Saving face should not be a priority for Brian Cowen. But it is.

We could almost sense it coming. Disparate pockets of grey would shuffle, zombie-like, toward some intuitive focal point. Hands trousered, eyes darting suspiciously as the diminutive, slumped shoulders and slouched back of australopithecine secondary school students, suddenly erect, surge forth - a milieu of scuffed black shoes moshing; arms akimbo, widening one's frame with a full-back's mentality; no one will get by me today.


And so it went, for six years, the daily barrage, like Pamplona, where we were the bulls and the runners; all for a seat on the bus. If by some calamity (a slip on a discarded buttery corned-beef sandwich perhaps) you found yourself at the back of the mob, the assent to the second deck, knowing that there are no seats, was reminiscent of a dead-man walking. Still you whisper your plea to some hard-of-hearing deity, begging for some cataclysmic occurrence to postpone the fate that awaits you. As you trudge upward, the imperceptive din of sixty school boys envelops you. You stand, fixed to the spot by merciless eyes, like headlights piercing a dense fog of John Player Blue. They feed on the futility of your own perfunctory glance up and down the bus, so as you traipse back downstairs, you are stalked by a disharmonious chorus of heckles, jeers and projectiles. That such inane banalities pierce your acne riddled hide, is proof, if it were needed, that such slurs are merely a reflection of your own pitiful weakness.


I was embarrassed , but you take your medicine. On another occasion, toward the end of the school term, a bunch of us were sitting around, the usual sort of to and fro, though perhaps more jovial, due to the onset of the summer holidays. As was the tradition, the guys would sign each other's shirts before we went our separate ways. Over time this evolved; initially we wrote funny messages, eventually it lead to ripping the pockets and collars off. On this particular day though, as the bus weaved its way along the Greenhills road, the lads who get off at Kilnamanagh gathered their things and began the slow migration downstairs.


I don't recall seeing a wink or a nudge, nor was a word or look exchanged. It seemed to me to happen organically. The guy who got off last, like an antelope separated from the herd, was set upon by ravenous hands, focused on his trousers. In a repetitive motion, inversely imitating the starting of a chainsaw, half a dozen hands or more tore his pockets and began to rip his trousers off. Money flew through the air and amidst the sound of cackling hyenas and rolling change, this poor guy - paisley boxer-shorts and milk-bottle legs - stood at the head of the bus, aghast, clutching his torn garment with a look of complete humiliation. In that moment there was nothing to do except meekly get off the bus.


In the last few days there has been an abundance of reports and analysis detailing the impending bailout (high-interest loan, if you prefer) that Ireland is being strongly advised to take from the ECB and IMF. Echoes of 1916 reverberate amid talk of a threat to our economic soveriegnty. This morning (18th November), with the arrival of the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund, we now know with certainty that the government, treating its citizens with contempt, lied for days about policy regarding our economic recovery. The reason is at once simple and pathetic; embarrassment. Brian Cowen is trying to save face. Six billion Euro of cuts in December's budget, hundreds of thousands unemployed and state funding due to run-out in June and still the Taoiseach's disdain for the Irish public manifests itself in cheap political double-speak. The word that springs to mind is optics. The red-face is anathema to this government. Not their legacy, their PR.  But Cowen's position is ridiculous. He is the boy on the bus holding his trousers up. There is no saving face. What's done is done. He must take his medicine and with his tail between his legs, traipse downstairs and exit through the middle doors of political life. It's all he can do.