Pre-Millennium Tension

ONLY three years to go and does anyone care? Anyway, what's in a date? Not a lot, if you take the long term view. In 1399, a few ecclesiastically minded historians would have known that a century was coming to an end, but the great unwashed would have been none the wiser.

The idea of the end of a century even a century itself, is quite new. The phrase fin de siecle was first used as recently as the 1890s. So, before you sink the family savings into some crazy scheme to witness multiple dawnings of the third millennium (note for authenticity: the first sunrise will probably be over the uninhabited Balleny Islands in Antarctica; bring your overcoat), the question should be asked: does the presence or absence of a specific number in a date make a blind bit of difference?

Yes, a thousand times yes, is the answer if you're a politician bursting with portentous nonsense, as was Tony Blair at his party conference when he spoke of "a thousand days to prepare for a thousand years". Crass, yes, but preferable to our own political leaders, who seem intent on waiting till the fourth millennium to do anything about the third.

Maybe they're hoping, that like the 14th century hoi polloi, we won't notice the date or will settle for the usual bun fight at Christ Church Cathedral.

There was the Chime in the Slime of course. It lasted all of nine months, its life seconds numbering tickgockgicktock, drawing tourists like magnets to peer over O'Connell Bridge, all the better to see the stately parade of drink bottles, plastic bags and whatever you're having yourself sail past. Its dignity thus offended, "the most beautiful and astonishing clock in the world" covered its modesty in patriotic coloured slime and gave up the ghost.

And that's that for the millennium. Ah, surely not, it couldn't be, could it? A spokesman for Michael D. Higgins, Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht (whom, everyone, including the Government Information Service appeared to think was running the millennium show), tried diversionary tactics. The National Lottery, he suggested, has another five projects up its sleeve. But the lottery press officer sounded quite startled at the notion: "and knew nothing of any project other than the slimy chime, never mind another five.

Still more startling is the fate of the 2000 Island plan, proposed, oh, about four or five years ago by John Stephenson, who got £10,000 from the Minister to cover the cost of a feasibility study which he duly produced. Fast forward then to 1995, when the Minister's reply to a Dail question in March suggested that the plan was steaming ahead and that Stephenson was happily assuming responsibility for the entire £5 million sponsorship required from State and private bodies without any further input from Government - a notion, which startled Stephenson, who assumed the Department would take the lead.

But come September the Minister was clearly feeling a touch victimised. Then, there was no mention of plans of any kind. The whole question, he said, was "a matter for Government" and furthermore ... a co ordinating role could be assumed by my Department only on the provision of extra staffing and adequate dedicated financial resources".

And that really was that. Not a word since, unless you count the GIS's response to our recent query which went as follows: "No firm decision has been made but consideration is being given to some appropriate way to mark the millennium."

The sad aspect of all this is that Stephenson's plan read like a triumph of vision over mere money. No huge monuments or works of stunningly expensive millennial proportion were proposed just a year long, 32 county celebration led by musicians and poets, writers and dancers, sailors and athletes, clowns and gardeners. He envisaged giant bonfires and fireworks on every mountain top, light and laser displays in the towns and giant illuminated Celtic patterns visible from satellites in space.

According to his plan, the groundwork would have been laid as early as 1994, with each year building on the last, culminating in the climactic millennial year itself. Three years down the line, it all looks pretty bleak.

MEANWHILE, as the seconds race tick tocktick tock towards the new millennium, the most we can do is stare, saucer eyed, at the flaithuilach ways of our neighbours up North and across the Irish Sea as they gear up on lottery billions. So far, the British Millennium Commission has splashed a staggering £730 million on projects such as a new £86 million university for the Scottish Highlands and islands, a £114 million, 75,000 seater stadium and rugby museum at Wales's Cardiff Arms Park and a truly enviable £181 million plan to create a 2,500 mile cycle route throughout the UK.

"Smaller" projects include £9 million to create 92 new woods in Northern Ireland, £5 million for six community parks in Belfast city's most deprived areas, £6 million for a St Patrick's visitor centre in Downpatrick, the creation/restoration of a UK wide network of church bells to ring in the third millennium at a cost of £6 million, and nearly £5 million to floodlight 400 churches in time for a "switching on" ceremony on New Year's Eve 1999. (Yes, that's 1999 for those who will insist on looking for all this a year later and think the rest of us a bunch of innumerate simpletons.)

Of course they've had their rows and, yes, only a couple of the Landmark projects will be open for the big date, but who wants to argue with the scale of their ambitions? No one can match it anywhere in the world but at least there are plans.

Though the timing is co incidental, the German Bundestag will be inaugurated in Berlin. In Paris, the most grandiose project is a privately funded £35 million exhibition space beneath the Place de la Concorde. Public money is going to refurbish the Pompidou Centre and on commissioning designers including Hermes, Kenzo and Balenciaga to decorate the main avenues of Paris.

Italy seems to be banking on a global response to the Pope's call for Catholics to descend on Rome, while countries such as Spain, Greece, Sweden and Estonia are promising spectacles as yet unspecified.

In the US, plans for the celebration were put out to international competition and the result will be a 24 hour party in New York's Times Square, "the crossroads of the world", designed to mark the arrival of the new millennium in each of the world's 24 time zones. Images from each culture will be, beamed from giant television screens from 7 a.m. on December 31st, 1999, the moment the year 2000 begins in the South Pacific.

The odd thing is that amid all this celebration or talk of it anyway people tend to react with a shiver at the thought of a new millennium. Some are describing it as a new form of PMT - Pre Millennial Tension. Several millenniums' worth of apocalyptic "prophecies" probably haven't helped, in particular the sort featured on a 1980s Japanese television documentary, in which "two eminent authorities" as described in A.T. Mann's Millennium Prophecies concluded independently that we would all be wiped off the face of the Earth in 1999.

The man who pioneered Japan's rocket technology, Prof Hideo Itokawa, calculated that on August 18th, 1999, the Sun and the planets would take up the shape of a cross. This, he opined, would coincide with the destruction of human society on Earth, caused by wars over energy and food. And all before the new millennium emits a whimper.

A bit less precise but no less ominous are the prophecies of St Malachy which, to cut a complicated story short, suggest that there are just two more popes to follow Pope John Paul II, swiftly followed by the Last Judgment. Malachy - like Nostradamus reckoned that this would happen around the year 2000.

There are, on the other hand, the more optimistic types who hold that, instead of annihilation, we may expect a Second Coming, either in symbolic or fleshly form. Several "prophets" have predicted such an event, according to Mann, one of the most recent being Benjamin Creme, who anticipated the arrival of Jesus Christ from within the Pakistani population of east London in the 1980s. Sneer if you must but as, prophecies go, it may be as reliable as any of the effusions currently pouring forth from so called futurologists.

In any event, the notion or desirability of a spiritual New Age is perfectly in keeping with the aspirations of many leaders and commentators, past and present. In fact, the last decade of most centuries have prompted a sort of prophetic, apocalyptic millennial surge, says Prof Roy Foster, Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford. It was true of Ireland in the 1790s remember 1798. And it was certainly true of the 1890s when there was a huge surge of prophetic and millennial activity, partly prompted, says Prof Foster (whose first volume on WB. Yeats - A Lid will be published in March), by the Theosophical Movement. They, bless them, had forecast a shift from the age of materialism to spiritualism after 1896. This coincided with the great Celtic boom and the firm belief shared by Yeats, A.E. and Maud Gonne among others that by the end of the century, the Celtic nations would usher in a new age, both spiritual and political.

Spiritually, the movement was antimaterialist and anti modernist. Politically, its focus at the time was on the 1798 commemorations a factor which led, in turn, Prof Foster believes, to a revival of the Fenian movement. You win some, you lose some...

Back in the present, that New Agey feel is with us again. The Pope has used the opportunity to call for "a return to the heart... the shaking up of a disenchanted world" (and, it should be pointed out, the Catholic Church has already begun its three year programme leading up to the "Great Jubilee").

The Prince of Wales is all for rebirth too - but not at the expense of the past. The time has come, he says, "to rediscover, hope... which belongs to a world which recognises the idea of limits, going with the grain of nature and cherishing and learning from the best of what we have inherited from the past." He can hope, but will it do him any good?

Perhaps a little of that PMT is

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