HEART BEAT:Wake up to the real Ireland and things won't look so gloomy, writes Maurice Neligan
He that has and a little tiny wit,
With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain, Must make content with his fortunes fit, Though the rain it raineth every day.
(Shakespeare , King Lear)
THAT ABOUT sums me up; but a funny thing happened yesterday. It didn't rain. That provided some relief from hard-pressed parents of young families, at last enabled to be up and about.
Weather-mediated close confinement never seemed to bother our lot. Our capacity to create mayhem was not space related. It did, however, bother the Highest Authority and consequentially it bothered me.
I have just written to an American-based colleague who has just purchased a property here and who dolefully mused when inspecting it that he didn't remember the weather always being that bad. I told him that the sun came out yesterday and that therefore we'd had summer and he missed it. (PS, I saw the moon and stars last night also.) It's raining again this morning.
The rain did its best to disrupt Puck fair, but the Kerry folk are hardy and a few "soft days" wouldn't knock them out of their stride. The fairs at the metropolis of Tydavnet, Tullow and Tullamore were cancelled because the softies couldn't stand a little rain.
God would want to watch out. He might upset our new chief elf (Taoiseach Brian Cowen), who hails from around the latter spot and was apparently due to open the last named festivity. It's what chief elves and their buckets (Cabinets to the rest of the world) do best and they are always to the fore. When things close down, they are conspicuously absent.
By the way, has anybody seen the chief elf or any of his ministers lately? I honourably excuse elf Cullen who is in Beijing, probably teaching the Chinese the art of synchronised diving, ie vanishing when the going gets rough; an art form that we seem to have perfected, giving credit where it is due.
We've always had bad summers and lots of rain and wind. The only thing that is mildly surprising this year is that on the occasional fine day, we have not had some authority or other telling us to conserve water.
What we didn't have before was some crowd of doomsayers telling us that the end is nigh unless we repent our wicked ways, forswear our cars and sit shivering in the darkness. They would have us in sackcloth and ashes, only the ashes would be a little bit dubious since they presumably derive from fossil fuel.
I have a feeling that a prolonged scorching drought would provoke the same kind of response. We just can't win. As for myself, I'll go with predestination. I can do little about it and I don't propose to worry unduly.
In any case, I blame the Chinese and their preparations for the games. It should have been obvious that all those fireworks would release tonnes of whatever it is that is shortening the life of the planet.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: "The most patient people grow weary at last with being continually wetted with rain." That describes us and our nagging feeling that when the Celtic Tiger departed for economically more congenial climes that he might have taken our little bit of decent weather with him. I am conscious that I am, as our previous chief elf Bertie Ahern would have put it in his gilded prose, waffling. In truth, I have a reluctance to re-engage with the real world that is only glimpsed fleetingly through the fog of concealment and misinformation.
We benighted people are not supposed to notice that things are not what they are meant to be. We are expected to believe what we are told and chided, in the latest catchphrase, for talking down the economy.
The apologists are even telling us that we need measures to stimulate the building industry. How do they suppose we got into this sorry state other than by blowing an elaborate bubble?
Do they look around and see empty apartment blocks and industrial premises? Do they see an over-supply of hotel rooms, empty partly because of our non-competitive price structures?
If they do see it, presumably they don't care. The answer seems to be to build more, start another bubble.
In truth folks, it's largely our own fault. We should be a bit long in the tooth for fairytales. But we or many of us believed the stories we were told and went happily to sleep. We didn't protest the lack of basic necessities, like hospital beds and decent schools or adequate transport infrastructure. Those who briefly awoke and wondered were lulled back to sleep;
If you awake at midnight, and hear a horse's feet,
Don't go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street,
Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie,
Watch the wall my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!
-Kipling's Puck of Pooks Hill
It is time to wake up darlings and notice that the said gentlemen have filled their sacks and left the pickings and problems to the rest of us.
Maurice Neligan is a cardiac surgeon