“Then, thus I turn me from my country’s light/To dwell in solemn shades of endless night.”
Thus spake Shakespeare’s Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, when faced with exile from the land of his birth. But that was in Ye Olden Dayes. In contrast, the modern Irish exile finds cosseted refuge in countries where endless sun seems to shine. The peripatetic Denis O’Brien has recently moved residence from Portugal to Malta, cardboard-box tycoon “Dr.” Michael Smurfit is based in Monaco, and “Sir” A. J. O’Reilly apparently declares the Bahamas as his primary residence. J. P. MacManus, the low-profile gambling centillionaire who nevertheless attracts plenty of coverage for his “charidee” works, has come a long way from Limerick, now operating from that less-than-gritty burb, Geneva.
And after selling his stake in London City Airport for a humongous profit, Dermot Desmond has now rocketed to the top of the list of the richest-Irish people-who-technically-don’t-live-in-Ireland. Desmond has chosen the Little Britain of Gibraltar as the bolthole of choice for his estimated 2 billion euro.
Yet sunshine and untaxed loot don’t seem to satisfy our home-grown, perma-tanned plutocrats. They still yearn to stay involved in the affairs of the old sod. And in the age of lax residence rules (initially brought in by Smurfit’s old pal, former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds) and executive jets on tap, the gullable [sic] Irish public might be forgiven for thinking these figures have never left our shores. Indeed, some of the rich themselves appear to have forgotten that by not personally chipping in to the operation of the state their views on how same state should be run might lack a certain credibility.
How else can one explain Dr. Smurfit lecturing his gilded audience in the K Club (the good doctor’s personal fiefdom, although officially owned by the Smurfit company) about the dangers of growing social inequality in Ireland? And then there is the example of Dermot Desmond, lambasting the critics of C.J. Haughey, a man whose own relationship with the taxman was conducted on very understanding terms. And we can’t forget Messrs O’Brien and MacManus basking in the reflected glory of their work for sports-oriented charities–these � la carte tax payments might be viewed as making a mockery of the system by those in the PAYE sector who don’t receive gushing press coverage for their (obligatory) contributions to keeping the larger show going.
In Richard II, Mowbray bemoans that his exile to foreign lands will stop him from communicating with his fellow man:
“The language I have learn’d these forty years/My native English, now I must forego:/And now my tongue’s use is to me no more/Than an unstringed viol or a harp”
Alas for the ears of the Irish public, the tongues of the modern Irish “exile” have not suffered a similar fate.