The family business

Son: I see the unemployment Figures are still hovering round the three million mark. That's one hell of a lot of people. Just think, it's the equivalent of everyone in Ireland being on the dole.

Dad: Yes, and you know that if you took every one of those people, the whole population of Ireland, and laid them end to end, they would probably enjoy it.

Son: And in no time at all you would have three and a half million. Is that supposed to be progress?

Dad: No, but every one would have someone to share their misery with. Lots of people to share it with, in fact.

Son: You've never been on the dole, have you, Dad?

Dad: No, I must admit that I haven't. I did rest on the seventh day, of course, but that was more like having the week-end off, rather than being on the dole. Being a traditional fictional deity is an unusual job in some respects. I suppose you could say that I've been self-employed all my working life.

Son: All six days of it. Six days!!! Hardly sufficient to understand what working for a living is like.

Dad: That was the whole purpose in having you. You were supposed to get down there and mix in, become one of the lads and acquire some of that insider savvy which apparently the old regime, that's me, folks, lacked. So that was your job, sonny boy, and any deficiencies now should be attributed to your own preference for mass picnics and after-dinner speeches above carpentry and the family business. Why aren't there any pieces of furniture on show, "Hand-crafted by J.C. during his time as a carpenter"? Why aren't there any wooden carvings of your mother, your step-father Joseph and your father the Holy Ghost with your initials on the case? I'll tell you why. Because you were that busy gadding about, doing your conjuring tricks and luring people away from their work, that you never had any time to do any work yourself.

Son: What I was doing was work. Marketing and publicity. I invented the white collar job before the white collar was invented. I was ahead of my time. You think that manual labour is the only kind of real work and that I should have stuck to my hammer and saw. But there are many other kinds of work. There is preaching.…And making up theology about angels and thrones and the glories of the hereafter.

Dad: Gas works! Combined with guesswork. An effective combination for hot air production. Richard Branson could run a whole balloon airline on that lot.

Son: It's a major industry now. Dad. It started out with me and my twelve-member executive committee operating on a shoe-string budget. Now every country in the world has got thousands of our representatives, skilled professionals who can put across company policy on a wide range of subjects: heaven and the qualifications needed to get in; poverty and how it is with you always; charitable giving and how clerical salaries depend on it, etc. Our representatives are never stuck for material. For a small financial consideration anyone can have an earful of pious verbiage, anything from a couple of minutes on Adam or Eve, depending on taste, to a full two hour lecture on changing water into wine, complete with weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth when it turns out that the recipe has been lost.

Dad: It's amazing to think how many people are employed, in a manner of speaking, in that line of business. I used to think that the Coca-Cola empire was amazing because it stretches all round the world, employs thousands if not millions of people, has billions of customers and all it sells is water with some fizz and colouring in it. But your customers don't even get the fizzy coloured water at the end of it. Unless something has gone wrong with the holy water, that is.

Son: That's still better than the Marlboro empire, though, which also has billions of customers and all they get at the end of it all is cancer.

Dad: It says something for brand name loyalty, though. All the customers trooping in, keeping up with the payments and at the end of it, what have they got?

Son: Poorer. Joyce commented on it a hundred years ago. In his story, "The Sisters". It's about a priest who keeps promising his sisters a big day out for slaving away supporting him all his life. Then he dies.

Dad: I trust that this is a short summary of the story. There must be more to it than that. What about the day out? Do the sisters collect on the insurance?

Son: No chance. It was all pie in the sky. They are left struggling on in poverty as before. And the young boy, the narrator, wonders about simony, which is a term for people stealing from the clergy. You see,there is no special term for the clergy stealing from the people. Strange, isn't it?

Dad: Indeed, a curious anomaly. Anyway, that's enough commercial plugs - Coca Cola, Marlboro, James Joyce's "Dubliners"... this is turning into Yellow Pages. What about a plug for The Belfast Humanist Group instead? That excellent organisation, campaigning for Sense and Reason in a society riven by religion, and….

Son: Bloody advertisements! Let's see, there must be something better on the other side……..