Seeking applause for just doing your job

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

That overpaid, underperforming footballer known as Mario Balotelli has one redeeming grace in that he has a strict policy of never celebrating wildly when he scores goals – or at least he had when he used to score them.

His explanation is that you wouldn’t expect a postman to celebrate delivering letters, because that’s just called doing his job.

It’s taken for granted that postmen will deliver letters, and they do so in the worst of weather without the need for congratulations or fanfare when their sack or van is empty.

They should put a postman in charge of Ryanair, because one of the most annoying aspects of flying with them over the years was that bugle tape they always unleashed on landing – were they not actually expecting to make it safely and on time to the other end of the flight?

There are some things we take for granted – and other tasks we simply expect completed because we paid people to carry them out.

So why then does the Government feel the need to inflict one or more of its Cabinet members onto the platform for every new jobs announcement in the country?

Why does a Minister have to turn up for the photo call – especially when he’s the Minister for Jobs whose primary, if not only, role is to help create these jobs in the first place?

Is it not the job of the Government to create jobs – so why do Ministers insist on congratulating themselves for doing it?

Shouldn’t they have already moved on to the next task in hand, rather than dining out on past deeds?

Why then do so many of these jobs never actually materialise – or is this a sleight of hand that actually allowed them to re-announce the same jobs two years later and get their mugs on the telly all over again?

New jobs are good news at any time, but even moreso when so many victims of the economic madness are still out of work.

But we voted for this Government to create jobs – and if they’re doing it, it’s no more than the rest of us putting in an honest day’s work in our own sphere.

Instead we have these self-congratulatory, smug jobsworths stuck in the middle of the shot when everyone knows that they first they heard of it was the early heads-up they got from the IDA.

Why too do TDs feel the need to welcome these new jobs in public pronouncements?

Nobody had suspected for a minute that they wouldn’t welcome the jobs – because if they had a problem with them, that actually would be a news story.

Perhaps it’s down to guidance from the top, because the Taoiseach has this unquenchable desire for the spotlight worst than most.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.