Every year around this time, as a self-employed freelance writer, I spend several days going through the previous year’s income and expenditure in preparation for filing a tax return. And during this personal harvest ritual – with its stocktaking of the year’s yields and losses, its offerings of tribute and appeasement to the Revenue gods – I find that two big personal phenomena are to be observed.

The first is that, through those long and tedious evenings of fiscal self-reckoning, I find myself drifting inexorably rightward from my ordinary political position. For about eleven months of the year, I am basically a democratic socialist; once October comes around, though, just as surely as the leaves will start to turn gold and fall from the trees, I will find myself grumbling about the parasitic accumulation of capital by the State at the expense of free individuals and small-business owners like myself. I will find myself having become, in other words, an October libertarian.

This is a cyclical phenomenon, as reliably transient as the seasons themselves. By the time you read this column, I’ll with any luck be done with the whole process, and returned to my entrenchment on the leftward flank of Irish Times columnists.

The second phenomenon is, I think, less shallow, and more worthy of contemplation. Every October, as I work my way through the previous year’s bank and credit card statements, marking off items as taxable income and deductible expenses, the tedium and banality of the experience gives way, at a certain point, to a sense that I am........

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