A Change Is Gonna Come

Was that it? Well! I can crawl out of my cave now. I keep getting e-mails from friends around the world telling me what a fantastic time they had. Fireworking and partying in sophisticated places like Paris and New York. Looked great. But then, by comparison with Ireland's dull worthiness, anything would look exciting. Anything.

It's ironic. Because last March I got e-mails from the exact same people who had seen the international coverage of St Patrick's Day in Dublin, telling me how pissed off they were that they couldn't be there. What a buzz! That was a hot town on fire.

You'd pity the poor bastards who came here for New Year having been tempted by the St Paddy's Day blast, and who arrived expecting a party town. The biggest excuse for a party in, oh at least a century, and people were being frisked on the streets and told they couldn't bring drink into the area around Merrion Square . . . (so they swigged the lot down in a gulp, thereby rather defeating the purpose). And the fireworks were put as far away from the centre as possible . . .

Indeed, the whole thing stank of management and control, of a bunch of crusty tightarses deciding that nobody would make a show of them. Whatever happened, they wouldn't have someone ringing up Joe Duffy to complain about vomit in the streets. Or condoms hanging on the railings. Or singing in the streets. We were going to be 'dignified' and 'responsible' and Mr Brennan was going to ensure that we were. So he and his committee bored us and dispersed us in turn.

I've spoken to some of the police who were on duty in the centre of Dublin on New Years Eve. And I've spoken to some of their relatives. And they said they were mortified at having to be the frontline of party-pooping. Even the traffic police! But (they said) their orders were unambiguous and came from the top. Surprise surprise.

Worthy, oh yes. But dull. So so dull. So so boring. Please, don't let SB ina shui run anything else that needs a heartbeat. If he ever gets a ministry again, give him . . . to Agriculture . . . If there was a Ministry for Sleep, he'd be your man.

(Paradoxically, for a very long time it would have been felt that, whatever else you might say of them, Fianna Fail knew how to throw a party. What the hell happened?)

As for the other likely suspect, I think Garda Commissioner Pat Byrne (who has escaped the opprobrium being heaped on the hapless Brennan) had a much stronger hand in the policy of dispersal and control than has hitherto been acknowledged. A proponent of 'preventive approaches', spreading people away from the centre so they couldn't congregate and make noise and cause trouble would be right up his street. Nice quiet night for everyone, and won't everybody be better off for that.

Well, they weren't! They were bored and pissed off! And, unlike Seamus Brennan, they can't take it out on Commissioner Pat Byrne at the ballot box!!

And isn't it a pity his chaps weren't able to pre-empt the young fellows who crashed into the canal later that night . . . before they crashed, that is. Now that would have been really preventive.

Well, all that aside, 2000 looks much like 1999. But is it the same? It's funny, but I'm not sure. Maybe it's the accumulation of all those articles. All the hype. All the buzz and blather. But I sense a change.

I think it's to do with critical mass. We've passed the threshold for mobile phone use, for computers, for internet access. And we've started questioning some of the basic tenets of tigerdom as well. Which is unusual. Normally that happens after an economic bubble bursts.

So now we have quite genuine calls for increased aid to Africa. We have demands for the cancellation of third world debt. And those voices we hear actually know what they are talking about.

Equally, I sense a change regarding the environment. It's the hurricanes in France and Germany, the snow storms in Austria, the floods in Venezuela . . . and the midlands. It's GM foods. It's dioxins. It's the homeless. It's the Y2K possibility of nuclear meltdown. It's all these things. But again, there's a critical mass, a threshold of general awareness, and if it hasn't been reached, it's very close. In this, as in so many things, we are getting more like the Dutch, the Danes, the Finns, the Germans. And it's no bad thing.

And yet, underneath all the hope and glory, there's always the complaint, the beal bocht, the outstretched hand. I have immense sympathy for those who were flooded in the midlands, and I think some way has to be found to ease their burden. But there is an irony involved. All the prognosticatons for the next century and millennium said the same things - first, that the world faces an acute shortage of fresh water and the next war in the Middle East will be over water, not oil; second, that global warming will lead to warmer and wetter weather in this part of the world (until the next ice age that is). So no let up.

Now just imagine if the fields of Athenry were flooded with oil rather than water.

Interesting thought. The farmers would look for compensation, of course, and would burn off what they could. The fact that you could get $20 a barrel for it would not be considered. They would tell you how difficult it would be to gather it. Oilers build rigs and dig holes many kilometres deep and float platforms on waves the height of skyscrapers, or (say in Alaska or Siberia) suck the diesel out of the earth at 40 degrees below zero. But the Irish wouldn't be able to suck it off the fields . . .

The point being this - water is a precious commodity. So valuable that in Chile they have developed a technology to gather dew drops to water their crops on the edge of the Atacama desert. It isn't even that it would be terribly difficult. Why not set up a pilot water-farm project to harvest the rain and sell it to the sheiks? Water is so valuable to the world - why do we see it as a problem? Why not look on it as an opportunity?

Any takers?