There’s water, water everywhere in Ireland this week. Last night, all the streets in the centre of Cork city were flooded when the River Lee burst its banks. Last weekend, Limerick saw its worst ever floods when the River Shannon flooded many areas of the city. In many coastal communities around the country, immense damage has been done, houses and businesses destroyed, lives wrecked.
Yet as usual, the response from government is slow and hesitant. It was hardly surprising that when the Edelman pr company annoucned the results of its annual global survey into people’s views of government and the media, it found that trust in the government in Ireland had fallen to an all-time low, around 20 per cent, while trust in the media didn’t fare much better. Bankers were deemed the least trustworthy sector of society.
It’s all a bit like the banking crisis in Ireland in 2008 that brought the country’s economy close to collapse. It was all perfectly predictable and if the regulatory authorities had been doing their job properly, the banking crisis wouldn’t have happened. It’s the same with the current floods; people in power have been talking for years about building proper flood defences, but as usual, little or nothing was done. In only one place in Ireland were proper flood barriers built, Clonmel, Co Tipperary. For years, whenever the River Suir in the town rose, the quays flooded, but after much effort, and much expense, the building of proper flood barriers meant that this time round, the town was spared most of the devastation of floods. Yet Clonmel remains the only place in Ireland at serious risk from flooding where appropriate defensive action has been taken.
Of course, this is not a problem just in Ireland - governments everywhere are much the same, quick to impose extra taxes, slow to respond when there’s a genuine problem. You only have to look at the damage caused by the floods on the Somerset levels in the south-west of England over the past few weeks. Prince Charles visited yesterday and even he was highly critical of the lack of official response to the disaster. It turns out that January, 2014, was the wettest January in England since 1767.
Despite all the storms and floods on the Cote d’Azur and in north-western France last month, it turns out that January was one of the warmest in France since 1900. Ironically, Nice had more rain in January than in any other January during the past 35 years. Overall, in Europe and further afield, we are seeing some dramatic changes in weather patterns and in all probability, global warming is the culprit.
Just the other day, the OECD, renowned for its sober statements, said that Paris could be prone to a once in a century flood, similar to what happened in 1910. It said that the Ile de France, which accounts for a third of France’s economic output, could have road, rail, electricity systems knocked out, affecting up to five million people and costing 400,000 jobs. The overall cost could run to as much as €60 billion. By comparison, the deadly floods in central Europe in 2012 cost €12 billion.
The OECD also said that investment in infrastructure to prevent flooding in the Paris area had tailed off in the early 1990s and that since then, the building of homes, factories and roads in flood-prone areas has increased the risk. As usual, the official government response has lagged far behind what is actually needed.
The forecasts made for the year ahead at Chinese New Year, which happened last weekend, are interesting indeed. This is the Chinese Year of the Horse and Chinese astrologers says that the world is going to see some very dramatic developments this year, in terms of weather upheavals and natural disasters. They also say that 2014 is going to be a year of many conflicts and disagreements and many believe that Chinese ambitions to control the seas around its coasts are going to be the source of many of those international disagreements, that could end up in armed conflict.
It may have been the Year of the Horse, but according to the BBC, it is the year of something quite different. According to a caption on a BBC television news programme last Sunday night, this is the Year of the Whores. Maybe they know something the rest of us don’t! The BBC has quite a history of typos in onscreen captions, like the time they called the Archbishop of Canterbury the Archbitch.
Back in Ireland, I went to a fascinating talk the other day on the history of Merrion, one of the districts close to where we live in Dublin. It was given by a local resident, Charles Lysaght, who has had a distinguished career as a barrister and obituary writer, among many other occupations. He was also at Cambridge and there, he was elected as president of the Cambridge Union, beating a certain politician called Vince Cable for the job.
Also in terms of local news, last weekend, the new quai des États-Unis, complete with a replica statue of Liberty, was inveiled in the centre of Nice. Why Nice should want to install this American parody, heaven knows; surely something a little more original could have been created?
Meanwhile, the Hollande affaire rumbles on - it just won’t go away. Anne Sinclair, who was formerly married to Dominique Strauss-Kahn (he who was once head of the IMF) and now runs the editorial side of the French edition of the Huffington Post, said that she would hire Valérie Trielweiler for her journalistic skills, provided she wasn’t too dear. Many political commentators have seen Hollande as callous and egotistical, in other words,a downright cad, in how he treated Ms Trierweiler. That’s something women voters won’t forget in a hurry.
One candidate (right wing UMP) for the Mayor of Paris said that Hollande’s statement about the breakup sounded more like a sacking note than a breakup missive. Jean-Luc Melanchon, leader of the far left Party of the Left, was even more direct, when he said that Hollande simply behaved like an oaf, interested only in “me, me, me”. Even Carla Bruni’s mother, Marisa Bruni-Tedeschi, weighed in to the controversy by telling the media in her home country, Italy, that Hollande had behaved like an churlish bumpkin. No wonder that Bernard Accoyer, a former president of the Assemblée Nationale said the other day that Hollande had plunged France into a dramatic crisis of decadence.
Meanwhile, the demonstrations continue. Last Sunday afternoon, in Paris, La Manif pour Tous held a massive demonstration against what it said are the anti-family feelings of the French government. It claims that France’s future is at risk from the unnatural families that are being created, shorthand for anti-gay feelings. The Paris march, from the Bastille to Les Invalides, attracted half a million people, according to the organisers, 80,000 according to the police, while a similar march was also organised in Lyon. The interior minister, Manuel Valls, who has a knack of seeming totally out of touch, dismissed the rallies as being merely anti-republican. He must take his cue from the president, who in recent days, seems to have found Valérie Trierweilier’s comments about her treatment at the Elysée as a source of fun. What he doesn’t realise is that he himself is the source of fun, in France and around the world.
At least, there was one bit of good news from France the other day. A retired firefighter called Robert Marchand broke his own cycling record for people over 100. He is aged 102 and he managed to cycle just over 25km in one hour at the brand new National Velodrome, which has just been opened at a cost of €68 million in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, on the outskirts of Paris.
I also spotted some good news from the US the other day, from one of its traditional industries under much pressure, the newspaper business. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, took over the Washington Post last year and the other day it was announced the paper is taking on more editorial staff for both its print editions and its online edition. Such news in the newspaper industry in the western world is rare-and welcome.
I also found enlivening a review in the New York Times of an opera production at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. The opera was Janaceck’s Jenufa and it is directed by a Latvian director called Alvis Hermanis. He has created a lavish and complex production that is obviously worth seeing. It also brought to mind my last night in Prague in August, 1968, with a Soviet-led invasion of Czechsolvoakia imminent. I went to the National Theatre in Prague to see a performance of this self-same opera and in all the musical performances I’ve attended over the years, I’ve never seen such an emotionally charged one as that in Prague. It packed such a powerful musical punch that 46 years later, I can still remember sitting in the theatre watching the performance as if it were yesterday, a sure sign that the years are whizzing by!
To end this week’s blog, I must just mention that my new book, Hugh Oram’s French blogs, based on all the blogs I wrote here between November 2012 and November 2013, has just been published by trafford.com in the US, priced $20.00 for the book, $3.99 for the ebook download.It’s also available from Amazon and the other usual online outlets,as well as from your local bookstore.Enjoy!