Oh, so that’s all right then: they’re going to give €50,000 each to an ‘artists’ fund’

When is this government and its corrupt allies going to stop insulting the public? Now the Prime Minister has announced that building contractors will donate €50,000, to a special fund for artists, for each ‘high-rise’ project.

What are we supposed to say to this – “Oh, so that’s all right then”? Or perhaps, “It’s OK if they wreck the urban environment, because they’re giving money to artists”. Or even, “Gosh, it’s so very generous of people who are making many millions off wrecking the environment to give the huge sum of €50,000 to artists. We should be so, so grateful.”

Elsewhere in the civilised world, people making that much money spend much more than €50,000 on actually buying art from artists and hanging it on their walls. But this is the land of the Philistine, so instead of buying art, our nouveaux riches offer to make tiny donations to funds for starving artists in return for permits to build skyscrapers.

And the irony is that they are probably giving far, far more than €50,000 to the corrupt fixers who are making the skyscrapers possible for them. They’ve certainly given a lot more than €50,000 to the Labour Party.