To Bee or Not to Bee

I remember the first time I was stung by a bee. I was thirty years old and walking across a lush thick grassed meadow in the Cook Islands in my bare feet. I didn’t see the bee and I guess she didn’t see me. But when I trod on her she did what bees are programmed to do. She launched the ultimate sacrifice and released her sting into the sole of my foot to guarantee that I at least would remember her passing.

I howled like a baby. Partly because I have a comically low pain threshold but also because I was on a remote pacific island and couldn’t be sure that I hadn’t trod on a creature with more fatal consequences. Thankfully my host at the time was able to confirm that it was a simple bee sting and administered a local poultice which relieved the pain in minutes.

I had reached this venerable age without a sting, not through luck, but through avoiding animals in general. I would cross the road if I saw an unleashed dog coming towards me and wave my arms like a manic orchestra conductor if a bee came within twenty metres. It’s not so much that I’m not an animal lover. I passionately hate a lot of species (the entire rodent population for example) and range from dislike to passive disregard for the rest. If truth be told, I’m not that fond of most Homo Sapiens either.

So, you can imagine how I felt when my wife told me that she was in advanced negotiations to procure a fully stocked beehive. Love conquered fear in this case and I acquiesced, although she was getting it from her Dad and it was in the back of our car before I noticed. Her Dad lives 144km from our house, so we had a scary two hour drive back with 20,000 bees on the back seat. They say the best way to expose your fears is to confront them and maybe they are right. That was probably the longest car trip of my life and every movement of hair on my head caused a momentary panic as I assumed the insect hoard had escaped their bondage and where heading my way.

When we got home, I helped carry the box of bees up to their new home with no more protection than a tee shirt and a pair of shorts. It was one of those situations when no alternative was available. The bees couldn’t stay in the car and 20,000 bees in a hive is actually quite heavy and not a job for one person.

Since then, I’ve left them to their own devices. They are far enough from the house not to bother me and they more or less look after themselves. That all changed last Sunday. I got a text from the missus to say that the bees had swarmed. She followed up with a few photos. Swarming is a process that happens when they get fed up of their digs and set off for pastures new. Most often it’s caused by a new Queen who tries to take over the existing hive, gets her ass kicked and heads off in a huff with half the colony.

The biggest fear in this scenario is that the swarm will land in a neighbour’s garden, particularly in the garden of one of those neighbours who weren’t all that happy about having bees in the area in the first place. The other fear is that they land in an inaccessible place, like the roof or near another bee keeper’s property. The salvage rules in the bee world are similar to those on the open sea. If a hive is found in a public place, it’s finders keepers.

Thankfully, in our case the swarm landed in our back yard and attached themselves to a wall above our flower beds. It’s handy being close to your food supply I guess.

But my wife was in a panic. She was on her own and had no protective gear. I had a dilemma. I had bought her a bee keepers outfit for Christmas and didn’t want to ruin the surprise. But needs must and I explained where I’d hidden it in the house. By the time I got home, she had managed to shovel them all into a box. And there they remain to this day, about two metres from the back door.

Bees are a fascinating species. They have an internal GPS system that allows them to find and return to the best feeding places and to find their way home after a 5km daily forage. That’s why you can’t move them more than 30cm at a time. Otherwise they act like tired holiday makers returning to the long term car park and wondering where they left their car.

You will notice from this missive that I seem to have built up some knowledge and interest in this particular species. I have to admit that I’m a little smitten. I find nothing more peaceful than sitting on the deck of an evening and watching all the little fellas come back from their days work and fight to get into the hive. When it gets hot many of them like to cling to the outside of the hive in a process known as bearding. When they cover the entire hive, it’s actually quite beautiful but also an indication that the hive is over extending itself. That’s one of the problems of bees. When they are healthy they keep expanding and then you need to find a friend or neighbour who will take half your colony off your hands.

I think the reason these have become the first animal I like is because you never have to touch them, feed them or pick up their pooh. But I know how long this love affair will last. The first time I get stung, that hive is going straight back to my father in law.

The Rugby World Cup is Class

I’ve always had an interesting relationship with rugby. The earliest game I remember watching on TV was an Ireland v Wales game in what was then the Five Nations. I was about fourteen and working in a pub in my home town labouring away one Saturday afternoon, cleaning ashtrays and the other general detritus left behind by the previous night’s revellers. I had the upstairs lounge to myself and while I cleaned tables I turned the television on for company.

I can’t remember the result or anything else about the game, but for some reason it has lodged in my memory. I think it’s there because it throws up the contradictions that rugby causes me. The very fact that I was working in a pub at the age of fourteen is a give away. I come from a firmly working class background where the only way I could procure a bike to get me to school was to get a job and pay for it myself.

Rugby, then as now, was played by the sort of middle class toff in Ireland that I generally despised and would have harboured dreams of putting up against the wall come the great revolution. As a child, we played soccer on the streets, Gaelic Football at school and at the local club and aped the sports we periodically saw on television, be it Wimbledon or athletics. We never played rugby. I don’t even know anyone in my town that had an oval shaped ball.

And yet, I remember being fascinated by that game. I think the technical rules appealed to my intellect and I’ll admit that the sight of eight burly men driving eight others down the pitch while the crowd howled “heave” appealed to my animal sentiments too.

As I got older, I continued to battle with class sensitivity while my friendships and amorous intentions pulled me towards the middle class. My favourite social destination in my late teens was the rugby club disco on a Saturday night, where you could meet the Doctor’s daughters who lived on the hill that overlooked the terraced house that I grew up in. 

I balanced precariously on the dividing line between my working class past and my middle class future, often falling on one side or other depending on the company I held. I was a social chameleon, comfortable singing off-colour songs at Arsenal matches, while discussing the merits of playing a forwards based game in wet weather at Twickenham with my professional actuarial colleagues.

However, it took me a long time to build up the required social capital to be a true rugby devotee. I had contacts in the soccer world to secure tickets for international matches. But getting access to rugby tickets was a different matter. They were the preserve of people who were members of clubs that would never have me as a member.

I solved this by finding a girlfriend who had social capital I could only dream of. So, it turned out that the first live game of rugby I attended was the World Cup Final in 1991. I followed this up with another visit to Twickenham the following spring to see Ireland lose 38-9 to the old enemy, England (I have to thank Wikipedia for that score as my memory is weaker than Ireland’s defence that day).

I do remember being in the toilets under the West Stand in the immediate aftermath of the match. A rotund English gent in a sheepskin jacket with a large red rosette ambled up beside me.

“Bad luck, old Chap”, he bellowed when he noticed my Ireland scarf.

My most recent direct encounter with England fans was at a soccer international and my old self kicked in.

“Thanks, but you know where you can stick your fuckin’ chariot”, I replied.

After that girl dumped me, I lost my easy access to rugby tickets but maintained my love for the game. I’ve been to most of the great stadiums of the world to see the oval ball game played and it has provided me with some of my best days out.

And now I find myself living in New Zealand, a country supposedly obsessed with rugby. I thought I would become immersed with the game in the way I was with AFL when I moved to Melbourne. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

To start with New Zealand is not quite as fascinated with rugby as people overseas think.  The Maori and Pacific communities are into rugby league. The Chinese and Indians are into basketball and on-line gaming and many white parents are keen on their kids playing soccer.

The country only really gets into rugby when the All Blacks are playing and even then, the expectations that it will be an easy win takes away some of the excitement.

I’ve also noticed that I’m only really interested in international rugby. The Super 15 is the primary club competition in this part of the world, but I wouldn’t watch one of those games if it was played in my backyard.

Then the World Cup came along. This is the first one I’ve witnessed in New Zealand and the first one that Ireland went into as number one in the world. It was all looking good until the country of my birth and the country I live in came face to face in the quarter finals. The Auckland papers were full of references to Leprechauns and ginger haired Guinness drinkers in the week before the game. Ireland was patronised and written off before the game in a way that no other team would be. I had my reply all ready for posting if and when we won the match. It wasn’t to be, but sport is a fickle mistress as the Kiwis found out when England beat them in the semi-finals.

I’ll watch the final with a weathered eye, more interested in tactics than results. And may the best team win, as long it’s not England.

St La Salle, our dearest father

I’m an old boy of De La Salle School Dundalk in the grand old Republic of Ireland. A very old boy at this stage. I left in June 1982 and last set foot in the place in August of that year when I crawled back to the guidance counsellor with my tail between my legs and apologised for mocking him for the previous five years.

The reason for my ego destroying visit was that my grant application for University had just been refused. At the time, Ireland was economically depressed but if you had a job you were either working for yourself or somebody else. My Dad was lucky enough to have employment and he worked his backside off to provide for us by doing every hour of overtime he could wrangle. His wages were taxed by his company and reported to the government. To obtain a grant, my parent’s income had to be below a certain amount. I didn’t make it by a couple of hundred bucks and so had to surrender my dream of becoming an Arts graduate, which in fairness in 1980s Ireland had the job prospects of a steam locomotive driver.

My careers guidance teacher was kinder to me than I had been to him and he set me up with an Interview in an Accountancy office that led me to a high paid career and a comfortable life in New Zealand.

It worked out well in the end, but I still carry some bitterness from those heady days of 1982, particularly as one of my first jobs in that Accountancy office was to complete grant applications for the off spring of farmers, who had far more income and assets than my Dad but were able to hide most of their earnings.

I think my understanding of inequality and injustice started around this time. I was teenage Socialist but this was the first proper kicking I got from Capitalism.

I thought of all this last Monday when I stepped into the foyer of De La School in Auckland. I was curious to see how it compared to my Alma Mater. My first impressions were that it had better sports grounds, which is not surprising when you think about the number of All Blacks it has produced. But the school itself was a rambling collection of pre-fabricated buildings scattered around a crumbling old Victorian building that would not look out of place in a Harry Potter movie.

I got there at 9.30am and late comers were scurrying around in a uniform that was very different to the stylish outfit we rocked back in the 80’s.

My reason for visiting was to drop off sandwiches for kids who get sent to school with no lunch.  My company pays me for five days work but expects me to work just four. In return, I’m expected to do four charity days per year. I chose a sandwich business that provides a free sandwich to hard up kids for everyone it sells.

My job was to be their delivery driver for the day. They gave me a list of four South Auckland schools and a map and sent me on my way. I should explain that Auckland is similar to a lot of cities in that the poor are funnelled into one part of town, so that the rest of the population can live in blissful unawareness that inequity exists. In Dublin, the north of the city is generally poor while the south is rich, although ironically the poorest suburb is in the south and the richest in the north. In Melbourne, they push all the poor out to west.

Auckland follows this structure rigidly. When I was still working in Melbourne, I visited the Citibank building in Auckland. As I knew we planned to live here one day, I asked one of the guys there where was the best place to live in Auckland. He pointed east and said that’s where the English live, west was where the other European immigrants lived, north across the harbour bridge is where the recent wave of white escapees from South Africa lived. I asked about South Auckland and he gave me a knowing smile. “That’s where you live if you support the Warriors rather than the All Blacks.”

We bought a house in South Auckland in 2016, partly because it was near my wife’s family but also because we had no jobs at the time and could afford it without a mortgage. It’s a nice house but 35km from the City centre. That means I’ve spent the last three years on the train each day enjoying the scenery that South Auckland has to offer. That’s a succession of car breaking yards, falling down, damp ridden houses, angry dogs on rope, cars on bricks and vast yards where shipping containers go to die. It’s where Auckland’s Maori and Pacifica communities live. They tend to be the most disadvantaged communities in a country that is still run by and for the privileged white community.

And Maori and Pacifica tend to favour Rugby League over Rugby Union. Union is more egalitarian here than in Europe, but it is still considered to be the white man’s game. The Warriors play in the Australian National Rugby League and that’s the only sports shirt you see in South Auckland.

I visited four schools that morning, delving deeper into the heart of darkness. The boxes of sandwiches got bigger as the schools got smaller. My final destination was a small primary school, where by my calculation every second kid in the school was getting a free sandwich. The America’s Cup will be here in 2021 when Auckland will showcase it’s beautiful harbour and flaunt the wealth that this country clearly enjoys.

I doubt if De La Salle or the other schools in South Auckland will make it onto that coverage. They form the part of New Zealand that nobody wants to talk about. They are hungry for sandwiches and also for a voice.

Take your fast car and keep on driving

I think it was the white leather seats that appealed to me, or perhaps it was the winking wing mirrors that warned of an approaching car in my righthand lane. Whatever it was, it didn’t take long to convince me that this particular car was the Mazda CX5 I’d be looking for. Ten minutes later, I shook hands with the salesman and handed over an obscene amount of money for a second hand vehicle.

When we arrived in New Zealand, we realised that we needed a car quickly. Very soon afterwards, we realised we actually needed two. Kiwis have the highest number of cars per capita in the world. There are a number of reasons for this. Public transport is piss poor in the cities and non-existent in the countryside. There are none of the restrictions on owning old, smoke guzzling rust buckets like you find in Europe. And finally, New Zealand is a dumping ground for all the second hand cars the Japanese no longer want. 

So, the average Kiwi family has a big car for the weekends, a little car for dropping the kids to school, a thirty-year-old Toyota Corolla for each of the teenagers over sixteen and an old Hiace van for when they go camping. And if you leave out the big car, the rest probably cost less together than an average family car in Ireland.

We bought a 2002 Honda Accord when we got here in 2016. So, it was seventeen when we sold it recently. That’s pretty normal for a car here, where most of the cars are driven by people younger than the car itself. A week later, we bought the Mazda CX5. Like most second hand cars here, it was fresh off the boat from Yokahama. It was a 2016 model and as I did the test drive, I noticed that things have moved on since I last drove a modern car. You don’t need a key anymore and the handbrake is a little button on the dashboard that gives you no confidence that the brake has been set.

The dials and clocks on the dashboard have also disappeared, to be replaced by electronic displays that wink and flash like a joyride at the playground. It makes you feel that you should be sitting in the back reading the newspaper and let the electronic wizardry do its thing. On the test drive, I noticed the onboard display was providing tons of information, but the problem was it was all in Japanese.

Now, I watched a lot of war movies as a kid and can stretch to a “Tora, Tora, Tora” or “Banzai” if required. But I’m at a loss for the Japanese for “Average Speed” or “Litres per kilometre”. So, I agreed with the dealer that they would fiddle with the software to fix this for a not insignificant price.

I picked the car up three days later and headed to the in-laws house on the coast. The first part of the trip was uneventful until an orange light appeared on the dashboard. I pulled in and checked on-line and it said that this was a warning about tyre pressure. I checked all four tyres with the time-honoured method of administering a swift toe poke to each of them and they seemed fine. I called the dealer and he said the tyres had all been pumped up before he handed the car over and the warning light was probably due to “settling”. He suggested turning the car off and on again, demonstrating what a loss he was to the IT industry.

Anyway, this seemed to work and we carried on. I pulled in for petrol and spent ten minutes trying to find the cap release switch (why can’t they put these in the same place in every car). When I pulled out of the garage, another orange light flicked on. This one was for “check engine” which is the sort of vague answer you’d get from a fifteen year old if you asked what they had been up to.

Google told me that either my petrol cap was loose or my engine was about to seize up catastrophically, proving that the greatest search engine in the world can scare the life out of you by giving widely divergent results when giving car information as well as medical updates.

My petrol cap was indeed loose and I fixed this and carried on my merry way. We soon reached the motorway. The speed limit there is 100kmh and most kiwis keep to the limit. I found myself overtaking everyone and whizzing down the outside lane. I glanced at the speed dial as I did this and it said I was doing 75 to 80. As I overtook a Ferrari, I realised that there was a problem with the software. I assumed they had set it to miles per hour rather than kilometres but the problem as it turned out was even dumber.

Speed dials in Japan only go to 160kmh. In Europe and New Zealand, they go to 220km. So, when they changed the software to English from Japanese it assumes my dial reflected this. If I was travelling at 110kmh, the software would set the indicator at half way around the dial. I still had the Japanese speedo display, so this showed as 80kmh. Luckily, I didn’t have to explain that to a speed cop. I’m not sure how hot the New Zealand police are on calibration and mathematics.

I brought it back to the dealer to be fixed. They said it would take a day or two. Eight weeks later, I finally got the car back. The entire dashboard had been replaced and from what they explained, it seemed like they had to contact NASA to get to the root of the issue.

As I drove from the showroom after finally picking the car up, I noticed that some of the dashboard readings had gone back to Japanese. I pondered my options and came to the conclusion that it would be quicker to learn a new language than to try and get the software fixed.

The Good Old Days

I left home when I was 22 and took a flight to London. It was February 1988 and I joined 80,000 others who deserted the sinking ship that was the Irish economy. Unlike most of them, I had a job in Ireland, but left it for the bright lights of Soho and the smell of a pound.

The job I left was a 35 hour a week role in an Accountancy practice. When I got to London, I expected this to change. To my country bumpkin eyes, London was the centre of the financial universe, with young hustlers in striped shirts and braces working 16 hours a day to cover markets in New York and Tokyo.

The reality was a little different. Thatcher had been in power for nine years by the time I arrived, but she hadn’t quite snuffed out the flame of collectivisation and worker’s rights. I got a job with a large insurance company, as an Accountant in their head office finance team. I thought I had finally arrived in the Promised Land. That at last I was dining at the altar of high finance. But in many ways, it was like stepping back into the 1950s.

There were twenty other Accountants in the team, all white and all male.  I was there when the first female Accountant was hired and management patted themselves on the back for their sense of diversity. On my first day I was invited to the pub for lunch by my boss. I had never drank at lunchtime before and starting the habit on a Monday didn’t seem a good idea. I found out later that he was an alcoholic. He would have happily drank every lunchtime but settled for three times a week to keep up appearances. He had Wednesday and Friday already sorted out but needed to be creative to find an excuse to go on Monday. I was his excuse on my first day but blew it by turning down the invitation. I had been offered three jobs and took the one with the Insurance Company because they had an excellent canteen. At that age, I couldn’t boil an egg and finding a job that would feed me every day was key.

The other thing that happened on my first day was a meeting with the staff association representative. He told me about the company sports club, the social club, the collective bargaining process and the company working hours. We were expected to work a 35 hour week and had to be in the office between 10am and 4pm each day, with an hour for lunch. The remaining two hours a day could be done before 10am, after 4pm or for most people an hour each side.

If you did an additional seven hours in a month (which wasn’t hard as it amounted to twenty minutes a day) you were entitled to a day off.

This wasn’t unusual at the time. Companies competed on how many benefits they could offer employees and employee care and well-being was high on their priority list.

I mention all this because the company I work for now has introduced a four day week. We still get paid the same as when we worked five days and in theory you don’t have to increase your hours on the four days you are in the office. This has been met with huge interest from the likes of CNN, BBC and every morning show from here to Hawaii. The owner reckons it has been clicked on two hundred million times and he has received more free publicity than Banksy did when he shredded that picture.

 

I get met with incredulity when I tell people about this. The most surprising thing to them is that a company would introduce a policy that is beneficial to their staff when the trajectory of the last thirty years has been in the opposite direction.

I left that comfy job in London for a three year posting to Luxembourg. When I rocked up back in Dublin in 1996 the world had changed. Globalisation was stalking the world and Capitalism was king. If you weren’t working hard enough, your job would get shipped off to some third world country overseas. Thatcher and Reagan’s legacy was that collectivisation and employee welfare were consigned to the rubbish bin of history and that individuality was king. We moved to single contracts, performance based pay and a bonus culture.

If your job is office based, it’s difficult to objectively measure performance because the metrics aren’t as straightforward as it is in say, the widget manufacturing business. People are positively assessed for the amount of hours they work because this is the laziest form of measurement. Like the guy who sends emails at 1am or the girl who is always first in and last to leave. It’s an easy optic and one that is easily abused by the cunning masters of presenteeism. I’m not immune to this myself and am in fact writing this at work while pretending to be busy.

I am indulging in this trip down memory lane to make the point that the policy my company here in New Zealand has implemented is not revolutionary. It is more generous than the one I worked under in 1988 (I now have to work 30 hours a week rather than 34 then) but the principle is the same. They both aim to reward staff by giving them time back rather than money. At the centre of both policies is a concern for employees above profit. Although both companies believe that if you have a contented and rested workforce, then more productivity will result.

It should not be shocking that my company has introduced a policy like this. What is shocking is that everybody used to think like this and then moved in the opposite direction. We lost our way over the past twenty five years. We are taking the first steps to re-embrace that glorious past.    

Kia Kaha Christchurch

I started my last blog by saying that nothing ever happens in New Zealand until something serious happens. I didn't realise how true this would be until the events of last Friday played out on the streets of Christchurch. Something serious was happening and it might change the way Kiwis look at themselves and the way the World looks at this country.

I've lived here for just over three years now. That has been filled with the 'nothing ever happens' stuff. You think that's boring but its actually the reason most immigrants choose to live here. You can enjoy the beautiful countryside, the virgin beaches, the pleasant weather and the friendly locals. You also don't have to worry about crazy tweets from your populist leader or live in an existential crisis about which trading group your country should belong to. The news is something that happens overseas, tucked into the middle of the paper here, between the agricultural prices and the rugby results. 

They interview the Prime Minister on the radio here every Monday and then they give the leader of the opposition the right of reply on Tuesday. That's because it takes him that long to think of something interesting to say, a task he fails miserably with most weeks. If you distil both of their conversations, you could create one of those Apps that help people get to sleep at night. Politics is dull and boring here. The most radical party in Parliament is one whose main policy is to increase old age pensions.

This serenity was shattered on Friday afternoon by the madness in Christchurch. I have no great insight into the mind of someone who could carry out such an act. I'm not sure I want to understand a mind like his because it must be like staring into hell. I'm normally as liberal as they come when it comes to prison reform, but in this case, I'd be happy if the perpetrator was locked up for 23 hours a day with a gap-toothed burly Maori with a sexual preference for pasty-faced Australian men.

Christchurch was the first place I visited in New Zealand. I arrived in December 1995 and spent three wonderful months there. I've been back many times since, so it holds a special place in my heart. A heart that has already been dented by the deadly earthquake in 2011.

I grew up in Ireland of course, in the years of the erroneously named "Troubles". Last Friday's events reminded me of the Omagh bombing in 1998. I was on a mountain hike that August afternoon, enjoying the beautiful scenery of the Cooley Mountains and Carlingford Lough. The tranquillity was shattered when news crackled across the radio that 29 people lay dead. Ireland had slipped into a sleepy innocence before then, seduced by the Good Friday Agreement and the promise of future peace.

New Zealand felt like that on Friday. I had just come back from a boozy Pre Paddie's Day lunch when the sad news from Christchurch started to trickle in. We gathered in the office kitchen to watch the unfolding coverage on TV. It felt as though the countries innocence was seeping away through an open wound. While most people said, "this is not New Zealand", you could tell that many of them felt that the country would never be the same again.

The big bad world that normally lives on TV screens, the world of suicide bombers, of hatred and despair, had landed on our shores. This sleepy little corner of the world, that thought it was immune to the madness that seems to engulf the rest of the planet was wrong. Unfortunately, evil knows no borders. 

Some solace can be found in the fact that the shooter was an Australian who learned his hate overseas. Apparently, he chose Christchurch because he happened to be living in New Zealand at the time his mind flicked into monster mode and because mosques make soft targets here. There is little Islamophobia in New Zealand so nobody thought their places of worship needed security.

Despite the sadness, however, I am still filled with hope. After the Omagh bomb Ireland rallied against the few malcontents who refused to get on the peace train. They were no longer tolerated and it drove people in the South to have a greater understanding of the plight of our neighbours in Northern Ireland.

I think the same will happen in New Zealand. I have Muslim neighbours and I called in to see them on Saturday. It was the first time I'd been in their house and I would say that's an experience that was mirrored throughout the country. Kiwis like to accentuate the difference between here and Australia. Islamophobia is rampant there and they even have a couple of out and out fascists in Parliament. In contrast, New Zealand likes to promote tolerance and humanity.

We are also blessed to have a wonderful Prime Minister in this regard. She fronted up on Friday and said that Muslims were part of 'Us' and the killer wasn't. I have lived under many leaders and Jacinda Adhern is the most compassionate and well-intentioned of them all. The contrast between her and say, Margaret Thatcher, could not be greater. 

The outpouring of sympathy and support the Muslim community has been heartening. Kia Kaha is the Maori for 'stay strong'. You see it everywhere this week. After a forest fire, a new and healthy life emerges. I really hope that happens in Christchurch, a city I love and want to see rise from the ashes. 

This is a great country and one bad bastard won't change that. Kia Kaha. 

Irish Traveller or Traveller from England?

One of the great things about living in New Zealand is that hardly anything ever happens until something major does. Like an earthquake or volcano. That happens every five years or so. In the meantime, I can sit back and enjoy the temperate climate and stunning views and not have to worry that I’m living in a Brexit nightmare or under the yolk of the great overlord Trump.

This is not to say that New Zealand doesn’t have its problems. Poverty is endemic within the Maori community and the country suffers from the sort of income inequality that would make Margaret Thatcher blush. But you rarely read stories about this in the paper. The public want to read about things that are unusual and unfortunately these issues don’t pass that test.

Summer is a particularly quiet time in the media here, when the serious journalists are all at the beach and the interns they’ve left behind struggle to fill the paper. Luckily for them a family of tourists stepped into the breach this year and their antics as the travelled through the country made regular front page news.

The story started around new year when a popular beach in the northern suburbs of Auckland was left covered in litter by a large family of outsiders. This would not be uncommon on a beach in Dublin on the August bank holiday or along the white sands of Ibiza. But New Zealand has different expectations of its tourists. They believe that people come here for the scenery, the clean air and the chance to see a hobbit. Chip packets on a beach don’t fit this narrative and a few of the middle-class locals thought it prudent to voice their objections to the tourists while cleverly recording their interaction on a mobile phone.

The tourists responded with some industrial language and sent their youngest (an eight-year-old) forward to threaten to beat the brains out of the local. That was enough to make the headlines on the six a clock news. Who doesn’t like a young fella in an oversized hat shouting abuse after all?

By the following day the papers were full of follow up stories. Unpaid meals, sunglasses pilfered from petrol stations and motel rooms trashed. In these early reports, the family were described as “Irish Travellers”. That is the polite modern term in Ireland and the UK for gypsies. But not many Kiwis are familiar with this linguistic compromise. So, they reached the logical conclusion that “Irish Traveller” was the same as “Tourist from Ireland”.

After a couple of days, the Police started harassing them in much the same way as the Irish and British police do. They were arrested for walking through a Burger king drive-in and condemned for leaving used towels on the bathroom floor of a motel they rented.

This led to some curious questions at work. Kiwis are used to seeing Irish people drunk on St Patrick’s Day but they don’t particularly associate us with litter and being badly dressed. I tried to explain the socio-economic conditions in which Travellers in Ireland live and their fractious relationship with the settled community. That if you spent ten minutes in the shoes of a Traveller, you would very quickly lose any respect for the social conventions of normal society.

My explanation fell on deaf ears. New Zealand has its own underclass, stoned on meth and living in tumble down houses with angry dogs and cars up on bricks. But these people don’t leave rubbish on the beach and generally keep themselves to themselves. Or should I say the nice middle class people of New Zealand know how to avoid them.

Then the Irish Honoury Consul General in Auckland stepped into the fray. She clearly had access to inside information and sent out a pompous press release saying that the family weren’t Irish at all. They lived in Britain and were travelling on British passports. With this single sentence, the Irish community in New Zealand breathed a sigh of relief and washed their hands of the issue. The New Zealand media got the message and started calling them “Unruly British Tourists” because there is nothing the Kiwis like better than bashing the Poms.

But another line in the Consul General’s press release caught my eye. She pointed out that “Irish Travellers” is an ethnic group and not a nationality and this had nothing to do with Ireland. This is consistent with how mainstream Ireland treats Travellers. There are outsiders, not like us and generally a nuisance.

This is hypocritical of course. It’s not so long since a Traveller carried the Irish flag at the Olympics and won us boxing golds. We all jumped on that bandwagon. And we are picky about which people of Irish decent that we allow into the national tent. If you are good at Football, it doesn’t matter how Irish you feel, we’ll give you a green jersey. Likewise, if you live in Ireland and do something noble like win a Nobel Prize, then we’ll happily put you on our Great Irish Writers posters and name pubs after you. But if you were a nasty 19^th Century landlord, then you are a dirty Brit. Oscar Wilde is an Irish hero, Captain Boycott is a British rogue, even though they both come from the same Anglo background.

This is not unusual. Every country clings to those that bring it pride while disassociating themselves from the dullards. The Dutch love their artists and footballers, but they disassociate themselves from Afrikaners in South Africa, even though they speak Dutch and have Dutch names. 

Ireland talks fondly about its diaspora, how the President keeps a light in his window to welcome emigrants’ home. That doesn’t work if you are a Traveller. Once they have driven their caravan onto the Holyhead ferry, Ireland can wash its hands of them. Most Irish people disown Travellers when they live in Ireland; they are not going to claim them as Irish when they live abroad.

Artificial Ignorance

I started work in September 1982 for the princely sum of 20 punts a week. That wasn’t a lot of money even then but the job was in an Accountancy office and it held out the tantalizing promise of riches to come. When I turned up for the interview for that job the partner tried to temper my expectation by letting me know that they planned to cut back on recruitment due to their imminent acquisition of two IBM computers. 

I got the job anyway and started on the same day as the shiny new computers as well as the two extra staff that had been hired to input data into them. They also had a dedicated room to themselves with air-conditioning, which was as rare in rural Ireland then as divorce, gay marriage or abortion services.

  

This was my first encounter with automation and the false promise that it was going to eliminate 90% of jobs. When you read about automation and robotics, you’ll notice that Accounting jobs are usually the first mentioned. There is an assumption that everything we bean counters do can be programmed and run instantaneously. I’ve been hearing this argument for 36 years now and every company I’ve worked for has thought they were the first to realise that automation could cut job numbers. The truth is that any organisation worth its salt would try to be more efficient and hiring accountants is actually the smartest way of achieving this.

  

My current boss is the latest to think that he discovered automation. I work in an IT team these days, surrounded by the sort of nerds who make us Accountants look like rock stars. He sent me an email he’d received from KPMG advertising robotic software that could cut accounting teams by 90%. Given that KPMG is an accounting firm, this is like turkeys sending out an email with roasting recipes.

What my boss doesn’t appreciate is that the work Accountants do is not an automated process. My first five years in accountancy were spent trying to minimise the profits that client’s reported, so that they paid the least amount of tax possible. It wasn’t the most ethical thing I’ve ever done and I’d like to say it was mostly legal, but it was creative. This often involved helping farmers to explain how they had bought lots of cows but hadn’t sold any and didn’t have any left at the end of the year. That was my introduction to bovine diseases and the number of fictitious cow skeletons there are in top fields in Ireland.

I once had a Tax Inspector call me to say that I hadn’t reported income from the pub that a farmer client owned. I replied that while he might have an old shack on his farm, he only opened it once a year for his family in order to keep the licence. The Tax Inspector laughed and said the one day he opened this year must have been the occasion that U2 were playing and that there were 200 cars in the car park that night. I’d like to see a robot handle that conversation.

I moved to London after that and got a job with an Insurance company that had launched several small companies in the wake of the Financial Services explosion in the UK in the 1980s. I was tasked with the monthly reporting of these companies, most of which were technically insolvent and were leaking cash like a drunk sailor on shore leave.

My job was to present a rosy picture and to go against my previous training by inflating profits. This meant hiding expenses and reporting income that wasn’t exactly earned. I won’t go into the detail for legal reasons. But when I moved on from this job, I just hope that my successor could make sense of my creative ramblings.

I spent the next twenty years valuing investment funds. My role there was to find a way of covering up the mistakes that others, including the automated systems we used, made. This involved a lot of creativity, from hiding documents to trying to confuse auditors with bullshit.

All in all, I think Accountants are safe for a while yet. At least until they can write a program that can lie and cheat. Which comes to think of it, maybe they have. Google tells you they don’t read your emails anymore, but can still provide three helpful suggested replies at the bottom of each Gmail. And if you’ve ever used google maps, it tends to take you through industrial estates rather than in a straight line, as though it has shares in petrol companies and wants to maximise your fuel consumption.

Automation is tied to artificial intelligence, an oxymoron that is up there with British Intelligence and Civil War. I hear a lot of guff about artificial intelligence and how the big tech companies are at the forefront of its implementation. Despite this, Facebook effectively got Donald Trump elected while Mark Zuckerberg is clearly a Democrat and Google will make sure you get an advertisement for a product immediately after you’ve bought it. People tell me that this is because Google knows that you’ve searched for flights but doesn’t know that you’ve booked and paid for one, despite the fact that the airline has sent you a confirmation Gmail, which as I mentioned above, they clearly read.

Every generation puts a hero up the pop charts. And every generation thinks it has cracked the secret of work. Yet there are more people working today than when the spinning jenny was invented. Then again, nobody worked in marketing or web development back then and this is the point. As one job gets automated, humanity finds a way to create another. We might all end up as hairdressers, pet psychics and YouTube contributors but all of these people will need Accountants to creatively boost or hide profits. I’ve got 12 years to retirement. I think I’m safe.