We must have silver stuck down the back of the couch

Date Published: {J}

Ever since the latest McCarthy Report came out last week, there’s been a lot of talk about Ireland selling off the family silver as though there was a big dresser somewhere in Leinster House packed with forks, spoons and salvers that might somehow drag us out of hock. 

The fact is there would want to be the equivalent of a small mine of the stuff to even begin to contemplate such drastic action, but all this talk of silver seems almost uncouth in these straitened times.

And anyway, what do they all mean. Have you ever met someone who did sell off the family silver? And if they did, who would they sell it to?Would it be those parasites who offer to exchange your wedding ring or granny’s jewellery for cash? Or is there a silversmith out there who refashions your old knives and forks into a new cup?

What exactly is the family silver anyway - are there families out there who have silver cutlery instead of the cheap stuff the rest of us cut our pork chops with?

I've always worried about those children who were born with a silver spoon in their mouth; isn't it very dangerous for babies who haven't an ounce of sense to be sucking on valuable spoons? The silver spoon could choke them.

Apparently we're thinking of selling off the family silver now - although in our case, given that we're talking about Coillte, it appears we think money grows on trees.

Sonia O’Sullivan won silver medals at the Olympics and World Championships which she might be persuaded to part with in the national interest, and Fianna Fail sold us down the Swanee for forty pieces of silver – so the least they could do is offer that back to the state by way of some very small compensation.

We’ve had a few stars of the silver screen, and clearly the current crop of household names like Saoirse Ronan, Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell, Gabriel Byrne and Liam Neeson would fetch a few bob on the open market.

We also have six sets of silver letters to flog after they were removed from the front of branches of the world's baddest bank last week that spell Anglo Irish Bank over and over again - like a sort of recurring bad dream.

Of course we couldn’t sell all of the letters – just the ones that say ‘rankish’ because we need to hold onto the rest of them to come up with the new name for this financial albatross around our necks. We’re calling it ‘Big Loan’.

Or maybe we could pretend that Silvermines is actually a business as opposed to an area in Tipperary. The only problem there of course is that, even if we had a silver mine somewhere, they’d expect to get it for nothing – just like Shell did when we discovered gas off the Mayo coast.

Staying with precious metals, however, we also have a fleet of silver birds for sale – as in, the helicopters that were once the transportation mode of choice for our developers. Like these high flyers, they too are now grounded - like our ghost estates, they are now gathering dust.

To sweeten the pot, we could throw in Roger Casement's sword which was unveiled last week by Jimmy Deenihan, wielding it like a hurley, and we’d even part with the Ardagh Chalice, a job lot of Roses of Tralee, Jedward, Mary Byrne, Westlife, Gaybo, Twink and Bono.We could certainly throw in the old silver fox, Colm McCarthy, who keeps issuing these reports that cause mass consternation every time he puts pen to paper. The man really is a national jinx.

But we're keeping Micheal Ó Muircheartaigh because even at the age of 80, he has scarcely a silver hair on his head.

And more importantly he's a national treasure - and even when we're stony broke without the price of a pint, there are some treasures we're not prepared to part with.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.