THE GREAT DEPRESSION

Well, what a year that was! We should have been celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead, we wound up jittering over the possible collapse of the very global capitalism that had, it was assumed, done in the dour old communism represented by the Wall. Who’d have thought?

Who indeed? Who’d have forecast a succession of meltdowns? Not the Government, that’s for sure. To say they were caught on the hop would be to understate the case.
Week by week, nay, day by day, bankster shenanigans were revealed, each worse than the previous. But would they be let fail? Would they fuck! (To borrow a phrase from the late James Gogarty). The poor oul’ taxpayer was dragooned into bailing out the very chancers who brought the house crashing down around our ears.
A disease had lurked in the financial institutions for years, only spewing its infection into public view when rogue American banks collapsed. They had been operating a vast pyramid scheme in the US and our home-grown heroes had followed suit. They weren’t alone. Our genetic cousins in Iceland had it even worse.
Some of the malpractices boggle the mind. For example, Director of Corporate Enforcement Paul Appleby spoke of a ‘catastrophic failure of governance at National Irish Bank’.
That’s a nice way of putting it. In fact it’s been a catastrophe, worse than even the most pessimistic feared.
The swagger and pomp of the Celtic Tiger years was finally revealed in 2009 as all fizz and no substance, the whole thing sustained by a toxic mix of malpractice, greed and cheap credit. Tens of thousands are in negative equity. There’s little credit flowing. Jobs are being lost. Hard times are here again.
Worse still, we’ve been handed over to economists (those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing) and hard-right journalists. Believe me, pint-ificating in Doheny and Nesbitt’s is poor preparation for running a country.
Few will be satisfied until they see crooks and chancers in the stocks... or in jail, like disgraced US fraudster financier Bernard Madoff, who was handed a sentence of 150 years in New York.
But it takes so long here. I mean, it was only this year that justice finally caught up with Frank Dunlop, who was handed 18 months for his part in the planning corruption in Dublin in the 1980s.
Nobody’s happy. Pensioners paved the way and after them every interest group has had its day out, parading and picketing to bate the band. A poisonous and vengeful atmosphere prevails as the Government and the Murdoch(ish) meeja divide (to conquer) public and private sector workers. Bullies are back with a bang.
Meanwhile, with shrinking incomes and a very substantial price differential, a lot of people cross the border to shop. Stupidly, the Government raised VAT and excise duty on alcohol.
The result? A 25% jump in cross-Border shopping and an estimated loss of €430m in tax to the Irish exchequer. In March it was reported that ‘southerners bought 10m litres of beer in NI’. The Government response? To cut public services and public service pay even more…

THE GREAT BLACK HOPE

In January, unlamented by the rest of the world, George W. Bush – by near-universal consent the worst world statesman since Aethelred The Unready – handed over the keys of the Oval Office to a black Chicago man named Barack Hussein Obama. Four years ago you couldn’t have made it up. A liberal Democrat whose policies would have been dismissed as halfway to Marxist less than a decade ago, Obama’s landslide election victory last November was the surest sign yet that the times are a-changing, as America faces up to its diminished standing in the global pecking order, the imminent end of Empire, and the collapse of the Chicago-School monetarist Reaganomics that we’d been instructed were ‘the only game in town’ for the last 20 years.
Obama’s inaugural address to the Houses of Congress sounded like something you might have expected to hear from a leftist orator at Speakers’ Corner, rather than a serving President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. It was rousing, wondrous stuff, chock-a-block with music-to-the-ears musings about the redistribution of wealth and the insane cost of war. In May, he delivered a major speech which could be summarised by the phrase ‘No War Without Need’, a clear repudiation of the neo-cons’ Iraqi adventure, pledging never to endanger American lives without ‘just cause’.
This has not precluded President Obama from continuing to prosecute the Afghanistan ‘campaign’. And May also witnessed the launch of a fresh offensive against the Taliban. On the other hand, Obama has been pro-active about the need to rid the world of nuclear weaponry which costs exorbitant sums and will presumably never be used, and his overtures in this area led to his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October. Hesitant as we are to place absolute faith in a man whose campaign slogan was lifted from Bob The Builder, the early indications are that Obama’s presidency has the potential to be a great force for meaningful, positive change in American foreign and domestic policy. We’ll wait and see.

THE POLISH PIMPERNEL

They seek him here, they seek him there, that damned accursed Pimpernel…
You’d nearly feel sorry for the Garda traffic division if only it wasn’t the Garda traffic division. The Irish Times reported in February that an individual named “Prawo Jazdy” had clocked up more than 50 entries for road traffic offences in the Garda’s Pulse system.
Quite the peripatetic bad boy, Prawo had been caught all over the country. It was quite late in the day when a traffic division officer checked up on this miscreant only to find that “Prawo Jazdy” is Polish for “driving licence”…
Oh Jaysus…
The Gardaí had to change their computer system and send notices to Garda stations notifying them of the error. But then the news escaped and they were awarded a gong at the annual Ig Nobel ceremony in the US.
How embarrassing…

HEAP PIG TROUBLE

Around the same time another challenge reared its head, this time a new strain of flu. Its genesis lay not in the mad banks of New York but further south, in the Perote Valley in Mexico, home to many industrial pig farms. Pretty soon it began to kill people. Medical authorities realised it was the long-anticipated new form of swine flu, one that could infect humans.
Game on. In May, Afghanistan’s only pig was placed in quarantine for fear of swine flu. It lives in a zoo, believe it or not, and visitors complained that it might infect them. As if that nation didn’t have enough problems to contend with...
Thankfully, although it’s a worldwide pandemic and millions have been infected, it hasn’t been the black plague the tabloids dreaded and desired in equal measure. Certain groups are high risk, but to keep things in perspective (which we find hard to do) the seasonal flu will kill ten times as many. Not a big story, then...

CLIMATE CONTROL

So, no Copenhagen agreement to copper-fasten what everyone knows should happen to control humanity’s contribution to climate change. Shit. Look around you. Time is not on our side.
That said, there’s also an argument, advanced by many eminent environmentalists, that we now need to look at ways of managing the earth’s temperature. Hah! Now, there’s a thought.
In that regard, the Chinese have already been busy. When, early in the year, Beijing had endured its longest drought in 38 years, 313 cigarette-size sticks of silver iodide were fired into snow clouds that weren’t snowing, if you catch my drift. This was to make the snow “a lot heavier” and it worked. Heavy falls of snow brought the whole region to a standstill.
So there you go, they weren’t messing when they said they could guarantee the weather for the Olympics!
Fascinating. You’d wonder where our record rainfall fits in, wouldn’t you?

STRANGE WEATHER

Apparently 1947 was a bad weather year. The cause, it is said, was a series of volcanic eruptions. Could that be the case this year too? Perhaps. Early in the year, Chile’s Chaiten volcano spewed a vast cloud of ash as well as gas and molten rock, in a partial collapse of its cone.
“Large quantities of gases and pyroclastic material were observed,” officials said, adding that the volcano is “a time-bomb”. It has been in a permanent state of eruption since May last year, when a cloud of debris soared as high as 32km into the air. The cloud was kept aloft for weeks by the pressure of constant eruptions, covering towns in neighbouring Argentina with volcanic ash.
A quarter of Chile’s 2,000 volcanoes are potentially active. This is the second-largest chain in the world after Indonesia… where the year also saw lots of eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis. Europe didn’t escape either, with a massive earthquake in Abruzzo leaving hundreds dead, thousands injured and many tens of thousands homeless.
But all of this geological drama might have been put in the halfpenny place had we been hit by an asteroid that zipped past Earth in March. NASA called it a “cosmic close call”. Phew!! (One shrewd punter had apparently placed a bet on the Earth being hit by an asteroid, availing of the bookies’ generous 909,000/1 quote. How on Earth he expected to be able to cash in his winning docket is another story).
Bad and all as things are, sometimes you just have to count your blessings…

THE BULL AT BAY

Gasps of amazement greeted the first salvoes fired by the Sunday Telegraph on British Ministers’ and MPs’ expenses. Nobody had thought that anybody in there was alive, much less still young enough to think. They learned different. Sure, the Telegraph is the Harumphers’ bible. But it got results. Quite extraordinary abuses were uncovered.
The Irish meeja are quick learners. The Sunday Tribune got there first and while they didn’t uncover anything comparable to the British excesses, odd things emerged alright, and in the end they got the ox’s tail, the bould John O’Donoghue, Ceann Comhairle and former Minister, the other Munsterman they call The Bull, who was forced to resign.

MEEJITS

It’s been a swaggery year for the Irish meeja. There’s been so much to get the teeth into, so many reasons to open the jaws and roar. The trumpeting and bellowing of alpha meeja hounds rumbled throughout the land. No finger went unpointed, no point went unfingered.
In what was a precosious prank indeed, student Shane Fitzgerald entered a made-up quote into the Wikipedia page for Maurice Jarre, who had just died. It soon turned up everywhere, literally worldwide, and users included some pretty prestigious newspapers. Lots of questions were raised. It’s fair to say that non-journalists were less surprised than journalists, but there ya go.
Everyone has a different understanding of the words ‘research’ and ‘evidence’. As journalistic time becomes compressed, it’s hard to find the space to properly simmer a story. We’re in pot noodle territory and something’s got to give. It turns out that it’s proper research that’s given. That’s the way of the world.

VISION THINGS

So what comes after economic woe, pestilence and war? Surely not visions?! Unfortunately, yes. In July, residents in Rathkeale attempted to save a tree stump they said depicted ‘Our Lady’… The mind reels and indeed boggles. But worse was to follow when Joe Coleman and Keith Henderson, who say they are spiritual healers and “Visionaries of Our Blessed Mother”, predicted that there would be an apparition at Knock. Chaos ensued when, as the Irish Times put it, the spiritual search turned into a stampede as impatient apparently lost faith. You couldn’t make it up.

SNARK ATTACK: THE NEW BRUTALISM

The increased viciousness and bile of Irish public discourse over the last eighteen months is beyond dispute. This is a function of meeja coverage and commentary for sure, but it’s hard to say to what degree. The raggedy machismo of Murdoch media is a factor, but there are others.
These include the growth of blogging, phone-in radio and the facility to comment that is allowed on web articles. At this stage, everyone has an opinion and can put it out there. Furthermore, they can usually do it anonymously or through an assumed identity, so there are few constraints.
But even in mainstream discourse, a new brutalism is apparent. The principal proponents are hard-right print and radio commentators, who fancy themselves as intellectual or political Dirty Harries, but they also include a number of socially challenged economists.
It’s some jump from celebrity culture to new brutalism, but that’s what Pat Kenny’s done in leaving The Late Late Show for The Frontline.
Kenny has always been one of RTE’s foremost current affairs broadcasters, a man with a formidable intelligence and range. And for sure, he’s been reborn.
But The Frontline is perilously close to the Jerry Springer Show with added current affairs knobs. So when audience member Alan O’Brien gave Pat himself a personal taste of aggressive bile, there was much chuckling around the nation’s water coolers.
On radio, O’Brien described how the presenter had told the audience to let their emotions out and not to hold back. So he did. In fairness to O’Brien, he also gave a piece of his mind to union leader David Begg at another gathering. Likewise, in fairness to Kenny he took the attack with commendable cool. No harm done. But there is a parable somewhere in all of this...

THE LOST HIGHWAY

The Darwin awards are given out every year to honour those who improve the species by accidentally removing themselves from it (http://www.darwinawards.com/). Well take the case of a middle-aged Swedish couple in Italy earlier this year. They didn’t actually remove themselves from the species last July, but they got themselves in a bit of a knot.
They planned a holiday on Capri, as any sensible person would at least once in a life, and punched in their destination into the GPS. Modern technology is foolproof… Or is it?
When they arrived, all was not what it might have been. They weren’t on the Mediterranean for a start…
They were, in fact, in Carpi, an industrial town some 650 kilometres north and inland from Capri. So GPS ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, is it? And being able to spell is an advantage.

LIVING OFF THE FAT OF THE LAND

Some years ago a punter paid €10,000 for a bar of soap made from fat taken from Silvio Berlusconi during liposuction and we all laughed.
Well, a gang in a remote Peruvian jungle has been, shall we say, mining the same vein… taking people’s fat for use in cosmetics… There is, though, a minor problem… they’ve been killing the donors to get the fat.
Police have captured three suspects, two of whom were carrying bottles of liquid fat, but they believe that six members remain at large. The head cop says that as well as the five killings they’ve confessed to, the gang may be involved in dozens more, and that gang leader Hilario Cudena may have been fat-mining for more than three decades.
How’s it work? Well, it seems they drained the fat from their victims’ corpses and offered it on the black market. They’ve told the cops it was worth $15,000 a litre.
I’ll tell ya, there’d be one or two options nearer home… Ho Ho Ho…

LISBON – THE SEQUEL

The Lisbon Treaty was approved by the people of Ireland in a democratic referendum, having been rejected by the people of Ireland in a democratic referendum a year earlier. As yet, there are no known plans to put the Treaty to a ‘best out of three’ referendum. The populace voted disobediently first time out, and did what they were told second time around. The will of the people is sacred; we hold this truth to be self-evident. As long as the will of the people doesn’t deviate from the will of the politicians. The result, all the same, may have been the best one...

THE HAND OF FATE

Sports-wise, one story dwarfed all others in 2009, and has became a front- and back-page running saga beyond all expectation, continuing to colonise column inches, and provoking a level of public hysteria in Ireland which has drawn comparison to the Princess Diana soap opera of 1997.
The wound remains raw, and even writing about it is a deeply painful experience. Basically, the Republic of Ireland football team was robbed of its rightful place at next summer’s World Cup by a blatant handball committed by France’s Thierry Henry, coming in extra-time after an epic two-legged play-off in which Ireland had succumbed 1-0 at Croker, then gone over to Paris and produced a performance of such virtuosity that (at the very least) it must rank alongside Bulgaria ‘87, USSR ‘88, England ‘91 and Italy ‘94 as perhaps our finest hour. In the Stade de France, Ireland carved the complacent hosts to pieces, conjuring chance after chance, before Henry’s intervention (unseen, or at least unpunished, by the referee or any of his three assistants) provoked a storm of worldwide fury the magnitude of which will no doubt have come as quite a shock to the perpetrator, who overnight found himself cast as basically the most evil European since a certain German statesman of the 1930s (the tabloids used word like ‘MONSTER’ and ‘BEAST’ to describe his actions).
The fallout has been seismic. Saipan was a minor story by comparison. FIFA stands accused of basically rigging the outcome. They made a first-rate PR blunder with their decision to change the criteria for qualifying very, very late in the day (they had initially promised that there would be an ‘open draw’ for the play-offs, then decided to ‘seed’ them on the basis of world rankings at a time when it looked like lucrative marketplaces France and Germany were in danger of not winning their groups). This decision — one imagines FIFA now regret it — has fuelled wild conspiracy theories about shadowy meetings with multinational sponsors such as Adidas and Nike, and knocking heads with referees in a sinister cloak-and-dagger bid to screw the little guys.
The furore is justified, but the wilder conspiracy theories are plainly daft. It was evident on the night that the referee had a generally excellent game up until the 113th minute, getting virtually every decision spot-on, until the one that really counted. It was a straightforward case of human error, and certainly not the first. Over and over again, at every level of football, the outcome of major games has been habitually distorted by refereeing errors. The examples are legion, far too numerous to list here. It’s now widely expected that the global outcry over ‘The Hand of Frog’ will shame FIFA into fast-tracking proposals to introduce video assistance – or at least additional assistant referees behind the goals – in time for next summer. If so, at least our dreams will not have died entirely in vain.
There will be more on this elsewhere. Suffice to say that the nation fell in love with its football team again. And Gillette razors are off the shopping list. And, for the first time this decade, people around the world sympathise with the Irish.
Of course, we’ll probably blow that reservoir of goodwill like we’ve blown the previous, but that’s for another day…

GOODNIGHT AND... GOOD LUCK

Speaking of reservoirs, after all that went before, now we’ve the wettest winter on record. We’re saturated and that’s official. Vast swathes of the West are flooded. The island is sinking into the sea, more or less. It’s had enough!!!
Farewell 2009, we’ll not regret your passing. The only thing is, next year could be worse. Batten down the hatches.