Recently, on the Discovery Channel, they brought in no less a personage than Donald Trump to put a price on just about everything in America – they chose well for, in the words of Oscar Wilde, Trump is one of those who would know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.

Trump started in the foothills overlooking Los Angeles where he introduced us to a householder who has a nice little earner in the back garden. He has got all the usual things in the garden . . . plus an oil well chumming away taking out the liquid black gold by the cup full and, incidentally, with an estimated $10 million worth still in that well.

They also took a quick look at the whole business of extracting oil by ‘fragging’ rock. You would literally blow up the rock, crush it and extract oil . . . I wonder if it would work in Connemara or Leitrim? It is a controversial business extracting oil in that way in the US, because of fears that it could damage the natural water courses.

You certainly don’t want to damage the Great Lakes, which Trump said were the biggest single fresh water gathering in the world, and in a world beginning to cry out for natural resources such as oil and water, water is beginning to become the more important. Trump estimated that the Great Lakes were worth $2 per bottle in the years to come.

However, it was in the area of unusual millionaire earners that the programme was most extraordinary. It was quite clear, for instance, that Trump was taken by the millionaire car boot sales attendee, who succeeded by going to the sales and putting together packages, and earning half a million a year.

Car boot sales are huge in America, though they have never taken off here. What this entrepreneur was doing was getting up early on a Saturday morning, jumping into his car and cruising the streets and not bothering to stop if it was obvious that it was junk on sale, but stopping occasionally if he saw saleable packages such as Lladro or records, or CDs.

However the item which made me sit up, was the man who was making millions from digging up the roads for local authorities, reconstituting the tarmacadam, selling it and building machinery.
This millionaire had worked out a system of using the machinery exactly like we have here. You see it every day at roundabouts and intersections . . . it’s the machine that looks like it has hungry teeth at one end and literally tears the tarmacadam away to a few inches in depth.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.