IN a cheerful mood this morning, I hope? I'm going to contribute to it. Today, I'm going to count up some of the doom-and-gloom things I among others confidently said would happen, and I'm going to point out that they did not happen. The fear of something happening, of course, moves things along just as much as the hope that something will happen. Still - we're often wrong.
It is maybe a bit unfair to start with the farmers, because the farmers' leaders habitually use the language of Armageddon. The beef farmers are out there at the moment on protest, while simultaneously denying any knowledge of, or responsibility for the beef industry, about the conduct of which, it seems, they knew no more than a teenage Dublin hairdresser. However. Today I'll pick out just one of the farmers' hysterical responses - the one to the MacSharry proposals for CAP reform. They said it would be the end of Irish farming. What actually happened?
In an article in the Irish Farmer's Journal recently, Prof Seamus Sheehy of UCD said about the beef farmers that "according to the MacSharry reforms, sales were to fall by 15 per cent as market prices fell in line with the reductions in intervention prices. But sales have held up, even increased a little. The direct payments (headage and premia) have increased broadly as expected. In other words, beef farmers have received in 1995 £250 million in payments to compensate them for a price fall which never occurred. This has meant an increase in revenue of 18 percent..."
Cereals are doing fine, too. "Again, Irish farmers are in receipt of £73m Area Aid in 1995 by way of compensation for a price fall that didn't happen." To sum up, the article - headed "The MacSharry Reforms in Retrospect" - says that "the 1995 income level of farmers is seen to be an all-time record."
I'm glad that the farmers are doing well. What's good for them is good for Ireland. I even see that they have no other way of making themselves felt except by constant protest. But all the same, they murder the meaning of words with their - conscious - exaggerations. Some day they'll be really crying "wolf" and nobody will believe them.
ANOTHER thing that did not happen was the accelerated decline of the west of Ireland, as feared by the Catholic bishops when they assisted the "Develop the West" campaign. The shops in the town of Castlerea - this was the metaphor for decay I used myself - have not been boarded up. The county of Leitrim is coming out of its corner fighting: the special report its County Enterprise Board published with this paper last week was unimaginable a few years ago.
Rural depopulation is continuing, but while people are leaving the countryside, they are moving into boom towns like Letterkenny and Galway. Even small places - Killala, for instance, or Tory Island - are doing much better than many places in Munster and Leinster. The west now has its own Minister; its own Development Partnership Board; its own protective mechanisms, such as the "ringfencing" of milk quotas so that they're not all sold out of the area.
The west needed this special help. No one could grudge it. But it's worth celebrating the fact that, in the tourist places on the west coast, the biggest problem at the moment is how to get staff for the new season.
A further thing that did not happen was that Shannon Airport did not become an echoing white elephant with moss growing on its runways. The campaign fuelled by the fear that it would had direct political consequences - Tony Killeen (Fianna Fail) got into the Dail, and Brendan Daly (also Fianna Fail) did not. Huge amounts of energy were expended. Bitter anti-Dublin feeling was aroused. Studies were commissioned. Rallies held. Lobbying conducted. And all rightly and properly done - if you think your whole region is going to be decimated, what should you do but protest?
But what has actually happened, subsequent to the abolition of the compulsory stop at Shannon on some flights is - and this is from the Clare Champion, which gets these matters right: "It is already shaping up as a record year for the Aer Lingus transatlantic operation at Shannon Airport, with long-term bookings indicating that passenger numbers could rise by as much as 14 per cent on the US routes. And a major feature of the transatlantic traffic boost will be the inauguration of the new Aer Lingus scheduled service to Chicago on May 1st, which is expected to bring an additional 26,000 passengers to Shannon in the first year of operation.
So there you are. Have a nice day. We're so used to the poor mouth that some people will actually be annoyed by my saying it, but the truth is, on some fronts - things are looking up.