One of the (few?) advantages of maintaining a blog is that it prevents you from indulging in that most futile of bourgeois literary exercises: writing letters to the editor. Two pieces in this weekend’s papers got my letter-writing dander up.The first was by Mark Lawson, in the Guardian. His op-ed columns are often rather lazy, pun-laden affairs, but this piece, mocking US liberals who are “threatening” to leave the country following a Bush victory, blundered into the bizarre. He writes:Robert Redford, for example, has long lived in Montana, a state that has become progressively more Republican and, if he wishes to go into political exile, could simply move to California or New York, although it’s true that both currently have Republican governors. He has spoken of fleeing to Ireland, but while he can be fairly sure that country wouldn’t invade another, he would still find himself in a theocracy with views and laws potentially shocking to a Hollywood liberal. Now I know we have the Angelus broadcast over the airwaves twice a day, but I’d be somewhat reluctant to say Ireland shows the same willingness to impose the one true faith on its population as, say, Saudi Arabia. Of course, the famously erratic sub-editors at the “Grauniad” must share some of the blame. Why didn’t the sub in charge of the column phone Lawson and say, “Mark, you’re in danger of sounding like a pillock of the Robert Kilroy-Silk variety.”?Actually the second piece that irked me suggested that, far from living in a theocracy, we in Ireland have all become Godless, alcoholic 4X4 drivers. These were the opinions expressed by Emily O’Reilly at a conference on “changing values in society” held last week and dutifully regurgitated in the Weekend Review section of this weekend’s Irish Times. It seems this type of article, castigating the hollow materialism of the nouveau riche, appears in the paper at least every three weeks. In effect, they’re rather like those periodical warning from the Central Bank over people getting into debt and banks lending too much. We bow our heads like naughty boys and girls for a moment before returning to our bad habits. But O’Reilly is candidly bewildered at her compatriots: “Readers of last week’s Sunday Times would have got a flavour of this phenomenon of excess in a front page report in which a Dublin retailer exulted in the fact that her outlet had a waiting list of 500 women in pursuit of a handbag that retails at 5,000 euro plus…Imagine that on your obituary. ‘Here lies Mrs X, fifth in line for a Birkin bag, and raging she wasn’t first.'”Of course, O’Reilly’s address (which includes some cloying paragraphs about how her daughter’s modest Halloween outfit was overshadowed by the creations of her contemporaries’ more grasping mothers) is given piquancy from her own socio-economic status. A former journalist, she was appointed “Ombudsman and Information Commissioner” (sounds like something out of “The Mikado”) following a recommendation by the then Minister of Finance Charlie McCreevy (the b�te noire of liberal Ireland).According to a piece in The Sunday Business Post that appeared when O’Reilly was appointed to her post, “O’Reilly is, when pension contributions are included, perhaps the best paid public servant in the country…Financial sources have put the value of the pension at about an extra �200,000 per annum on top of the salary. This brings O’Reilly’s salary close to �400,000, making her one of the best paid public servants in the country.” With the wisdom of the Buddha, O’Reilly tells us that “Money can’t buy you happiness.” But 400K a year must at least secure a deposit?