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.