Mary O'Rourke was right to encourage us all to buy shares in Eircom. It gave workers the chance to take some control of the means of production, distribution and exchange, which Karl Marx said was the means of taking control of the world.

I got involved. I got great insight into the world of finance, which governs us all. I even gave Hillary Clinton the benefit of my new knowledge, when she passed through Derry.

Many investors in the healthcare industry hate her guts. When a new wonder drug comes on stream that promises a cure or significant alleviation, I told her, investors grumble that if she becomes president, she will keep the price of drugs down, thus limiting, they think, their profits.

I knew this because I had bought shares in the Irish company Elan, which is bringing back to market Tysabri, its "gold standard" drug for MS. She was delighted to hear that Wall Street aficionados are aware of her proposals on healthcare, and instructed one of her assistants to take notes from me.

Click into Elan's online message board, I told him, a place where investors share knowledge with each other. A well-informed bunch of posters these people are, it has to be said, ranging from doctors, scientists, and bankers to the pure speculator. They all use pseudonyms. They live all over the globe.

I was telling Clinton's staff something they did not know . . . that the message boards concerning Wall Street are a mine of information about the connection between finance and politics.

It was through the Elan message board that I landed into pornography. Posters often refer people to other sources of information, highlighting web addresses which can be accessed by the click of a cursor. It is, however, nearly impossible to know from a website address which site one is being directed to, hence my inadvertent excursion into pornography.

Many posters take pleasure in using violent, graphic, sexually explicit messages to convey their thoughts when they wish to celebrate or criticise. This past week, for instance, one poster was told by another to "leave, you asshole paedophile, you". The reply was "hey, you can call me anything you want, but you have hit a raw nerve calling me a paedophile, since my daughter was molested by one. Go to hell, dick." Other messages are unprintable here.

The Yahoo authorities are serenely deaf to protests about obscenity. The parameters of free speech are elastic in the US. I am forced into melancholy agreement with that. I do not think that censorship can or should be used to combat the rising tide of coarse public intercourse.

And so, I watch with interest to see if Peter Stringfellow's lap dancing club will succeed in Ireland. He does not have a capacious mind. His vocabulary is limited. He thinks soft pornography is entertaining. He is financially successful. He reads and sounds like many Wall Street investors.

His club is comfortable in comparison to the dingy basements run by his Dublin competitors. He is aiming at a newly monied Irish male class. The Irish Taxi Drivers Union sent four besuited men along on Thursday night to avail of the free entrance passes which were dished out this past week.

They passed resolutely, and wordlessly, through the picket organised by local residents. Since when do Irish people not greet each other? Do taxi drivers speak for the nation? They're quoted often enough.

The sullen silence between Dubliners last Thursday night was dispiriting.

Stringfellow's success or failure will be a harbinger of our future discourse. Sadly, I wouldn't bet on the outcome.