HEART BEAT:Pledging millions while our people sleep rough on the streets
EMILY DICKINSON wrote that “Hope is the thing with feathers–
That perches in the soul–”
For a nation that has been fed on a diet of horse feathers over the last 10 years, it’s about time to look for a little hope. I don’t see any about just now, but you never know. If 2010 brings a continuance of the attitude and refusal to accept the fact that we are essentially bankrupt, then we are going nowhere good. The closing month of 2009 gave little assurance that things might change.
I am trying to remain placid as I think about it, and nature is giving me a helping hand in my endeavour. It is beautiful outside, with a half moon hanging low over the snow-covered hills. It is also bitterly cold. I know this, because I have just returned from the three-mile walk prescribed by the Higher Authority as being good for me.
Tongue firmly in cheek, I felt how lucky we are that global warming has missed this part of Kerry. Seriously though, I have major problems with the climate change industry. It’s not that I don’t accept that the climate changes. It does and has done so since the planet arrived, either by way of big bang or creation. We’ve had ice ages and warm periods before and there seems no logical reason we won’t have them again. I have doubts about some cave dweller lighting a fire and initiating the whole process.
The perpetrators of the South Sea Bubble or the Dutch tulip bulb scam, even the gangsters who constructed our very own property-based calamity, would be in awe of those folk who trade carbon emissions. Copenhagen was a lesson for all. Did anybody quantify the emissions emanating from this fest of doomsayers?
In the end it achieved nothing; save that this costly roadshow will roll on, next year to Mexico. Mexico right now has an increasingly violent drug war and needs this costly circus like a hole in the head.
Our own Mr Gormley, the same buck who is sorting out the stag hounds, and who, together with his colleagues, did so little for our own unfortunate flood victims, tells us he’s disappointed with the US and China.
Wasn’t it the Skibbereen Eagle that warned the Czar of All the Russias, that it was keeping its eye on him? We’ve never lost it.
Our Taoiseach is disappointed with the outcome also and would have preferred firm targets for reducing CO2 emissions. He pledged €100 million of our money to mitigate what is happening in the worst affected countries. This is why I am angry and trying to remain calm. The money is peanuts of course compared to what we’re giving the banks and we can easily afford it since we’ve cut social welfare. We’ve even sprung another diversionary argument with the concept of “additionality”.
This, I think, means that such monies would be over and above sums allotted for overseas aid. Ah, go on, give it to them, the blind and the carers won’t mind.
Some of the recipients didn’t seem too impressed by the largesse. A gentleman from the Sudan denounced it forcefully. I would have thought that in his country there are problems like Darfur to be settled. I am also conscious that such aid has a habit of disappearing into Swiss bank accounts. But it really doesn’t matter. Haven’t we unlimited money, what’s a few bob here or there?
It was with incredulity that I heard a “Friend of the Earth” tell us that we were supporting an intransigent Chinese attitude by buying “white goods” (washing machines, etc) manufactured in that country. I suggested to the HA that she should do her bit for the planet by heading down to the river to do the washing, no detergents of course. She didn’t seem too keen on the idea.
I’ve a different idea. Let’s tell them all we’re broke. That of course we would like to play with the big boys but that right now we can’t afford to. That we would rather use that €100 million to vaccinate our little girls and to make our psychiatric hospitals fit for purpose.
And that we would rather use some of it to alleviate the distress of our people sleeping rough or to help heat the homes of the elderly who are stretched by welfare diminution and of course the “carbon tax” which makes it harder for the disadvantaged to stay warm.
In other words, let us stop pretending and regain our place in the world; earned of course.