Why couldnÕt they have given us the wine lake instead?

If the nitwits who thought that free cheese would somehow sweeten the pill of the bitterest budget in the history of the state, they picked the wrong stock of EU surplus to dip into.

Because if they really wanted to cheer us all up after they mortgaged our future generations through mismanagement and sheer greed, they’d have found a wine lake so that we’d all get a few free bottles.Cheese, after all, only gives you nightmares if you eat it late at night – wine on the other hand will have you sleeping like a baby, deluding yourself that the reality was all a bad dream as opposed to the cheese causing one.

A wine lake would have taken away so much of the pain and they wouldn’t even have to bottle it for us – if they dug out those water tankers we had during the cryptosporidium and filled them with rioja or rosé, we’d come out with our buckets to fill them for domestic consumption.

That’s presuming of course that Europe’s wine makers didn’t keep the best stuff for themselves, and simply put the wine made from sour grapes into EU storage.

But presuming the wino was up to scratch, then, indeed, we might also welcome a pound of Edam or a cut of brie to go with the cheeky red or dry white so that we’d rediscover our sense of community by having the neighbours over for a wine and cheese reception during Brian Lenihan’s ‘sackcloth and ashes’ budget.

Wasn’t there a beef mountain at some stage as well – not a mountain as such but weren’t there refrigerated container ships anchored off the coast with enough steak on board to feed an army?

Why didn’t they think of that instead of cheese – or did the vegan-loving Greens rule out any meat eating even if it was already dead and doomed to eternal life at sea?

Did we have a milk lake at one stage as well? Then again, who’d want to accept a litre or two of sour milk when we could be toasting each other’s good health with a drop of Blue Nun?

Even a distribution of the butter mountain would have been a better option; not that we’d eat it of course because the health police insist that a million margarine substitutes in a tub are better for our hearts than the real thing.

No, what we’d do with the butter mountain is sculpt it into a ski slope so that Galway could hold the downhill skiing slice of the Winter Olympics.

And when it was all over, rather than being left with a white (or indeed yellow) elephant, we could then give it to the poor people to put on their bread.

For those of us reared in a time when a choice of cheese stretched to either Galtee or Calvita and when every portion came individually wrapped in silver foil that only a scissors could cope with, all of this might be seen as a symbol of our Celtic Tiger era when we became all sophisticated and held dinner parties to show off our new €50,000 kitchen extension.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.