GLOBAL WETTING

Great weather for ducks, they say. This island has been deluged. Inundated. East to west, south to north. And it is, if anything, worse to the east. The Rhine is already many metres above normal as far inland as Köln. By the time it subsides, billions of marks worth of damage will have been done.

Ecologists have long warned about the effects of greenhouse gases, and have forewarned of global warming.

But maybe it won’t quite work that way. Maybe, instead, we’ll get global wetting.

Australia got it recently. America in 1993. Europe each year for the last four or five. Bangladesh too, of course.

In other words, alongside droughts, we also get floods. Those irresponsible forecasts that we’d have a climate sort of like present-day Bordeaux were probably miles off the mark. Instead we’ll probably be a temperate zone monsoon region. Lovely.

And for those who reckon that’ll be fine for fish, sorry but there’s more bad news. There are no fish in our seas. And it isn’t all the fault of Spanish pirates.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation now says that every one of the world’s major fishing areas has reached or surpassed its natural limit and that nine are already in serious decline.

Overfishing is one cause, but the greenhouse effect is another. A recent report by Geoffrey Lean in The Independent on Sunday quoted a senior official in the UK’s Department of the Environment. When asked to pick an indicator that would provide a warning of a gathering global environmental crisis, he said that it would be time to start getting seriously worried when the world’s fisheries began to collapse.

And it isn’t merely the dreadful implications for global hunger (fish supplies 40% of all the protein consumed in the Third World) that should concern us. Some experts maintain that collapsing fisheries will have knock-on effects, unravelling the entire ecosystems of the oceans.

That could mean the end of our oxygen. It would almost certainly mean the end for life as we know it. Something else would fill the gap, of course, but that’s small solace.

And this isn’t some idle futurist speculation. No. Even a cursory examination of the figures presented by Lean would scare the living shit out of anyone without a vested interest in doing nothing.

There are all kinds of reasons why no action will be taken and the oceans will be left to fend for themselves, even at the expense of our longterm obliteration (probably by late next century).

I mean, look at the implications for Ireland: we catch our weight in population terms, but not in terms of coastline, or being islanders. We should catch more. Any suggestion that we actually reduce our catch would lead to manifest outrage. It may be an ecological necessity, but it is a political impossibility.

In another manifestation of our incapacity to manage the earth, I read that smog has returned to the UK. This is not a laughing matter: in 1991 a blanket of photochemical smog killed 150 people in London hospitals. And the Great London Smog of 1952 killed 4,000 people over a single weekend.

Meanwhile, even deregulative Tory economists are coming to agree that a Green budget would tighten up British industry and create employment.

They point out that the economies with the highest fuel taxes in Europe are also the strongest. They say that measures to make homes and industries more energy efficient, including grants and tax reliefs represent money well spent, that they reduce rapid depletion of scarce resources, but also make a crucial contribution to combatting global warming and poisonous atmospheres.

And in an increasingly competitive economic environment, they also give a leading edge in trading with countries like Germany, Sweden and Switzerland, where the Green economy is well entrenched.

And there are jobs there, especially in the semi and unskilled areas that are so hard to find in traditional industries. Germans, for example, think nothing of four or five separate bundles of garbage, for paper, glass, plastic bottles, beer and mineral cans, used vegetables and peelings for compost. The remaining rubbish goes in the bin.

Each of these then has its recycling route. Indeed, there are others. Travellers and pickaroonies fulfil the most basic roles here, stripping skips and bins of whatever might have value in some circumstance or other – like copper wire in a broken down washing machine motor.

None of this is a joke. In the Patagonia shop around the corner from Hot Press HQ you can buy winter fleece clothing made from “recycled soda bottles”. Go and see. You’ll be flabbergasted. It’s exactly like wool. There’s more to recycling than you think.

Moreover, we lack the most basic infrastructures: take waste paper. In the EU headquarters in Brussels, virtually everything is printed on recycled paper. Throughout Europe there is a vast market. But nowhere in Ireland actually recycles paper. All recycled paper collected in Ireland (and it only represents a tiny fraction of the paper used) is shredded for bedding for animals (a good use) or is baled and sent overseas, where it is turned into paper, and sometimes sold back to us here.

Crazy, eh?

Given that this is the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the death camps in Auschwitz and elsewhere, one should mark the occasion. But how? Silence is probably most appropriate, and yet seems so completely inappropriate.

Especially since the intervening years have shown us that these horrors were not unique. The world did not know at that time that Stalin had already obliterated millions of his fellow citizens during collectivisation and purges, and that some of the Gulag camps were on a par with the Nazi concentration camps. Extermination on class grounds is no more acceptable than extermination on racial or religious grounds.

And later there was Nigeria. There was Cambodia. There was Iraq. There was Sudan. There was Rwanda. And there were more. The 20th century stands alone in the scale of horror visited by humans on their fellows.

But the Holocaust will stand forever as the defining horror. All others stand in its shadow. No less grotesque. It is just that the heart grows harder.

And so perhaps silence is the most appropriate gesture. Silence and contemplation. And resolution never to let such injustice prevail upon the earth. Such a stance would give us all much to do.

And another anniversary is also upon us, that of the Great Famine. I’ve no doubt that others will return to this turbulent theme, as indeed Sinead O’Connor already has, so I will be brief.

It is important that we acknowledge the Famine. The past must be accepted and incorporated. The Famine represents a real challenge in this respect, but it’s one which must be faced.

But I don’t accept the proposal that is advanced by counter-revisionists that we have all been crippled by the Famine.

Or to put it another way, the Irish are no more crippled by what happened six generations ago than Rwandans are by what has happened in their benighted land in the last generation, or the Cambodians, the Chinese, the Japanese (earthquakes and atom bombs, remember?), the Vietnamese, the Indians and Pakistanis (murderous wars), the Germans and others involved in any of the wars in Europe since the Middle Ages, or the many millions who were dislocated from the English countryside by famine and agricultural revolution in the early 19th century and so on and on and on and on and on.

Everyone has their troubles. The Irish are no more victims than most of the rest of the human species. Of course we’re special, but thinking of our woes as unique is part of the problem, not the solution.

Some people believe that everyone should be in therapy. Some believe that Ireland should be in therapy. Others believe that coping is innate. For example, when someone we love dies, as die they must, we go into a natural sequence: shock and grieving and, slowly, recovery.

It takes about a year in all to deal with it, the pain, anger, sorrow, loneliness. But most of us work it out and get on with it. Because that’s the way it is. Three things are inevitable in life, birth and death and change. Know what I mean?

And that’s the way it was with the Famine. I don’t see a people twisted by grief. I see a people pissed off by unemployment and emigration, but who are adaptable and cunning and know how to live. You get like that.

As Dennis Leary, that most Irish of comedians says “Life is tough. Get a helmet.”