The Cure at Troy

Brian taught English at Xavier College for nearly forty years. He retired three years ago but kept in touch with his old buddies through a friendly little group that meets every Friday morning. They have a cup of coffee in Brunetti’s in Carlton and talk about the good old days when boys could be smacked if they couldn’t name the twelve apostles or recite the life history of Ignatius Loyola. Once the coffee and the nostalgia are out of the way, Brian and his fellow retirees head down to East Melbourne for their weekly meeting with John the security guard.

John didn’t go to a posh school like Xavier College. He’s a bit vague on schooling to be honest. His years in the Army beat out any memories of childhood, happy or otherwise and his lived in face and bulbous fists suggests that his education didn’t come from musty old priests and men in tweed jackets. He shuffled from foot to foot as if ready to start a race and stared with weary resignation as Brian and his friends unpacked their placards and assembled a small table on the footpath before him.

Brian has been coming here every Friday morning for the past two years but has never spoken to John. They dance around each other but are destined never to embrace.

The retirees like to be set up by 8am when the first appointments are held in the East Melbourne Day procedure centre. Brian likes to think that they hold a dignified protest and they make a point of not speaking to or physically impeding the frightened and lonely women who are there to avail of the centre’s pregnancy termination services. John is there just in case their dignity deserts them.

I passed at 8am on my way to work and as anyone who knows me will testify, my brain is not exactly in gear at that ungodly hour. I saw a group of old men engaged in a silent protest outside a medical centre and assumed that Australia had followed Ireland’s example and removed free healthcare for pensioners. Or perhaps they were complaining about the delay in receiving a hip replacement. It was only when I got closer that I saw that their protest was more sinister and realised that being undignified can come in other ways than through the spoken word. Brian held a poster that showed a picture of a before and after termination. Subtlety obviously wasn’t the corner stone of their campaign.

I stopped and asked if they were Catholic. “We’re not a Catholic organisation” Brian said. “But most of us are Catholics.” He picked up on my accent and asked if I was also a member of the one true faith.

I said only part of me was these days, but it was my conscience and it told me that these guys should be ashamed of themselves. Brian didn’t even flinch. Countering that argument was taught in Pro-Life class 101. “There is no shame in helping those who can’t help themselves”.

“What would Jesus do?” I said. “What did he do when he found Mary Magdalene being stoned? She had been engaged in the sort of sexual immoralities that you guys get excited about. Did he knock up a couple of posters of her before and after she’d been stoned? Did he tell her about the various departments of hell to which she was condemned? No, he didn’t. He put his arm round her and told her that he loved her. But what did he do when he found the money lenders in the temple? He smashed up their tables and threw them out. Because Jesus realised that Greed is man’s worse sin. So you know what you and your pensioner mates should be doing Brian? You should be outside the Banks down in the CBD protesting about their immorality and leave these poor girls to their own conscience.”

I heard a chuckle from behind and saw that John was taking great merriment from my comments. “These guys act all holier than thou. But there’s an old fellow sleeps in that alleyway every night and none of them would even bring him a cup of tea. They don’t care about real people, only ones who haven’t been born yet.”

Brian ignored him as he had clearly done every Friday for the past two years. I was a reluctant but potential recruit however. “Do you know The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney?” he asked.

And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing

the outcry and the birth-cry

of new life at its term.

“You’re not trying to convince me with poetry” I asked. “Sure even the devil can quote scripture for his purpose.” Brian smiled. His eyes lit up when I mentioned the devil, as though we were back in his territory. “I taught Heaney for the last twenty years in Xavier. Don’t you think those words are pertinent.”

“I prefer the start of that poem” I said. “Human Beings suffer, they torture one another, they get hurt and get hard… and hope and history rhyme”. Isn’t there lots of pain and suffering in the world that you could devote your energies towards? Why not protest about the real live babies being bombed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq? Or the malnourished children being brought up in poverty in some of Melbourne’s suburbs?”

“These guys haven’t got long left” John said. “They have to ration out their protest. Give it a couple of years and they’ll all be dead and then they can ask God personally if they were right to make my Friday mornings miserable these pass two years.”

Thirty minutes later I was sitting at my money lenders desk in the temple of Capitalism. Doom and gloom filled our computer screens and it seemed as though the second coming was at hand. Jesus, in the form of the global credit crisis was about to smash our tables and chuck our immoral asses into the street.

The Road Home

I was going to write about the global financial crisis this week, but then I realised that I’m an accountant who has worked in the Financial Services industry for twenty years and I haven’t got a bloody clue what’s going on, so how I am expected to explain it to others. Anyway, I don’t know about you but I’m getting a bit bored with the whole thing. When you wake up to the news of another disastrous day on Wall Street for the umpteenth morning in a row, it kind of loses its dramatic impact. Cancer is a disaster, getting a letter from your first girlfriend saying her mother won’t let her see you anymore because of her upcoming exams is a disaster, Man United winning the treble in 1999 was a disaster. But rich people’s investments being worth less than they were yesterday, well that’s not even unfortunate.

Despite my profession, I’ve always had a carefree relationship with money. The truth is, I’ve never had it for long enough to develop an attachment. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate the finer things in life that only money can buy, I’ve just always felt that I should own money and not the other way round. When asked why I stuck with a highly stressful job, I used to say that I had an expensive burger and chip habit to support. And this wasn’t too far from the truth. I ate my way through the Celtic Tiger, fur and all. As a result I stacked on about 15 kilos during my years in Dublin, as my body became a symbol for the bloated excess of modern Ireland. Unlike the Irish economy mine wasn’t looking like it would implode any time soon, so I’ve taken things into my own hands.

I’ve started walking home a couple of times a week, which is helping with the weight loss but also gives me a chance to throw the old Ipod on shuffle and to enjoy the spring evenings through the riverbanks and parks of this beautiful city. I start in Collins St in the central business district or CBD as it’s known. All Australian cities have to have a CBD, even if they have little or no business to transact. It’s downhill from there to the Yarra River which meanders like a brown snake towards the salt water of Port Phillip Bay. Tonight the rowers are out in force, pumping their narrow boats through the still waters in a blur of rippling muscles. I head over the bridge and onto St. Kilda road with its tree lined thoroughfare leading south towards the shore and my house. From here its about 10km home, but I’m emboldened by the memory of being 8 years old when the De La Salle brothers used to make us do 10 mile sponsored walks to raise money for the brothers alcohol and pornography fund. So if I could do that as an 8 year old in the sort of hob nailed boots that my mother used to make me wear, then this little jaunt should be no trouble at all. Of course, as an 8 year old, I wasn’t carrying a wallet, blackberry, mobile phone, Ipod and 15 kilos of excess weight.

The Arts centre comes up on my right with its sophisticated advertisements for upcoming ballets and symphonies. Sydney may have the Opera House, but Melbourne has the culture. When they built the centre, they must have stepped back and thought that it looked like a 1970s communist party headquarters because only that could explain the obvious afterthought that they stuck on top. I think they were going for an Eiffel Tower look, but they’ve ended up with something that I could only describe as a mobile phone mast, if that didn’t do a disservice to the architectural splendour of phone masts.

Down the road I come to the domain and the sweeping parklands that blanket the southern part of town. Directly ahead is the striking war memorial that stands sentry over the City and the rattle of trams passing domain interchange on their way to exotic locations like Toorak and Kooyong. The traffic gets quieter as the road widens and trees become bushier and more frequent and suddenly I can hear the music coming through my headphones. Every now and again the shuffle will throw up a classic from my innocent youth that I haven’t listened to in years and I find myself singing along to Cat Stephens or Gordon Lightfoot. Luckily all the other walkers are wired into their own personal entertainment and are oblivious to my tuneless warbling.

The impressive grounds of Wesley College come up on the left and I think of all my old friends in Wesley Hall in Dublin. I’m sure they will be glad to hear that the Methodists in Melbourne are keeping up the traditions of their Irish cousins. They also charge extortionist fees to educate the sons of the wealthy and privileged and to maintain the social order.

I turn right and head down towards Albert Park. Meatloaf has just started singing to me about how two out of three ain’t bad. My singing amuses a homeless person sitting outside a shelter and momentary embarrassment leads to a shared chuckle. I skirt the lake with its serious runners in lycra and wrap around shades and head for the open fields of the park. Chinese immigrants in counterfeit Arsenal football tops are playing 5 a side with jumpers for goal posts and large ladies in baggy tracksuits are being put through their paces by a sadist with a whistle. In between there are groups of twos and threes engaged in that great and pointless pastime of kicking an Aussie Rules football to each other.

The sight of all that physical exercise makes me tired but I know I’m nearly home. I brave it through Fitzroy St with its tempting take away smells and turn on to the esplanade above St Kilda beach. The sun is melting across the bay in reds and oranges and this spurs me on for the last kilometre. I make it home and head into I Carusi for a celebration Quattro Formaggi pizza. “You’re quiet tonight”, I said. She shrugged and said “global financial crisis, nobody wants to eat out until things settle down”. There’s no escaping it I guess but if you want a temporary respite then put your Ipod on and head out for a walk.

International Banking - My part in it's downfall

The Irish Banks went on strike for three months in 1976 and to be honest I’m not sure anybody noticed. In those days most people were paid in cash and if you were unlucky enough to get a cheque, there were plenty of pubs that would cash it for you and they would then use it to pay their suppliers in an unofficial system of credit. Most people were spared the luxury of savings and so didn’t have to worry about it being locked up in some untouchable vault. What little they had was kept in the post office or the credit union and that’s where you got a car loan or the money to go on holiday. Banks were simply magnificent Georgian buildings in the town square that changed your punts into sterling when you were visiting your sister in Birmingham each summer.

People owned their own house (and usually only one in the days before Irish people owned as many houses as John McCain) or lived in one kindly provided by the local council, so Mortgages were as rare as hen’s teeth. Pensions were paid by your employer or the State and were based on your final salary and not the whims of the stock market.

In short, people had little or no interaction with banks, apart from an obsession with getting their children a job in one. If banks had gone bust then, it would scarcely have bothered the masses as much as the risk of their local pub closing. These days of course it is different. Banks all over the world are tottering on the precipice with only the weak and unsteady hand of government holding them back. And everybody is affected by this whether they like it or not.

In the past thirty years, Governments have abdicated responsibility for running the economy to the International private banking system. On your first day at work HR will give you a form requesting lots of personal (and mainly intrusive but irrelevant) information. This will include your bank account number, so that they may efficiently transfer your hard earned cash into the clutches of a private company. You can try and argue that you want no hand or part in this capitalist conspiracy, but you won’t get very far and you certainly won’t get paid.

Once your money is in the bank, you’re on the slippery slope towards debt and destitution. They will drip feed it back to you in weekly withdrawals from the hole in the wall outside or make you queue for half an hour to get it from a surly clerk who will make you feel guilty for withdrawing your own cash. Over time the bank will encourage you to get a credit card and maybe a loan or two (particularly if they trapped you at a drink fuelled student promotion) and maybe tease you with some tax avoiding off-shore savings account.

Encouraging salaries to be paid directly into banks was the first example of outsourcing society’s needs to these private and profit making institutions. But much worse was to follow and for that we have to look to that arch enemy of Society, Margaret Thatcher. She engineered a seismic cultural change in Britain that most people understood as uncomfortable but went along with anyway. In Ireland, we swallowed our normal anti-English sentiment and embraced Thatcherism with enthusiasm. I was always a rebel against this orthodoxy I should say and I proved this when I refused to pay my poll tax while living in England in the late 1980’s. At the time, I lived across Dulwich Park from Thatcher and she never called in to say hello or to bring round a cake when the three of us Irish lads moved in next to her. We were in the flat one night when Thatcher popped up on the news. Emperor Hirohito had just died and the Iron Lady was making a pompous speech about how she would be shunning the funeral on account of the Japanese making the English build a railway in Burma during world war two when that was clearly a job for Irish navvies. My flatmate Jella chuckled and said “that’s OK; the bitch can pass on her condolences in person when she meets him in hell”. Oh how we laughed.

So you can tell that I don’t have a soft spot for her. But my feelings are complicated by the fact that I have become fat and comfortable from her decisions. I got a job in Financial Services in the UK at precisely the time that Thatcher was de-regulating that industry and handing over the keys to the nation’s housing stock and the administration of ordinary people’s pensions. In a few short years, council housing estates were sold off to banks who then mortgaged them back to the people who had lived in them for generations. Your pension was no longer a guaranteed reward after a life of hard work, but something you had to pay for yourself. It would then go into the coffers of a large financial institution to be gambled on stock markets and in complex financial instruments which were beyond the intellect of even those who administered them.

So unlike 1976, if banks fail now, they will bring your salary, your savings, your house and your pension down with them. We have sold our economic soul to these bastions of profit and risk and if they crash it would be as fundamental as the loss of water, electricity or breathable air. So while it is morally repugnant to have tax payers bail out these bastards, the alternative is such an appalling vista that it can scarcely be contemplated. Our governments took Thatcher’s lead and mortgaged our souls to the banks. The really scary thing is that they also sold water, electricity and the maintenance of clean air to private companies. They are also greedy and speculative and will eventually fail for the same reason the banks have failed. Guess who will have to bail them out?

Ah Sure that was a Grand Final

Memory is a funny thing. What we choose to remember probably says more about us than anything else. I’m useless with names for example which is unfortunate as I’m also useless at bluffing. So I’ve met people in the street that I’ve known for years and can’t for the life of me remember what they are called. But instead of coming up with a story about a bang on my head that has suddenly made me amnesic or how I’m really my twin brother and I believe the person in front of me is my sibling’s friend, I mumble a few words and stumble on.

For reasons I’ll come to, this week I tried to remember a school class from years ago. It was in 1980 I think and the school had reluctantly decided to teach us Civics. I say reluctantly because my school cared only for academic achievement and Civics wasn’t on the State exam system in those days. In hindsight it seems strange that a country so obsessed with its History and national pride should care so little about teaching its kids about modern Irish life. I guess like its people, it prefers to live in the past. In the 1980’s our past was a glamorous place of heroes and princes. Our present was a grey and rain-sodden tale of strikes and emigration boats.

I can remember everything about that first Civics class except the name of the teacher. Maybe I’m just fascinated about what she was talking about or maybe she was the first female I had a crush on. Only Freud will know. The subject that day was national cultural events. Like most teachers, instead of telling us things, she asked questions and tried to tease the answer out of us. This took hours and I often wondered why she didn’t just tell us the answers in the first place.

So for forty minutes we struggled to name Ireland’s annual cultural events. Christmas didn’t count apparently because it wasn’t uniquely Irish. After much huffing and puffing, Snotser McKeown mentioned St Patricks Day. It was the first thing Snotser had said all year, apart from asking for the loan of a tissue (a loan I might point out that nobody ever wanted to be repaid). Those of us in the smart row were upbraided by Snotser beating us to the teacher’s approval, so we argued fiercely that St Patrick’s Day wasn’t uniquely Irish either. Even in those days, it was clearly an event for yanks and other plastic paddies. But she wasn’t having any of it and wrote it on the board were it stood naked and alone for the rest of the class. As the bell was ringing for lunch, she lost her patience and screamed “what about the bloody All-Ireland Final”. We looked at each other with surprise and thought, “Isn’t that just a football match”?

I thought of that class this week because the AFL Grand Final was on in Melbourne and it made me compare it to Ireland’s premier sporting event. And I’m sad to say that in comparison to the Aussie Rule’s final, the All-Ireland final is just a football match. Over here, it’s a week long activity that starts with the semi-finals. That itself comes after two weeks of finals activity which works up the passion of supporters. On the Monday of Grand Final week you have the Brownlow medal ceremony, which is an opportunity for player’s wives and girlfriends to display cleavage and pearly white teeth while supporting a $3,000 dress with the aid of double-sided sticky tape. They also hand out a medal to the player voted best and fairest by the competition’s umpires. Which is a bit like asking the Police to name the country’s best burglar.

The rest of the week is dominated by a carnival at Federation Square, where you can test your marking skills by leaping onto the back of a mannequin dressed as a Collingwood player and propelling yourself towards a hanging ball. Most people just take the opportunity to kick the pretend Collingwood dummy, which is how it should be. All right thinking people hate Collingwood after all.

By Friday, excitement is building up in the City as the media goes into overdrive. The City itself hosts a parade on this day, featuring all the players from both finalists. This being Australia, they are transported along the parade route in the back of Utes. Special chairs are placed in the open back of each vehicle and the players sit in pairs and wave regally to the crowd, like some Indian Viceroy and his wife aboard a ceremonial elephant.

If you’re not part of the lucky 100,000 people to procure a ticket, then the Saturday of the match itself is traditionally spent at a barbeque. Thousands of these were held across Victoria last weekend as the first warm day of spring came to join the party. I ventured into the heart of the Eastern suburbs for mine, to a land of white picket fences, detached bungalows and mighty front and back gardens. This facilitates the barbeque itself but also the obligatory half time kick about. This is a blokes only affair and allows middle aged Australian men to relive some lost childhood. To my amazement, I found that I was able to skilfully kick their odd shaped football, although I think the 6 bottles of beer I’d consumed in the first half helped.

The game itself wasn’t a classic but at least the underdog (Hawthorne) won. Geelong have dominated footy for the last two years but on this occasion they froze like a rabbit in headlights.

On Monday morning, there were a lot of happy and hungover Hawthorne fans at work. And the rest of the staff were just happy that Melbourne finally had a winner in the game it invented after eight barren years. If cultural events are measured by the amount of interest that ordinary men, women and children display, then the Grand Final is up there with the best of them. I couldn’t find one person in Melbourne that had no interest in it. They don’t need Civics lessons here to tell them what to be proud of.

Working for the Yankee Dollar - Part 2

Behind Eimear’s desk was a large framed poster of the sort loved by international financial companies and small marketing firms. Three hands, one black, one white and one yellow, intertwined beneath a slogan that said “Together we are One”.

Someone in HR figured that a few motivational pictures were all the staff needed to get them to go that extra mile. Bugger pay increases, a feeling that you were all part of one big happy team was all that mattered. To Eimear it looked like the sort of picture you’d find in a Credit Union. Every time she saw it she was reminded of the time she told her mother she’d been promoted to Manager. Next time she was home she found out that her mother had told all the neighbours that Eimear was now a Bank Manager.

Eimear had been promoted to Manager as compensation for not getting a pay increase. She didn’t tell her mother that bit. It got her a better desk and an invitation to the weekly management meeting. This turned out to be more of a punishment than a reward however. Regular meetings are fine the first couple of times, but they soon turn into the office version of water boarding. A feeling of drowning in a sea of nothingness is common to both.

Each manager gets a few minutes to update the team on issues the boss is already aware of and nobody else cares about. As a general rule, if you have to wait a week to hear something at a meeting, it can’t have been that important in the first place. After each manager has used up their allotted time talking about transaction numbers and the planned team night out at the bowling alley, the boss gets his turn. Generally he’ll just regurgitate what he’s been told at the senior manager’s meeting but with a few alternations to soften the blow of negative news. So where he might have been told that sweeping redundancies are planned, he’ll tell his team that the company is looking at some strategic restructuring initiatives to maximise synergies.

At Eimear’s first meeting the boss didn’t feel like softening the blow. Desperate measures were called for. If the department didn’t trim its expenses by 10%, then New York would do it for them. Eimear was a dab hand at spreadsheets, so the boss had asked her to put together some numbers beforehand.

“Salaries make up 50% of our budget, rent and services 40% and stationary 10%.”

That last number fell off his lips with an excited murmur. It was clear to him what needed to be done. “Lets cut stationary”, he exclaimed. “Those bastards think they can get a new pen every time they open their desk and what is it with the amount of highlighters we go through? Are we running colouring competitions? And why are we buying calculators for people? Don’t they all have Excel on their computers?

The managers looked at each other and shrugged. Once the boss got a crazy idea in his head, he was like a dog with a bone and no amount of logic would change his mind. Eimear was innocent to the ways of the office however and she had the full analysis of costs in front of her.

“The vast majority of the stationary budget is paper. And we can’t stop that because we’re legally obliged to maintain hard copies of all data and print reports for clients. When you take out paper, we hardly spend anything on stationary.”

The boss smiled. Eimear and her colleagues were simple number crunchers. He had been invited into the secret group of senior strategy thinkers that were trained to think outside the box. The previous November the boss had spent a week at an off-site planning meeting in Barbados. The purpose of the meeting was to plan expense cut backs in the coming year and no doubt the calming influence of the 5 star resort they stayed in helped. One of the messages the boss came back with was that the monetary value of expense savings were less important than the message they give.

“Once the staff realise that we have tightened our belts on this issue, it will be easy to whip them into shape. Fear is a great motivator”.

The managers trooped out dejectedly. They had a quick meeting outside the boss’s office and agreed to keep quiet about the stationary freeze in front of their staff. Being a coward is a lot easier when you do it as a group.

Over the coming weeks the staff learned all too well about the freeze. Pens ran out first. People started stealing from their kid brother’s pencil case, so that outsized Bart Simpson pens became common. Highlighters were next to go and the office became monotone as a result. People started clambering under desks to retrieve pens that had been dropped months before and had gathered dust and fluff.

The archiving team was hardest hit. The nice filing envelopes they used were culled. Luckily this was before Ireland’s ban on plastic bags, so a strict re-cycling program was put in place. In years to come, archeologists will find the bank’s archiving site and wonder why Tesco plastic bags were used to store documents for 6 months in 1999.

Frank had been avoiding Eimear since the disappointment of his pay review but he saw this as a chance to impress with little effort. He had a mate who worked in the London office and he emailed him about their dilemma. A week later a box was delivered by courier. When they unwrapped it, a large red cross was drawn on top and somebody had written “Emergency Stationary supplies for our beleaguered colleagues in Dublin”. Frank and Eimear were suddenly overcome with a feeling of shame. The bloody English were patronising us again. Then the opened the box and their mood changed instantly.

“File dividers! I haven’t seen those in months.”

Soon a scrum formed as the team scrambled around the box like starving children at a feeding station. They scurried back to their desks which armfuls of posted notes and refill pads and for a morning at least, Eimear didn’t have to listen to complaints. She took the box to the re-cycle bin and noticed the courier ticket on top. It gave the charge which she knew would be routed back to her department. It was greater than that month’s normal stationary budget.

Eimear smiled. As her boss said, it’s not about the amount of money saved. It’s about the message.

Working for the Yankee Dollar - Part 1

Frank finished College in 1998, having been part of the first batch to benefit from free University Fees. He didn’t know it then but he would be a pioneer in the rise of Ireland’s lower middle class. The people who would later paddle in the shallowness of the Celtic Tiger and measure their worth and the value of others in property and fast cars.

Frank didn’t put a lot of thought into picking his first job. The big American banks had toured his College the previous March and dangled dollar bills in front of the hungover students. Newly emboldened with his degree and surfing the wave of the emerging Irish economy, Frank simply chose the biggest bank and before his feet hit the ground he was sitting behind a desk in Dublin’s gleaming Financial Services Centre, wearing an ill-fitting suit and trying not to be too obvious when eyeing up his new female colleagues.

Those first few months were easy. Frank was smart and realised that he could have his work done by 10.30am but he could skilfully stretch it out till 6pm to demonstrate to his supervisor Eimear that he was a committed soul willing to put in half an hour of unpaid overtime each day. He remembered one word from his initiation course that seemed to by-pass his fellow new hires. They were more interested in the free coffee and muffins. But Frank heard the word “meritocracy” and he was determined to make them live up to it.

The HR woman explained that the bank was proudly American. “We reward individual effort, if you do a good job, it doesn’t matter what the rest of your team, the department or the overall company does. You will be rewarded. We don’t recognise Unions here because we don’t need them. Hard work brings its own rewards”.

These words brought a cold shiver down Frank’s spine. It was the first of many times he would feel that shiver in the years to come. His favourite subject at school was History but his ambitious mother had pushed him in the direction of Commerce so that he would get himself a “good” job. Nevertheless, Frank hankered for the summer he spent back-packing around the World War II sites of Eastern Europe. As he sat listening to the hectoring tones of the woman from HR, he was reminded of the hot day he stood outside Auschwitz and listened to the tour guide translate the sign on the front gate. “Hard work makes you free”. The link between concentration camps and the bureaucrats in Human Resources had been fused in Frank’s mind and the events of the coming years would do little to dispel it.

Frank went into his first staff appraisal in a confident mood. He’d put in six months of deception but had met every target Eimear set him and had skilfully spotted opportunities to do extra tasks if they involved little effort but were highly visible. One of these was to put in half an hour each Friday talking to Eimear in the pub. Frank would have preferred to be talking to the lads about Football, but 30 minutes of chat about bastard boyfriends and the problems of being a female manager in a macho culture was a small price to pay.

But as soon as he walked into the room he could tell from Eimear’s face that the news wasn’t good. “I won’t beat around the bush” she said. “Your performance has been excellent. But we’ve a problem with this year’s pay increases. It’s Argentina you see”.

“What’s Argentina got to do with me”, Frank said. “I’ve never even been there”.

Eimear squirmed uncomfortably in her seat. The management courses she fought so hard to go on didn’t prepare her for times like this. Those courses taught her how to deal with difficult staff. But Frank wasn’t being difficult, he was correct. The company had sold him a lie when it talked about meritocracy and senior management were too chicken to deliver the news themselves. So all around the world on that fateful appraisal day, they left it to junior managers like Eimear to deliver the company message.

“You see Argentina is just the tip of the ice-berg Frank, they’re talking about a global crisis. It seems that we were like, more exposed or something to Argentina than anyone else.”

Frank was enjoying it up to this point. Something in Eimear’s discomfort made him feel powerful and in control. But then he thought of the skiing holiday he’d planned in February and how he was hoping to pay for it with his year end bonus. The prospects of receiving that were melting like the spring snow.

“But I thought we were a global bank, sufficiently diversified to ride a crisis in an individual country? Didn’t we just announce massive profits and say that transactions were at an all time high.”

Eimear paused. The briefing note she got from HR didn’t anticipate staff spotting the fatal flaw in the company’s message. “But they burned down our branch in Buenos Aires” she mumbled, her voice fading with each sentence. “And little old ladies are protesting about us outside the US embassy, saying they’ve lost all their savings”.

Frank leaned across the desk and stared directly at Eimear. “Let me get this straight. I work in Dublin and I’ve worked bloody hard. My team have worked hard and we’re busier than ever. The department is twice the size that it was when I started. And you’re telling me that I’m not getting a pay increase because some old dear in South America has lost her pension”?

“It’s a global financial crisis Frank. If it’s not now it will be in six months. The company has to provide for that. But if you stick around I’m sure we can do something for you next year”.

Frank sat back and sighed. Little did he know that this was just the first excuse of many. The company would continue to make massive profits but conveniently find a crisis every time his pay review came around. He shuffled out and headed to the pub. In future his Friday nights would be spent talking football with the boys.

Isaac and Ishmael

Steve is an ocker Aussie. Likes his footy and his four and twenty meat pies. Speaks with an accent that would make Kath and Kim wince with embarrassment and has even called one of his kids Kiely. Steve is also Jewish and I only realised this when I asked him what he thought of bacon butties as a hangover cure. He’s not a fan needless to say but he was more than willing to fill in the gaps in my simplistic mindset.

Jews have been in Australia as long as Europeans have been here. The early arrivals fulfilled the stereo-types of all those first fleeters. While the Irish on those prison ships were there for various crimes involving animals (stealing them usually as opposed to acts for which New Zealand is now famous) and the English were there for pick-pocketing and other Dickensian crimes, the occasional Jew was being punished for forgery. This made them highly sought after in the new colonies when legal documentation was in its infancy. It also made them popular among the other prisoners because they could knock together a “Ticket of Release” form in a jiffy.

Later Jewish migration followed the periodic upheavals in European history, right up to the fall of the Soviet Empire. Australia opened its doors in particular after World War II, which means that it must be the only country in the world with sizable populations of both Holocaust survivors and Nazi war criminals.

Being Irish of course, I have very little experience of meeting Jewish people. We like to pride ourselves on being the only country in Europe that didn’t persecute Jews, but the truth is we achieved this by not allowing any into the country in the first place. Until recently our only experience of Jewish people was on the pages of Ulysses. And more Irish people have been to a Bar Mitzvah than have read James Joyce’ classic about Leopold Bloom.

Nevertheless, I’ve always been fascinated by the Jewish faith. This has been inspired by my devotion to Woody Allen movies. Through Woody, I like to feel that I share in the existential neurosis of being Jewish. Steve laughed when I told him this. He said judging all Jewish people by the standards of Woody Allen would be like judging all Irish people on the activities of Father Ted.

He told me about the different communities that live here. From the secular to the Hasidic, from the Russians to the Israelis and from the ones like him who considered themselves as Australian to those who insist in speaking Yiddish and dressing like they have just walked off a 17th Century movie set. Like many secular Jews, Steve is suspicious of his Orthodox cousins. He distrusts their piety in the way that I, as a Catholic, distrust Opus Dei and Jesuits. But in the same way that the Devil makes the best music, Steve believes that the Orthodox guys are the top cooks. He suggested that I visit a bakery near where I live that does the best Matzo breakfast in Australia. The bakery is in Elsternwick which is the next suburb over. I’m in St Kilda and it doesn’t really have an ethnic majority although the recent influx of Irish backpackers is trying to change that. It could best be described as Bohemian with its eclectic mix of Italian and eastern European restaurants. It might even have people who are actually from Bohemia.

Elsternwick on the other hand is a Jewish suburb right down to the kosher section in Supermarkets and the Shul on every major intersection. It sits just on the other side of the Nepean Highway from St Kilda but it seems like continents away. Steve’s bakery is on Glenhuntly Road and the food didn’t let me down. One of the great things about living in Melbourne is the amount of fantastic places to have breakfast. I like nothing better than sitting in the window of a café on a Saturday morning and watching the world go by.

On Glenhuntly Road on a weekend morning you can sit on one side of the café window and pretend that it’s Tel Aviv or Lower Manhattan outside. The Orthodox Jews scurry along as though constantly late for an appointment. Whatever the weather is in this City of ever changing climate, they always seem to be dressed the same. Black frock coat, as seen on bouncers and undertakers, black suit with an ornamental Gartel around the waist and a wide brimmed hat keeping the rain and sun off their sumptuous beards and carefully plaited hair. And as the old Woody Allen joke goes, that’s just the women!

Their secular cousins can be found clogging the road in their gas guzzling SUVs as they scuttle between delicatessen and bakery. It’s a scene repeated in many Cities across the East coast of America and it’s indicative of the cosmopolitan nature of this City.

I brought the news of my happy breakfast back to Steve but somehow our conversation veered onto weightier matters. I made the mistake of bringing up Middle Eastern politics and that was like a red rag to a bull. For the next two hours we relived every atrocity in Israel and Lebanon in the last fifty years. Needless to say we got nowhere. Steve reckoned that if Jews didn’t exist, the Arabs would have invented them just to practice anti-Semitism.

I mentioned that Brunswick in North Melbourne is the centre of the City’s Arab population. I’d spent a wonderful Saturday morning there some months ago. We had dined on Arab cakes that day and what struck me after visiting Elsternwick was how similar they were to Jewish ones. Steve smiled and told me the story of Isaac and Ishmael. They were sons of Abraham and Isaac grew up Jewish while his brother Ishmael followed the Islamic faith. And so the troubles in the Middle East began. One thing they had in common however was that they both loved their mother’s buns.