As they say, we have the good or bad fortune to live in interesting times. And then some. A few years ago, when millenarian hysteria was at its height, many were wont to cite the Book of Revelation, and specifically the possibly imminent arrival of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.
The rider on the red horse is war. The rider on the black horse is famine. The rider on the pale horse is death. The fourth is generally accepted to be pestilence.
Well, whatever about the millennium, all four have been in play in 2005. Famine struck Niger. The earth shook and blew and showed us miserable humans just what the force of nature actually means. There was the tsunami over last year’s holiday period, the biggest hurricane season ever in the Caribbean and, in the Karakorams, an earthquake that swept away village after village.
War there was as well, and not just in Iraq. A third of the world is now designated as dangerous. And as for disease, apart from what we already have to contend with, the bird flu stepped across the Urals, Europe’s last defence.
For the past couple of years reactionaries and conservatives have been in the ascendant, and not just in Muslim countries and the United States. Things changed somewhat in 2005. In America, the deviousness and poverty of thought of the administration became clear to increasing numbers of people. In Arab countries, the halo of the terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi slipped after his acolytes bombed a hotel in Amman and he was disowned by his clan.
Here, Ray Burke went to jail. Tribunal reports were published and the Catholic Church, which had regained some composure in recent years, was rocked by the scale and depth of the appalling crimes committed by its trusted servants in Ferns.
The news that this is but the first of many such investigations cannot be welcome to the faithful. To have to face the dripfeed of horror over perhaps a decade may well finish the Church as it has been in Ireland for two centuries. Little wonder that when Liz O’Donnell called for a clear division between State and Church, there was much support.
But we also have to look to other challenges. The horrible story of the adopted child known as Tristan Dowse caused outrage. He was born in Indonesia and adopted by KPMG high-flier Joe Dowse and his Azerbaijani wife Lala. They left him at an orphanage in Jakarta when they were returning to Azerbaijan.
We can do heartless too. And in tragedies like the killing of John Ward by Pádraig Nally, we can see the contours of other troubles. This case, which has riveted and divided the country, involves members of two isolated and lost communities. Truly a tragedy.
The Book of Revelations doesn’t foretell anything of Ireland’s demographic changes, but the Central Statistics Office report does, and change that was hinted at before is right here right now. Immigrants make up ten per cent of the population, and in the key age sector of 20-35 the proportion is higher.
We’ve grown rich and complacent, but we have yet to work out how to be the land of 400,000 welcomes. We’re going to have to start soon.
Well, there was fun too. 2005 brought any number of must-haves, like the nano and video iPods and now, just as we speak, the XBox 360. We had a hot summer too.
And our war seems to have ended. Tell that to the four horsemen. Most of our violent deaths nowadays are in the criminal underworld. Bringing a ceasefire there won’t be as easy as in Northern Ireland.
And so it goes. The four horsemen are often seen as harbingers of the end of the world. Then again, in Biblical Greek, the word “apocalypse” means revelation, not holocaust. So hold onto your horses a while yet. The end may be nigh, but only in your game console. Elsewhere we’ll hang on a while!