‘Tis the Season to Be Grumpy!

By Richard Delevan

NEW York City mayor Mike Bloomberg can move over — he’s just been replaced as the chief scrooge for 2003.

Not content with a New York-style smoking ban beginning in January, new and more restrictive laws on drinking hours, new laws restricting freedom of the press that make Zimbabwe’s look liberal, locking up people who protest against a new tax on garbage collection, the Irish government now wants to ban Christmas.

Or at least, you’d be forgiven for thinking so. Mary “McGrinch” Coughlan, whose day job is minister for social and family affairs, not the singer, has stuck her head above the chimney to humbug the Christmas shopping season about to descend upon us.

A few days before Halloween, Coughlan pleaded with retailers and advertisers to keep Christmas out of the shops until December – preferably December 8.

Besides death and taxes, the only other certainty in life is that Christmas shopping season starts earlier each year. At this rate, by 2013 we’ll see commercials for Christmas toys a full year and a half before they’ll be in the stores.

So surely Mary Coughlan is the ghost of Christmas past in this little holiday drama, rather than Scrooge, I hear you say? Think she’s standing up against the rapacious Grinch stealing the true meaning of Christmas from us and replacing it with the “creeping commercialism” of corporate capitalism?

Or could it be that Mary’s been hitting the fruitcake a little too hard, a little too early this year?

The BBC World Service found the story too tempting to pass up, wondering if the Irish had finally lost their minds. Unwisely, she agreed to be interviewed on air.

Why did she want to delay the decorations? Because “one of the issues casually discussed is that Christmas is a difficult time” and that after Christmas, “a lot of people have put themselves into debt.”

She went on to complain that because shop windows get decorated earlier each year, “we don’t have the chance to celebrate each season as it comes along” and that Christmas has “moved back to almost September.”

“I feel that puts undue pressure on people,” she added.

But surely, she was asked, people can simply exercise some self-restraint? Or are we, in fact, all mindless zombies who, the instant a cardboard cutout of a fat guy in a red and white suit appears in the display window, cannot resist buying everything in sight?

So did the minister concede that Ireland’s adult citizens are capable of taking responsibility for their own actions? Well, no.

“People put themselves into debt and often times that causes other relationship problems, family problems and perhaps not necessarily of people‘s own making,” she said.

So basically I – and every other adult in Ireland – are idiots.

Granted, I am an idiot, because despite those helpful decorative reminders going up earlier each year I still manage to be rushing around buying on Christmas Eve. In fact, it seems the earlier store windows are festooned and halls are decked with whatever holly substitute is in this year, the longer I wait to buy.

I’m not alone in this. According to the local chambers of commerce, the vast majority of Christmas shopping still happens in the last couple of weeks before Christmas – just like always. Despite the decorations.

The scary thing is, if I believe Mary Coughlan, if I nuke the credit card this year, it’s not my fault. Or rather my imminent bankruptcy would be “perhaps not necessarily of people’s own making,” as Coughlan prefers.

Sadly, Coughlan isn’t the only one here who thinks all us little Whos in Whoville need protecting from ourselves.

Take the smoking ban, which publicans in Kerry and elsewhere are threatening to ignore. At the end of the day, it can be reasonably argued that people are entitled not to be exposed to second-hand smoke where they work – even if they happen to work in a bar. 

But smokers – a quarter or more of voters here – didn’t take particularly kindly either to Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern, in his most condescending voice, telling us last week that “decent people” would come back to the pubs soon enough after the ban was in place.

Decent people? Decent people?

I’m okay now, I’ve just had a cigarette to calm down.

Health Minister Micheal Martin has made not a little political hay out of the ban he’s introducing. But again, no one likes the smug self-righteousness of an ex-smoker telling the rest of us how awful we all are.

On drink, we have a justice minister, Michael McDowell – an ex-drinker, with all the smug self-righteousness of the professional teetotaller – whose zeal in pursuing such menaces to society as bars that serve beer until midnight (gasp) and alcopops is equally annoying.

The same minister is at war with the media here at the moment. He wants reporters to face prison time for getting information from police about cases – the stock and trade of any crime journalist. 

His zeal in this has quite a lot to do with the fact that his own son was beaten up on the street a few blocks from his home, and a newspaper had the nerve to report the fact. Rather than put more cops on the street, the solution is to prevent people from knowing about it.

Mary Coughlan, in the same interview about her campaign to cancel Christmas, let slip the fact that she hates shopping.

All of the moralizing, the talking down to us wee Whos by the Scrooges of Destiny who notionally run the country (with apologies to Dr. Seuss and Mr. Dickens for the mixed metaphor) would start to sound a little frightening if they were serious. They’re not.

Coughlan, for example, has had her job for nearly 18 months now. But rather than start a debate about her proposed embargo on Christmas last spring, when something might have come of it, she scores a few headlines and forgets about it until next year.

Retailers not too panicked about whether this Christmas might be their last as they battle it out between city center outlets and gigantic American-style malls out in the suburbs, if they found the time to notice Coughlan’s comments, sniffed.

And far from mass hysteria and panic buying when shops opened the day after Halloween – which despite Coughlan’s fears of being swamped by creeping Christmas commercialism and being unable to enjoy the passing of the seasons went off quite normally thanks – Christmas shopping was still largely limited to the extraordinarily prudent and extraordinarily sad.

Yuletide demagoguery is cheap. What makes Coughlan’s little Christmas tantrum so galling, however, is that while she blathers on about the true spirit of Christmas, her department is a downright Scrooge when it comes to keeping holiday promises.

As part of its program for government 17 months ago, Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats promised an all-Ireland Christmas travel allowance for pensioners. Grannies living in Derry were promised free travel to visit the grandkids in Kerry.

But in an answer to a Dail (Parliament) question earlier this month, Coughlan confirmed that nothing had been done to put any program in place.

The Scrooges of Destiny should put their Christmas penny where their mouths are before they give out to the rest of us.

Bah. And indeed, humbug.