Christmas preparations are supposed to be well under way by now,but some of the pre-Christmas news is far from cheery.
An opinion poll carried out the other day by Dimanche Ouest-France, shows that just over three-quarters of the people polled believe that a social explosion is very likely in the coming months, a sure fire indicator that all is far from well with the body politic in France. And last weekend, the far left managed to assemble 100,000 people for a protest march in Paris, another sure fire indicator of trouble ahead. Recently, it was announced that unemployment in France had fallen in October by 0.6 per cent, the first such drop since April, 2011, but it seems to have little effect on the general mood.
Then last Friday, a former president, Jacques Chirac, celebrated his 81st birthday and promptly went into hospital for an undisclosed surgical intervention. Back in 2005, he suffered a cerebral vascular incident, but he had seemed to recover from that. But at the end of last month, he made a rare public appearance at the new museum on the quai Branly in Paris and was said to have looked very weak. Compared with the present president, Chirac’s time in office now seems to have been a time of some considerable stability and bonhomie. Chirac didn’t do anything very revolutionary, but kept everything ticking over. Many allegations of corruption against him surfaced and he himself said that one of the benefits of being first mayor of Paris and then president of France was that he hadn’t had to buy any groceries for 40 years. He is still very popular with many people, even though he is so long out of office.
What happened on the TGV the other day between Paris and Nice caused a lot of discomfort for the passengers and in ways, the incident could be taken as a metaphor for all that’s wrong in France at the moment. The train left the Gare de Lyon on November 22 at 18h49 and was due into Nice shortly after midnight. However, soon after the train departed, the driver realised that the data transmission system wasn’t working properly, which meant he couldn’t get any warnings of other trains on the high speed track. So the train was switched to a low speed line and its speed was cut from 300 to 160 km an hour. It finally arrived in Marseilles at 02h00. Late night track maintenance was going on in the area, so the train couldn’t go any further.
The more than 300 passengers were then giving the choice of spending the rest of the night on the train or getting friends or relatives to pick them up from the station in Marseilles. Eventually, the train left Marseilles as 06h30 and arrived in Nice shortly after 09h00. SNCF promised passengers a full refund on their tickets, small compensation for mighty discomfort.
But at least on December 15, the new TGV service between Paris and Barcelona is being inaugurated. Up to now, passengers have had to change trains at the frontier, but now they’ll be able to make the whole journey on the one train. The journey time will be six hours, 20 minutes and it’s promised that by 2021, that journey time will be cut to five hours, 35 minutes. That depends on all the upgrades being completed between Perpignan and Nimes.
And at least a French artist, Laure Provoust, who now lives and works in London, won this year’s Turner prize. She’s a video and multimedia artist and her prize winning exhibit explored relationships with the past using the present day technology of today’s Instagram generation. I heard her interviewed on the radio and I’m still trying to work out what exactly she was on about! But an absence of clarity is often essential for winning this kind of award.
Meanwhile,here in Ireland, the threat of chaos looms just as much as in France. For starters, workers and management in Marks & Spencer in Ireland have long been at loggerheads, and not just over unilaterally imposed changes to the company pension scheme. So staff are starting a series of strikes, the first of which is due this coming Saturday, one of the busiest shopping days before Christmas. Much more serious is the threatened strike in the state owned power supply company in Ireland, again over a long running pension dispute. At present the situation is totally deadlocked and it’s said that one UK company that specialises in high capacity emergency generators has already started shipping in considerable quantities of them to Ireland.
Despite some signs of economic improvement in Ireland,the figures are still bleak. Last year, for instance, 600 people committed suicide, many because of economic hardships they were suffering, while over the past five years, 300,000 Irish people have left Ireland for other shores. The situation is still so bad here that whereas once people thought that the state and the government were on the side of the people, few believe that anymore.
In another sign of European unrest, a commentator for The Irish Times who lives in Greece wrote a piece last week in which he said that he wouldn’t be surprised if the military in Greece staged a coup aided and abetted by right wing forces. The military have taken charge in Greece before, but that was around 40 years ago, so the precedent is there.If it happens this time, what a brilliant ending to the EU’s efforts to rescue the Greek economy!
I must mention as well this week, the tragic deaths of Brian Hitchen and his wife Nelli. Brian was a long time newspaper editor in London, mainly of the Star, and by all accounts was one of the great old style characters of the London newspaper business. In more recent years, he’d acquired an Irish publication, Kerry Life. He was 77 when he died; he and his wife had a house in the south of Spain and on Sunday night, when they were out, they were both mown down and killed by a car just as they were crossing the road. May they rest in peace.
With Christmas coming up fast on the inside track, it looks like this festive season there’s going to be absolutely no shortage of bad news to put people off their Christmas lunch. Cheers!