At last, an apocalypse to call our own

SOME DECADES AGO, Stanley Kubrick obsessed about where the safest place would be in a nuclear disaster.

He studied likely targets, fallout patterns and so on and concluded that Cork was the spot. The world would be half destroyed, Dublin a quarter destroyed, but Ireland’s second city would still be there, possibly just a little satisfied with having survived when the capital hadn’t.

You will have noticed that the apocalypse never happened. Not here anyhow. At least not in such a dramatic way. It hasn’t happened several times in the US, where today someone has once again taken it on himself to declare the imminent end times. This time, it is a fellow called Harold Camping, behind a Christian radio network, who has said that today – this morning our time, to be precise – the Rapture will happen and that things will get very messy indeed for most of us. Even Cork.

It's the end of the world as we know it. Lunatic religious fringe picks a date with destiny, shouts about it, puts ads on buses, and then the time passes, the world doesn't end and we wait for the next prediction. The difference this time is the fun everyone is having in advance. There is a "post-Rapture looting" Facebook site, Doonesburyhas riffed on it all week and, if you believe the news reports, some in the US are planning Rapture parties.

Here, it hasn't been noticed too much. We can only be hopeful it happens after the Heineken Cup Final. Thatwould be one for the What Happens Next? round on A Question of Sport("Sue, is the ball intercepted by a returned Christ?"). We've never gone in for that particular strain of fundamentalism – and, besides, we have our own end times to be dealing with. And this may finally, slowly, be seeping in to our popular culture in a way that we previously resisted.

Kubrick calculated that Cork was a possible post-doom haven while he was making his great nuclear satire Dr Strangelove(above, starring Peter Sellers). It came in the 1960s, in the middle of American and British fiction's lengthy concern with the end of the world, either through metaphor (countless creature features) or head-on ( Threads, When the Wind Blows, The Day After). Irish popular culture remained somewhat outside of this, perhaps because we were only ever going to be ancillary casualties rather than direct targets in a nuclear war, but also because our concerns were more insular.

It took until 2006 and the two-part drama Fallout– about the aftermath of a fictional attack on Sellafield – before RTÉ went nuclear. That was motivated by post-9/11 fears and Joe Jacob's iodine-tablets disaster, but also by the vogue a few years ago for mock documentary what-ifs about pandemics, dirty bombs and the like. It was interesting purely in a parochial way. It's always much more fun to see your home town reduced to ruin or zombification than some American city.

At that time, though, there developed a strain of post-apocalyptic American and British fiction. Cormac McCarthy's The Roadepitomised this; there was excellent film version of Children of Men, the BBC's truly rubbish Survivors, 28 Days Laterand, more widely, zombies galore. It was down to 9/11 again, but also grew out of countries at war with others and themselves.

And still Ireland held out.

Then our economic bomb went off. And now there are hints – small, vague, but hints nonetheless – that doom and decay is on our minds. Kevin Barry's City of Bohane, for instance, is notable for how it steps off the Irish literary path that goes only into the past, and instead is set in a future, rotting city. There's no big message, no sense that Barry is making any greater point about Irish society; he is simply manufacturing a world that can spawn characters and a story. It is interesting, though, that he is a literary author taking what, in some hands, would be considered a sci-fi route.

Cinema, too, has been attracted to the theme. Last year, there was a very low-budget, largely unseen Northern Irish post-apocalyptic film, Ditching. And One Hundred Mornings,currently on release, is worth watching not just because it is a fine film but also because it revels in those occasional glimpses of what would go on if Something Very Bad happened in Ireland. The shotgun-wielding guards and rotting rural landscapes suggest that it would be Something Very Bad Indeed.

None of these proclaims to be a post-collapse feature, but it will be interesting to see if they herald a fresh theme in Irish culture. You watch your home country in this alternative universe and wonder, Where am I in all of this? Probably zombified/cannibalised/an alien’s slave. Still, at least it would get me out of this negative-equity fix.

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