Middle classes are hung out to dry

Forget working-class, middle-class, rural, urban, blue-collar or white-collar - the Irish workforce is now divided into two distinct tribes: the 'nailed' and the 'non-nailed'. The nailed have clean, healthy, neatly-shaped nails with well defined half-moon cuticles. The non-nailed have chipped, broken, grubby stubs on the ends of their fingers, typically moderately deformed or covered with plasters.

The nailed work in offices, banks and the page-shuffled, memo-obsessed, paper-trail world. The non-nailed toil away (usually ...