Fintan O’Toole: 2019 was a bit like Game of Thrones – lots of action, no climax

Perhaps in 2019 it was not just Game of Thrones that left viewers feeling short-changed. Fans of the great TV extravaganza were apoplectic in May – how could all that lurid action, all that vivid spectacle, have produced such a sense of anticlimax? Their rage was comically disproportionate but even those whose energies went into more serious matters surely knew how they felt.

For this was a year for lurid action and vivid spectacle leading – where exactly? Big things were unfolding in obvious ways but their effects seemed oddly underwhelming.

We are used to thinking of major events as moments of change. If something dramatic happens in a given year, we think people in the future will look back on it as some kind of hinge in history. But 2019 didn’t feel at all like that.

It was certainly a year in which extraordinary things were happening. But was anything being transformed? The news was full of rage and drama. Yet it was hard to shake the sense that we were in some kind of uneasy transition with a lot of activity but not much movement.

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History seemed to be stuck on the Western Front: democracy and destruction facing each other morosely across no man’s land, the air full of noise and violence, the days full of sorties and alarums, but the same lines of trenches holding their grim stasis.

This contradiction was even, literally, in the weather. Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit a record level in 2019. The global average temperature in 2019 (January to October) was about 1.1ºC above the pre-industrial period. In Antarctica, the ice cover hit record low levels in some months of the year. The rise in sea levels caused by that melting ice continued unabated. This is on course to be the second or third warmest year on record.

And the expressions of all of this were certainly dramatic, even, at times, apocalyptic. Just to write the words "wildfires in the Arctic" seems like indulging in some kind of dystopian fantasy, but yes there were wildfires inside the Arctic circle, hundreds of long-lived intense blazes in Alaska, Siberia, even in Greenland, as frozen peatlands dried up in record June temperatures and became highly flammable.

Arctic fires

In July, a vast swirl of smoke from multiple fires in Siberia extended across more than 4.5 million square kilometres of central and northern Asia – acting like a thin cloud blocking the sunlight. The cloud was bigger than the European Union. In June alone, the Arctic fires emitted 50 megatons of CO2, equivalent to Sweden’s total annual emissions.

Countries ranging all the way from the Bahamas to Japan to Mozambique suffered the effects of devastating tropical cyclones. Wildfires swept through Australia, California and Canada. Forty thousand fires burned out of control in the Amazon rainforest. Storms and floods hit much of Europe, drowning the great treasure of Venice and killing hundreds of people. (Ireland got a little taste of it with Storm Lorenzo in October.)

The word “Biblical” appeared in news reports, but not in a good news way – the analogy was to the Flood that drowned all of humanity except Noah and his family.

Yet how much changed? 2019 was the year in which the world's largest economy, the United States, submitted to the United Nations its formal notification of its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on measures to tackle climate change. It was the year in which the rabid climate change denier Jair Bolsonaro took office as president of Brazil, giving him custody of the rainforests that are crucial to human survival.

In November, Bolsonaro accused the Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio of “giving money to set the Amazon on fire”, part of his conspiracy theory that the fires in the Amazon are caused, not by his own backers clearing trees for logging and beef ranches, but by environmental NGOs looking for publicity.

It was a reminder of the connection between climate change and the politics of fakery that remains (in spite of some setbacks in Europe) in the ascendant: once you start denying climate change, truth goes out the window.

The Irish Government is not literally in denial, but the fact remains that throughout 2019, Ireland continued to contribute a disproportionate volume of Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions and to be one of Europe’s worst laggards in implementing the necessary policies.

Ireland increasing emissions

The country’s commitment to reaching agreed targets by 2020 has been abysmal: instead of achieving the required reduction of one million tonnes a year in CO2 emissions, Ireland is currently increasing emissions at a rate of two million tonnes a year. Ireland is not on course to hit its 2020 EU targets until around 2040.

In January, the Taoiseach, addressing his party’s annual think-in, said he wants Ireland to become a “global leader on climate action”, and the Government launched its big Climate Action Plan in June. Yet there is little evidence that Irish politics or Irish society are yet ready for the radical moves away from neoliberal economics and car-centred development that will be necessary.

The most important speech of the year was undoubtedly Greta Thunberg's furious address to the UN climate summit in September

The modest gains for the Green Party in the local and European Parliament elections in May and the Dublin Fingal byelection in November are undoubtedly significant, but it remains to be seen whether the priorities of the political system are about to change.

In this global context, the most important speech of the year was undoubtedly Greta Thunberg’s furious address to the UN climate summit in September. It was full of rage at the very absurdity of a schoolgirl having to make herself the voice of a future that is so obviously coming upon us: “you all come to me for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

The Extinction Rebellion movement that has swept through much of the democratic world has a similar despair at the lassitude of official institutions: “Conventional approaches of voting, lobbying, petitions and protest have failed because powerful political and economic interests prevent change. Our strategy is therefore one of non-violent, disruptive civil disobedience – a rebellion.”

The question that has not been answered in 2019 is whether this rebellion by the young can gain the grip on the conventional systems of governance and power, without which a sufficiently quick and deep response cannot happen.

*****

This same combination of drama and stasis applies, of course, to Brexit. Previewing 2019 in these pages I wrote that “The Brexit project will have to take some kind of shape very early in the year. The extraordinary indulgence in time-wasting has run out of road.” So much for prophecy: there was always more time to be wasted.

At one level, Brexit has been a riveting performance, with more plot lines than Game of Thrones. (Whether it reaches an equally anticlimactic conclusion is still an open question.) For a saga that everyone claims to be bored with, it continued to produce a remarkable number of unprecedented events.

The series of massive parliamentary defeats for the withdrawal agreement Theresa May had finally concluded with the EU at the end of 2018. Backbench rebellions seizing control of parliament from the executive. May winning a vote of confidence largely because nobody else wanted to be responsible for the mess. The great Independence Day of March 29th, 2019, coming and going with the UK meekly seeking an extension to its EU membership.

Extensions to the extensions. May’s resignation and the inexorable rise to 10 Downing Street of a man whom only 13 per cent of British voters say they would buy a used car from. Boris Johnson’s proroguing of parliament and the Supreme Court’s overturning of his mendacious manoeuvre. Sackings and resignations.

Johnson’s sudden capitulation and acceptance of the same withdrawal agreement he had characterised as colonial slavery, except with the Irish backstop elevated to a frontstop. The ditch that Johnson didn’t die in when he sought yet another extension after his do-or-die date with destiny of October 31st. A general election that seemed at once epoch-making and strangely underwhelming.

Alice in Wonderland

Yet what did this mad whirl of events amount to? Pretty much a return to the agreement that was on the table two years ago, in December 2017. It all felt rather like the Caucus Race in Alice in Wonderland: “There was no ‘One, two, three, and away’, but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However . . . the Dodo suddenly called out, ‘The race is over!’ and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, ‘But who has won?’”

In a very real sense the Irish Government won. It rightly withstood pressure (from Britain, but not from the EU) to water down its opposition to a hard Border on the island of Ireland, and in the end it was Johnson who capitulated and conceded what he had sworn no British prime minister would or could ever do – a so-called “border in the Irish Sea”, with Northern Ireland diverging over time from Britain’s customs and market arrangements.

This was the finest hour for Irish diplomacy since the Belfast agreement was signed in 1998.

But it is also a bittersweet victory. It is not a good news story – just a successful limitation of the damage from some very bad news: Brexit itself. There is no good outcome to that saga, merely a least worst consequence.

The Irish Government’s success involved Johnson’s barefaced betrayal of the Democratic Unionist Party. This was always going to happen: the DUP was deluded by its temporary good fortune in holding the balance of power at Westminster, an advantage that melted away when Johnson destroyed his own majority by withdrawing the whip from Tory rebels. And the DUP deserved little sympathy. It led unionists into an upheaval that was always going to undermine the union.

It is now perfectly normal to have the president of the United States trolling people on Twitter in the early hours of the morning

Nevertheless, October 10th, 2019, when Leo Varadkar met Johnson in Liverpool, and effectively persuaded him to go back to the Northern Ireland-only backstop that had been on offer before, may in time come to be seen as the moment at which another Irish crisis began.

It made concrete what has been implicit in the whole Brexit project, rooted as it is in English nationalism: that Northern Ireland doesn’t much matter to the Brexiteers. The implications of that for the island of Ireland are not just long-term. They may, depending on how events unfold, push forward the big existential questions of belonging that the Belfast agreement was designed to contain and postpone. And they may do so before Ireland, north or south, is ready to deal with them.

*****

The same combination of spectacle and immobility applies to the politics of the United States. They arrived in 2019 at a paradoxical state: the banality of outrage. Two years in, the Trump presidency had definitively disproved the suggestions of mainstream Republicans at the time of his election in 2016: that the office itself would settle him down, that the “adults in the room” would control his excesses and that over time Trump would not seem so different from his predecessors.

In fact, the reverse has happened: the adults have left the room. Trump has not adjusted to normality, he has changed it. It is now perfectly normal to have the president of the United States trolling people on Twitter in the early hours of the morning. The outrageous has become unremarkable, even boring. Nothing is sensational anymore.

The Mueller Report on collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia, when it came out in April, was an earthquake that turned out to be just the rumble of a passing train. In any other era, the report’s findings on obstruction of justice by President Trump would have been breathtakingly scandalous. In this one, they were just another routine affront to democratic norms.

The same may be true of the essentially uncontested evidence of attempts to extort the Ukrainian government that led to Trump’s impeachment: the volcano erupts but to Trump’s loyal nexus of support, there is nothing to see.

And so we had our year of suspended animation: lots of animation leaving everything suspended in a deeply unease stand-off between democracy and destruction. Those plots must surely begin to resolve themselves in 2020 but it is not yet clear whether the climax will be cathartic or catastrophic.