Not everyone is in a charitable mood; many health professionals, from pharmacists to family doctors and doctors working in hospital emergency departments are going on strike on December 22 for a week. They are protesting at unreasonable working schedules and other work-related issues.
There’s grumbling, too, in the French Alps, because unlike parts of eastern and northern France, which have already had their first seasonal falls of snow, none at all has fallen in the Alps. Two days of Alpine World Cup competitions planned for Courcheval this week had to be cancelled, because there’s no snow. Down south, near St Maxime on the Provencal coast, part of a coastal road has fallen into the sea. Near here, too, the other night, at Beausoleil on the Cote d’Azur, a man in his 20s, from Nice, who was driving a powerful motorbike, crashed, killing himself and his female pillion passenger.
Also on the south coast, at Hyeres, a campaign to ‘save our palm trees’ is under way. Over the past seven years, over 1,100 palm trees in the town have fallen victim to disease and have had to be chopped down. It’s the same kind of story in Italy, where the olive fruit fly, devastating hail storms, floods and bacteria have cut the production of olives in Italy’s largest olive producing region by 35 per cent this year.
At 3.40 am local time yesterday morning, Tuesday, a 3.7 Richter earthquake struck in western Brittany, close to Belle-Ile. It didn’t do any damage or create any casualties. When I was looking at the map of the region and saw Quiberon, situated at the end of a long peninsula and close to the undersea epicentre, I was very amused to note that there’s a small town on the nearby mainland called Bono. No relation at all to U2 and I’m pleased to report that Bono seems to be recovering well from his injuries suffered in a recent cycling accident in New York. The other night, he turned up at a Dublin restaurant, and started serenading the customers.
And I nearly forgot to mention the latest strike on SNCF; there are so many that one can easily lose count. The latest work stoppage is by ticket inspectors. The latest Hollande scandal has just passed by with scarcely a murmur; they are so plentiful that they have simply lost their power to shock. One of the president’s advisors, Faouzi Lamdaoui, has just resigned because he was suspected of misusing company assets to his own benefit. The president himself got in more hot water the other day. He was on a visit to Kazakhstan, where the president there presented him with a Kazakh fur coat and hat. Hollande was pictured wearing this outpit by the government press office there, much to the annoyance of the Elysée Palace. The photo was quickly taken down, but not before it has gone viral. Much derision followed. One media commentator, Christian Delporte, said ‘the Hollande doll will be a real gift for Christmas, that children can dress as they want’.
Many people in France, especially in the south-west, are annoyed that a half share in the airport in Toulouse is being sold to a Chinese consortium for €308 million. Toulouse is of course the home of the Airbus company.
Another blunder came in Marseilles, where the city authorities planned to issue ID cards with a yellow triangle to homeless people in the city, so that they and their ailments could be swiftly recognised. The dunderhead who dreamed up this scheme had forgotten that during the Nazi era in France during the second world war, Jewish people who were about to be deported to an almost certain death had to wear something very similar. There was such a public outcry about the scheme in Marseilles that the city authorities promptly dropped the whole idea, like a very hot potato.
But the political elite have a remarkable knack of doing stupid things. Plans are under way to build a TGV rail line from Bordeaux to Dax. It will pass through the Ciron valley, which is destined to have a huge points section. There’s only one snag; the valley is where Sauternes and Barsac, those famous sweet wines, are produced. The wine producers say that the microclimate of the valley is essential for wine production, including the morning mists that help the growth of Sauternes grapes. They are up in arms, because they say that these rail plans will destroy that microclimate.
Talking about adverse environmental factors reminds me that the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has pledged to ban diesel cars from the city by 2020; diesel is much more polluting than petrol. She also wants to see a lot more pedestrianised streets in Paris and more cycle lanes. The good news is that already, far fewer Parisians now have cars. Today, only 40 per cent of Parisians have a car, whereas in 2001, that figure was 60 per cent. So Parisians seem to be getting much more green-minded. And it seems that just over half the population supports Hidalgo’s plans to ban diesel, according to a poll the other day in the Journal du Dimanche. The busy Mayor of Paris is also talking about the city putting in a bid for the 2024 summer Olympics. We shall see!
Despite all the political and economic gloom in France, there’s still good news around. The Champs-Elysées has just got a new set of Christmas lights, replacing the very tired ones that did duty for so long. The big obelisk in the place de la Concorde, at the foot of the Champs-Elsyées has been draped with what looks like a huge illuminated Catherine wheel. Despite all this, the Champs-Elsyées is the one street where no self-respecting Parisian will set foot. It remains a largely all-tourist hot spot, a favourite of Chinese visitors to Paris. France being France, there’s also plenty of ongoing controversy about Nativity scenes in publicly owned buildings. A court in Nantes ordered the other day that such a scene should be removed from a local council building. It’s all part of the on-going debate in France between religion and secularism, but some local councils that are controlled by the right wing Front National are busy trying to get round such court rulings.
There was better news too for the St Nazaire shipyard in north-western France, which is actually South Korean owned. It has just struck a deal with Royal Caribbean Cruises to build two new cruise ships worth in total €1.2 billion. The yard recently completed a helicopter carrying ship for the Russians, which the French government won’t deliver because of the Ukraine crisis,and the yard was also set to build a second such vessel for the Russians, an order that now seems increasingly unlikely.
More good news came on the tourism front. National Geographic in the US said that the world’s top tourist destination in 2015 is going to be the northern coast of Corsica, while Mont St Michel came in at 17th place. Sark in the Channel Islands, despite the Barclay Brothers, who live on a nearby small island, came in at number nine.
Another tourist attraction next year will be the first ever vertical race, up the Eiffel Tower. Runners will have to climb 1,665 steps to reach the finishing line, 279 metres in the sky.
Some very interesting anniversaries are coming up in France next year, including the 1,000th anniversary of the foundation of Strasbourg; the 300th anniversary of the death of Dom Pérignon, the ‘father’ of Champagne and the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, a rather ignominious event in French history.
Lots of cultural things will be coming up in 2015,including the opening of the new Philharmonie de Paris concert hall; the new hip-hop cultural centre in Les Halles district of central Paris and the Joan of Arc history museum in Rouen. Hotel events in 2015 will include the reopening of the five star Crillon in Paris after extensive refurbishment. Frank Gehry, the American architect, is going to get his first major retrospective in Europe, while the Gout de France, or Taste of France, event is all set for March 19. A total of 1,000 chefs on five continents will celebrate French cuisine, presumably the non-fast food pre-prepared variety that’s taken such a stranglehold on French restaurants.
Plenty of festivals are also planned for next year, including the Rock en Seine rock n’ roll festival in the Parc de Saint-Cloud in Paris at the end of August and throughout July, one of Europe’s largest cultural festivals takes place in Avignon. The Franco follies music festival will be staged in La Rochelle in July; founded in 1985, it’s become one of the most popular pop music festivals in France.
There’s also some intriguing cinema news with a French twist. Production is under way of the new James Bond film, Spectre, which will star a young French actress called Léa Seydoux. Her grandfather Jerome is chairman of the French cinema company, Pathé, while her great uncle Nicolas runs the Gaumont cinema company. But she says that she has always done her own thing, without any help from her family. Now 29, she started off as an opera singer, then went into movies. Last year, she won a Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival for her role in Blue is the Warmest Colour. That included a steamy lesbian romp; later, she created much controversy by saying that gay women are not as beautiful as straight ones. The Italian actress Monica Belucci, 50, is also starring in this new Bond film; she too was involved in controversial movie scenes, including a notorious anal rape episode. But as Oscar Wilde once said, the only bad publicity is none!
Back here in Ireland, it seems as if the country could become the latest in Europe to recognise the state of Palestine, a growing trend in Europe after the French parliamentary vote to the same effect recently. But Ireland has another unwelcome accolade, of having the fastest growing property market in the world, with price shooting up even faster in Dublin than London, surely a very unwelcome trend that reflects a rather juvenile obsession with not only owning property but constantly renovating it. Many continental European countries have a much larger and much safer dependence on rented accommodation, but things aren’t going to change any time soon in Ireland.
I’ve always said that the property bubble that broke the Irish economy in 2007 and 2008 could easily be repeated, as the same mistakes are being made all over again. Whether it’s a question of plain greed or stupid ignorance, I’m not sure. But one effect is being felt by many people living in modern apartments in Dublin; many of these have now been snapped up by international vulture funds and naturally, the people living in these apartments are now battling huge rent increases. All very unhealthy-the huge ongoing protests about the impending water charges could be just the start of a much larger movement to protest about the present senile ways of governing Ireland.
A perfect example came last week of the rot that’s blighting rural Ireland, with low economic development, huge unemployment and massive emigration. The Cashel Palace Hotel in Cashel, Co Tipperary, was one of the most elegant luxury hotels in Ireland, going since 1962 in a building that dates back to the 1730s. On Monday of last week, the owners had to stop trading straight away, because business was so bad; many local people were put out of work. So much for all the government guff that the economy is improving at a fast rate of knots. But then, that’s what most governments do-put out guff that bears little resemblance to reality. The EU itself is a past master at refusing to recognise reality.