We are into the last days of the first quarter of the 21st century. It hardly seems 25 years since the world held its breath on December 31st, 1999, expecting planes to fall out of the sky and the internet to crash, all due to the millennium bug. It never happened. Another doomsday “prophecy” turned to dust. A lesson there.
But we’ve had many catastrophes since 2000, none forecast. Such as 9/11, that horror event when thousands of people were killed after two planes were crashed by al-Qaeda into the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001, followed by the killing of hundreds of thousands in the so-called war on terror, as the US sought revenge in Iran and Afghanistan.
More recently there has been the killings of more than 66,000 Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli forces bent on limitless revenge too, for the murder by Hamas of 1,219 people and the taking of 251 hostages in 2023. And in 2022 we had Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which affects us all.
“The evil that men do lives after them.”
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One of the greatest natural disasters ever was the Indian Ocean tsunami of St Stephen’s Day 2004 in which more than 230,000 people died. A wholly man-made disaster, however, was the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, which in Ireland cost an estimated €85 billion in a bailout of the banks, of which the taxpayer paid about €64.1 billion.
Another natural disaster, conspiracy theories aside, has been the ongoing Covid pandemic, beginning in 2020, leading to more than 9,800 deaths in Ireland and an estimated 7.1 million worldwide. Some put that figure at 19.1-36 million, when related deaths are taken into account.
A highlight in Ireland since 2000 was the visit of Queen Elizabeth in 2011, somewhat dented by the Brexit referendum of 2016, and there was the 2015 same-sex referendum when Ireland became the first country in the world to approve marriage for gay people by popular vote.
Pope Francis’s visit in 2018 was marred in advance by so many statutory reports on the cover-up by church authorities of child sex abuse by priests, leaving the Catholic Church in Ireland at its lowest ebb since Emancipation in 1829.
As for the next 25 years? Don’t get too bothered. Most of us won’t even be here in 2050.
Retrospect, from Latin retrospectum, “to look back”
