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