FROM this side of the Irish Sea the result of the British election seemed very much to suggest that the voice of the British people had spoken and said: “We don’t particularly give our trust or our backing to any of you.”
A closer analysis could, I suppose, lead you to argue that a clear majority had given their vote to parties, Labour and Liberal Democrat, who most would view as being somewhere on the centre-left of the political spectrum.
How interesting then that Sky News and Rupert Murdoch, to say nothing of Nick Clegg and David Cameron, came to the conclusion that Britain in 2010 had clearly given a mandate to a coalition between two past pupils of two of Britain’s most exclusive fee-paying schools.
How strange that this new politics, this new representation of 2010 Britain, should come skipping from the playing fields of Eton and the hallowed halls of Westminster.
How lucky you must feel over there. The toffs have come to save you.
Of course, some argue that to disparage people of privilege simply because they are people of privilege is some kind of inverted snobbery, is merely resentment and envy.
And by and large who really cares where someone went to school?
The truth is though, to say that the two most powerful politicians in a country just happening to come from two of its most elitist schools is of no importance, is clearly ludicrous.
I don’t really care what the background of the person standing next to me at the bar is, but if he also happens to be somebody holding a position of extreme power then I’m mighty interested as to who he is and where he came from.
It wasn’t so long ago, after all, that they were telling us that Britain was now a classless society.
Well, looking at the new Government, it doesn’t look so classless now.
By contrast one of the enduring characteristics we were told Ireland had was that it was genuinely a classless society. Everyone here was in the same boat. Unfortunately that was a very deep lie.
Ireland’s class system may not ever have been as pronounced as in Britain, but it was there all the same.
We should remember again and again that the ones getting the boat were always the same ones and the ones staying at home were always the same ones too.
Ireland’s elite were served well by the lie of the classless society but it remained a lie all the same.
So it might cheer you to know that our equivalent of the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister, our Taoiseach and our Tanaiste, also attended fee-paying boarding schools.
We are not backward here, you know.
We have our own toffs. Indeed of the current Irish cabinet of 15 TDs, nine attended a boarding school, a fee paying school, or a private school with discriminatory admission policies.
Which considering there is, apparently, no class system in Ireland is pretty remarkable.
What is even more remarkable, in the midst of this deep recession, is that these Irish schools with their fees in the region of €6,000 a year for day pupils and up to €16,000 for boarders are supported by the Government to the tune of €100million per year.
These schools, educating the select elite of Irish society, trumpeting their discriminatory admissions policies by advertising the fact that siblings of current pupils, children of past pupils, children of staff, and those already attending their feeder junior schools get first choice are supported by the whole of Irish society.
A society that last year saw some 150,000 people applying for back to school allowances of around €250 for help in buying shoes and clothes for their kids.
From the last figures I can gain access to, these exclusive schools don’t seem to be that keen on advertising their actual fees.
Brian Cowen’s old school was in 2005 charging €8,350 per year for a boarder.
In 2008 this same school received €1.4million support from the State. As I write a Department of Finance suggestion that State support to fee-paying schools be cut by 50 per cent has not been acted upon.
Maybe it doesn’t matter what school Cowen, Clegg or Cameron went to.
In the light of those schools though and what it tells us about them, we might well be justified in asking any of them, in these recessionary times, in these days of cutbacks and financial hardship, now what in hell would you know about that?