The parable of the labourers in the vineyard (Matthew 20 v 1-16) seems to have relevance today. Without wanting to sound a sanctimonious prig (while doing so), when I laboured in the City I tried to do what was morally right. Additionally I tried not to mind what my colleagues were paid. I was only interested in my pay and if I was satisfied why should I care if a colleague was paid more or less?
The BBC published how much they pay their top earners and a row erupted over the differential between male and female presenters. Now journalist Kevin Myers has been sacked by The Sunday Times for suggesting that female Jewish presenters get better paid than Gentile women. I don’t have a dog in this fight although it may be that the former have more aggressive agents. However, it does smack of the parable. I suppose the difference is that the vineyard owner is a private enterprise and the BBC are spending licence payers’ money.
Up to a pont it is willing buyer/willing seller although the law can intervene. Do you remember Gilbert O’Sullivan? He had great success singing pop songs in the 1970s but was mighty cheesed-off to discover that he was being fleeced by his management company. In 1982 O’Sullivan & Another v. Management Agency & Music Ltd & Others came before Sir William Mars-Jones. He was an old-school lawyer. When he represented Kevin McClory against Ian Fleming in a case, that he won, alleging that Fleming had stolen McClory’s plot for Thunderball his opening speech took a magnificent twenty-eight hours and eight minutes. That was in 1963. Could you get away with that verbosity now – even with Welsh blood? Incidentally it was worth the effort – his fee was £10,000.
In 1982 he determined that Gilbert O’Sullivan had been ripped off and, after a partially successful appeal by MAM, he was awarded £7 million. The labourers in the parable that worked through the heat of the day were not successful in their appeal to their employer.
Kevin Myers for years wrote An Irishman’s Diary in The Irish Times. I met him when he came to Barmeath as a guest beater for a shoot. His diary piece about the shoot was a poor reflection of what was an unusual day. I suppose he thought that as a guest he should dissimulate somewhat.
The Garda Síochána arrived first – before breakfast. They were augmented by the army and picnic lunches later. They intended to do what we were about to do, namely beat through the woods. They were looking for Dessie O’Hare, an IRA man known as “The Border Fox”. Our quarry was a pheasant. Their programme was not conducive to a successful pheasant shoot but like the Strauss opera, Ariadne auf Naxos, the two events had to happen concurrently. Neither side were told about the other activity. There was nearly a nasty incident when an armed, camouflaged soldier appeared out of a bush startling a shotgun-wielding guest. Both thought they were in trouble.
I liked Kevin Myers and suggest that if The Sunday Times didn’t like the tone of his piece they shouldn’t have published it. “The Border Fox” was later cornered in a bar in Dunleer where there was a Wild West shoot-out.
To remind, here is how the parable panned out.
The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’
“But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’
“So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
I am duly cautious about mixing-in on the matter of Kevin Myers’s being an anti-Semite (which I doubt), but I can say with certainty that his 2009 memoir of the Troubles, “Watching The Door: Cheating death in 1970s Belfast”, seemed to me very exciting and moving. I would be surprised if it weren’t quite an important historic document. He says now that his reputation is in tatters, but I doubt that. He’s in hard covers, at book length, and that sort of stuff lasts much better than high-wire journalism.
His diary piece in The Irish Times described how he was unaccustomed to watch pheasants being shot but, in the event, saw that – like a Hollywood Western – no birds were killed in the days sport. Not quite true;the bag at Barmeath never strays into double figures but I recall once a dog catching a bird on the ground, a welcome addition to a hitherto non-existent bag.