Gone Paddy, Gone

If you like your economic gloom early with your morning tea then cast an eye over this piece here by Morgan 'I told you so' Kelly in today's Irish Times. To give you the ticker-tape version: 'Ireland is beyond fecked'. We will all be back to subsistence farming before the end of the year. That, of course, depends on whether there is anybody left in the country by then.

My admittedly paltry list of facebook friends, all 45 of them (and yes, you are all so special to me in all your individual special ways) includes a fair few Paddies who now make their home abroad. And home isn't just the tried and true destinations like the UK, US and Oz, but includes Thailand, Argentina, Hong Kong, China and one of the less revolutionary 'stans in Central Asia.

While email, skype and connecting flights have rendered these places less remote than before, they still can't obfuscate the fact that none of these people - listen to me - us people will be in a position to return home anytime soon. Unless of course it is to grab our family and take them with us back to our adopted homelands before they are sold by the Irish government into enforced servitude to German banks.

Lord, I hope, really, I do, I genuinely hope that in the coming years me and Mad Dog Kelly are both proved wrong, but I doubt it.