To act or not to act – that is the question Fine Gael can’t seem to answer on homelessness
ACCORDING to reports, one of the reasons cited for Fine Gael ministers attending acting lessons is that politicians should learn to emote better: which sounds perilously similar to the cynical if witty recipe for success attributed to American comedian George Burns in the last century.
“Sincerity,” he opined. “If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
Some benefit might still come of it, of course.
If, for example, through the fortuitous choice of Shakespearean passages, someone such as our Housing Minister were to be introduced to (or, given his fine fee-paying school education, reminded of ) King Lear’s great oratorical, and emotive, passage on the homeless, when the king is himself exposed to the cruelty of elemental nature:
‘Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en
Too little care of this.
Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what others feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the Heavens more just.’ (Act III, scene iv).
Alas, however moving this speech, or however moved by it our impassioned Finance Minister might be, while contemplating any possible “superflux”, there remains the major obstacle astutely noted by someone who has a rather better acquaintance with homelessness than our ruling politicians.
For it was Peter McVerry who suggested that our present Government is “ideologically” incapable of solving the homeless problem which continues to make the cheeks of any decent Irish human being flush with shame. Brian Cosgrove Cornelscourt, Dublin 18