Gombeen man

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A Gombeen Man is a Hiberno-English term used in Ireland for a shady, small-time "wheeler-dealer" or businessman who is always looking to make a quick profit, often at someone else's expense or through the acceptance of bribes. Its origin is the Irish word 'gaimbin', meaning "usury". The term referred originally to a money-lender and became associated with those shopkeepers and merchants who exploited the starving during the Irish Famine by selling much-needed food and goods on credit at ruinous interest rates.

1 Cultural significance
2 Recent use
3 See also
4 Sources

[edit] Cultural significance

The despised image of the gombeen as a usurous predator on the poor was immortalized in the poem The Gombeen Man by Irish poet Joseph Campbell:

Behind a web of bottles, bales,
Tobacco, sugar, coffin nails
The gombeen like a spider sits,
Surfeited; and, for all his wits,
As meagre as the tally-board
On which his usuries are scored.

The Famine's gombeen men were universally Irish Catholics, as their customers were, and the phrase is almost always intended without any religious or ethnic context. However, the anti-Semitic culture once prevalent throughout Europe, which negatively associated Jewish people with usury and credit, has occasionally influenced the use of the phrase.

-- O, Father Cowley said. A certain gombeen man of our acquaintance.
-- With a broken back, is it? Mr Dedalus asked.
-- The same, Simon, Father Cowley answered. Reuben of that ilk.

(Concordance, Ulysses, James Joyce)

More generally, "gombeen" is now an adjective referring to all kinds of underhand or corrupt activities and to the mindset possessed by those engaged in such activities. In Irish politics, it is used to condemn an opponent for dishonesty or corruption, although its definition has become less precise with time and usage and it can also imply pettiness and close-mindedness. Alternative modern parlance for a gombeen man is someone "on the make".

[edit] Recent use

"We want to be free to pursue our grievances in our own way so that we will not have to go like gombeen men and women to the doors of politicians" - Máirín Quill, Dáil debate, 1987.

'Goodbye Gombeen Man', a Sunday Times headline, 1994, referred to in The Guardian, 2 December 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1364036,00.html

"As a Dubliner I have no problem with the principle of decentralisation but I do not want it to cost excessive amounts of money and to be the type of gombeen initiative that the Minister of State, Deputy Parlon, who has just left the committee, projected" -- Richard Bruton, Dáil committee debate, 2003.

"Bertie Ahern yesterday turned the tables on one of the most trenchant critics of the Government's decentralisation programme, Professor Ed Walsh, and also lashed the 'gombeen' opposition to the plan." -- Fionnán Sheahan, Irish Examiner, 2004.