Pouring oils on troubled waters

The year winds down in torrents. Not a potential torrent is left unpoured. There are torrents of abuse for politicians and donors of aid to South Africa alike. There are torrents of rain and hail. There are floods.

As so often before, we have the rather strange spectre of the Irish complaining about fate’s over-generosity. It has often been predicted that the next great conflagration in the Middle East will be about water, not oil. And yet, here we are in Ireland, inundated with water, and all we can do is complain. Am I being funny?

In a way, I suppose I am. And yet, I am not.

If one abiding image of the last six weeks is that of relentless rain and floodwaters rising, the other is of oil sludge washing up on Galician beaches. Vast fishing grounds, both for seafish and shellfish, are destroyed. And those of you who have travelled in the real Spain will know how important these fisheries are.

Those of you who live on the west coast of Ireland will know too, and will understand why the Government has been pressed to preserve the so-called Irish box.

But of what importance are fish? They’re only food, after all. The oil that has destroyed the fisheries is deemed of greater significance. After all, George Bush and Tony Blair did not batter the Afghan Taliban into a paste for fish, they did it for oil, and specifically, it is alleged by many, for a pipeline to take oil from the former Soviet republics through to an Indian Ocean port.

Bush ‘n’ Blair are not going to attack Iraq for fish. No, they will attack to secure Iraq’s oilfields for oil companies and for America, which treats environmental objectives set by the international community with disdain.

So what if there are millions starving in the world? The rich countries want oil, so fuck the food.

Money is the thing, and oil is a priority. That’s why unsafe buckets like the doomed Prestige are ferrying vast amounts of oil around the world. They go in seas that are increasingly violent and unpredictable thanks in no small measure to the greenhouse effect created by the over-consumption of oil by rich western countries, amongst whom the United States is by far the most excessive.

And if and when they run aground or take a wave they weren’t made for, well that’s tough. Tough, but we need the oil.

In contrast, over here we have an overabundance of the one physical resource that is more important than oil, and that’s water. It’s everywhere, washing hither and tither, ruining basements and beds with equal abandon. Not only that, but many people, perhaps as many as 20, will die between now and Christmas on Irish roads wrecked and ruined by floods.

Our relationship with water is as complex as our relationship with oil. For us it’s not a resource, it’s a nuisance. We’ve too much. Like Eskimos and snow.

But not elsewhere. Already in a number of countries, take Turkey, Syria, Israel, Lebanon and Iraq for starters, there are rumblings of war over diverted rivers and ‘stolen’ resources. And rightly so. You can do without a lot of things in life, even oil, but you can’t do without water.

Strange, isn’t it? The places where they have no water are rich in oil and the places where we have no oil are rich in water. If the positions were reversed, what might we find?

Well, they used to say that if the Irish lived in Holland and the Dutch lived here, Holland would be under water and Ireland would be the richest country in the world.

Some years ago, I remember reading of a Swedish experiment in Chile, where, by using fine filament nets, they were able to trap water and irrigate a desert. It beats me why we can’t think like that here. Why don’t we establish water farms, harvest the bounty of the skies, and sell it onto the highest bidder?

I don’t even think it would be all that difficult.

Can you imagine the Taoiseach standing kneedeep in oil on Richmond Avenue? If it was oil that was flooding up through the pavements and blocking the roads, we’d find a way of gathering it and selling it. So, why not water?

All of which returns me to the ecological disaster in the seas off Galicia.

My own preference is for a declared change to hydrogen fuel cells by a stated year. Iceland has already said it’s gong to change by 2020. Why not us?

I mean, go on as we are and the next broken tanker could be off the west coast of Ireland. What value then the Irish box? What torrents of abuse might we hear then? And how much water might we need to wash it all away? And as the climate changes, and much of the earth parches, how can we justify sitting on our arses and not gathering our water?

It has been said that we Irish know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Hard to disagree with that.

Compliments of the season.

The Hog