Who wants to be a Millennium

So that was it, eh? The year 2000. To which we had so much looked forward. The turning point. The new millennium. The clean slate. The bright new dawn. The chorus. The flights of angels. The closing of the circle. The end of the world. The opening of the seventh seal. The Stone Ring. Ommmm. Say it again. Ommmmmmmmmm.

But no. In with high hopes and out with high dudgeon. Optimism to pessimism in 12 tremulous months. And it turned in an instant. I mean, look how it started. Dull and worthy. Or dignified and responsible , according to Siamus Brennan i.e. a soggy squib. People frisked in the streets before being allowed near the community concert in Merrion Square, and fireworks reduced to a smudge of enthusiasm on the horizon. Pathetic. A cold wet towel over all the hype.
Well, time marches on. Things change. We were modern then, and now we re something else. E-literate, perhaps, or quite dotty. The Internet has infiltrated the popular consciousness curiously, as much through mobile phone technology as through computers, and especially through e-mail. In the same breath, micro-heroes and pocket celebrities popped up, like the protagonists of the fly-on-the-wall docu-soap Big Brother. Warhol was right.
Of course, every year should see old demons evoked (this year it was Charles Haughey and young people) and new demons discovered (this year it was rugby schools and Red Bull). But these little notes were set in a series of greater movements.
One of the abiding themes of 2000 was the precariousness and preciousness of life. We heard of how asteroids, super-volcanoes and megs-tsunamis could destroy known life and plunge the planet into darkness from which cockroaches and rats would inherit the earth. Sounds familiar.
But there were also real and immediate tragedies. There was the Concorde crash in Paris. More recently, there was the immolation of skiers in an Austrian train tunnel. These events not only reminded us of the fragility of our existence, but also underscored the limits of the science and technology on which we have pinned so many of our hopes for the future.
Mind you, there were advances too, like the publication in 2000 of the human genome. Some say it s on a par with Galileo s discoveries. Others go further. It will change everything. And you were there.
Precious life? Perhaps. But we also had spectacular, appalling and tragic murders and road rages. And diseases, like Ebola and West Nile Disease, that loomed unbidden out of the tropics to threaten our sanitised lives. The vigour of the threat posed was underpinned by revelations of official incompetence, for example in the UK response to BSE (are we confident that we are all that different?) and the blood tribunal in Dublin. Who would trust an assurance now?
We picked at the sores, and we got very cross indeed. Tribunal revelations were one source of fury, but there were many others. For example, there was the economy. We ve never done better, we re told. So, why is there still poverty? Why can t working people afford to buy a house? Where s my share? Why do some earn vast fortunes, while those they employ to actually do the work earn so little? And we heard, and were quite staggered by, how little some people actually earn, even those whom we might have thought well-paid, like aeroplane cabin crews.
By the end of November it had descended into chaos, with truckers, teachers, airline staff, rail staff, taxi drivers variously on strike, withdrawing services, blocking the streets, fucking up the general public. And everywhere, anger and frustration.
Other points of irritation included the increasing Ibization of Ireland and the growing intrusiveness of official controls. There are police cameras everywhere. There are new traffic and litter Stasi in many towns and cities, but above all in Dublin. Big Brother wasn t only a television show. It s your life.
The future is here and we re not sure we like it.