Poldark has nothing on this seaside cliffhanger
IT’S the drama that has gripped the nation for months, and series one ended this week with, appropriately enough, a cliff-top cliffhanger: Our swashbuckling hero was wrenched from his rugged seaside domain by cruel officers of the law, but he left vowing to return. Nah, not Poldark, not that overblown melodrama of scheming bankers, unpaid loans, wild financial gambles and fancy frocks in a dramatic coastal setting – this was the OTHER overblown melodrama of scheming bankers, unpaid loans, wild financial gambles and fancy frocks in a dramatic coastal setting. This was Keeping Up With The O’Donnells, the reality show that has had us on the edge of our seats all year.
Keeping Up With The O’Donnells used to be a game played exclusively by the residents of Vico Road, in Dalkey, where the participants sought to match each other for tennis courts, swimming pools, Greek statuary and saunas. Then it became a reality show, with nail-biting regular instalments. Then this week, Keeping Up With the O’Donnells became a mystery and a challenge – where have they gone? Where will they pop up next? Are they planning to take their case to the European Court of Human Rights? And did they ever find the green bag with the shoes?
The extent to which the O’Donnells seem deluded was illustrated by Brian O’Donnell’s speech after he’d stormed into the Bank of Ireland shareholders’ meeting on Wednesday and dumped his keys – a gesture worthy of Poldark, in fairness – into Richie Boucher’s lap. He was ‘extremely disappointed’, he said, that the Supreme Court had met in ‘a closed room’ before delivering its final verdict against him – all very Da Vinci Code, no? But for anyone who still doubted that they were, indeed, out to get him, Brian had this clincher: they’d been to court 82 times, over Gorse Hill, ‘and lost, 82 times – statistically impossible’.
Really? So if I go to court 82 times asserting that I am the rightful heir to the British Throne and that Prince George is actually a shape-shifting lizard, is it statistically certain that I will succeed at least once?
If I fight Floyd Mayweather 82 times and lose 82 times, does that prove it’s a fix?
If 82 successive losses in court is statistical proof of anything, it is that you are definitely in the wrong. Oh, and that you have far too much money to squander on legal fees. The O’Donnells, both of whom had lucrative careers in law and medicine before they decided to unleash their inner property tycoons, are now bankrupt. That’s a sad state of affairs for them and, if they’d conducted themselves with a little more humility, they’d have been due
IT’S hard to blame female staff at the Midlands Prison for objecting to being left alone with Graham Dwyer, given his warped attitude to women. He is not allowed to work in the kitchen – in spite of his previous experience in the kitchens of Cloverhill while on remand there – because he might on occasion be alone with a woman employee. But who ever thought it was wise to let him near a kitchen – and all those sharp knives – in the first place?
sympathy – we need people who think and dream big. And it was unexpectedly pitiful to see them packing up this week (even if the green bag with the shoes went astray) to leave Dalkey for the hospitality of ‘relatives and friends’.
They used their legal nous to devise a complex ownership model for Gorse Hill, which they may have hoped would protect it from repossession. All the clever structures in the world, though, won’t change the fact that bankrupts don’t get to hang on to €7million houses. Stay tuned for series two of Keeping Up With The O’Donnells, though, where our intrepid heroes prove that the right of bankrupts to live on billionaires’ row is a basic, fundamental human right. They plan, Brian O’Donnell said on Wednesday, to take their case to the European Court of Human Rights – well, you might as well be hung for 83 sheep as a lamb.
And let us hope they get as prompt and thorough a hearing, in Europe, as they seem to have had in our own courts, even as other litigants cooled their heels behind them. And all those frivolous Libyan migrants, coming to Europe in the hope that we might vindicate their human rights not to be murdered or drowned, can just get in line.