Gerard Howlin: There is an unreality about the unsustainability of our lifestyle – Irish Examiner
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The reform of simple things often means much more than great events in history.
The fact of dying alone, family and friends absent, funerals of only few mourners and the bereaved, perhaps an elderly widow, returning directly from the graveyard to an empty house, which nobody else can enter captures deep meaning.
We were brought up to believe we are post-plague. Only a few now remember the polio epidemic.
I have no memory of it. Rampant disease was either for others or other parts of the world.
Penicillin, the contraceptive pill and the flush toilet transformed life in the 20th century.
They filled great moats of experience, separating illness from pain, sex from childbirth and daily life from its own squalor. We are so inured in this new ordinary, we have forgotten their novelty or life before.
Pain is no longer acceptable. For most of us it is relatively seldom. When it comes it is expected to be alleviated.
Unmitigated suffering is not only seemingly a failure of care, it is morally unacceptable too.
What was commonplace is now exceptional. To die roaring wasn’t a metaphor. It was an apt description of how life often ended.
Yesterday, we were told by Jim Breslin, the Secretary General at the Department of Health, that the acute phase of Covid-19 could last for years.
It is astonishing but hardly surprising. Most of human life was lived with recurring, incurable disease as normal.
Those who could afford to left the towns, which with their stink and wretched masses were the epicentre of death. Disease did best among the poor. So it does today.
We should hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Instead, we risk re-ruining Ireland.
Officials have been reasonably frank about what lies ahead. There may be no vaccine or one may be years away.
The health and the mental health consequences are alarming: in turn, a semi-permanent epidemic over years, even a single year or two, is an economic ice age in which our whole model of exponential growth is shunted violently into reverse.
We have hospitals, schools and roads only because we have an advanced and usually successful economic model.
And of course, provided we can source it, we have the energy to power our lifestyle, as well as an economy to pay for it.
What I am most afraid of is not Covid-19. If I channel my inner Pontius Pilate into handwashing and lean-in on an instinct to keep my distance, I have a reasonable chance. No, it’s not the disease I am afraid of, it is the cure.
We may guffaw, appalled at Donald Trump talking a malaria tablet called Hydroxychloroquine.
The medicine we are concocting for our country as public policy, to get us through the economic crisis that is about to wrap around the health crisis, makes ‘The Orange One’ eligible for a Nobel prize.
There is an utter, alarming lack of reality about what is going to happen next.
Even the shortest wait between now and the arrival of a vaccine, of say 12 to 18 months, means a dislocation in-scale that will make the economic crash of a decade ago seem a mere inconvenience.
As if mirroring the reopening of DIY on Monday, we have a political effort at the self-assembly of a dodgy shelf set. It won’t bear the weight.
Energy policy is an example. In historical terms it is hardly a few seconds ago, but we are convinced that automation is a naturally self-propagating phenomenon.
We have no memory of life before the light switch. Like very young children who think shops are the natural habitat of food, our disconnection from nature is so complete we have forgotten the complexity and politics of sourcing energy.
I admire the Green Party. They have an insight and a dynamic and insight we need. Instinctively I want to go where they are prepared to lead. But I want a road map, not just a destination.
A carbon-free future is necessary on so many levels if there is to be any future at all. But, while change is made, we have to survive and invest.
On energy, there is no instant switch from carbon-dependency to carbon-free.
The policy aims of never ever taking any more carbon out of the ground after existing dwindling resources end, and simultaneously saying no to a liquefied natural gas terminal on the Shannon, must be music for President Putin and the Saudi crown prince.
The consequences sign Ireland up for years as an energy dependency of some of the most unreliable, regimes on earth.
To plan for carbon-free, we have to plan for carbon over years while the transition is made.
It is not simply that the Corrib gas field keeps us out of the clutches of energy autocrats to some extent. Corrib contributes €6bn to the Irish GDP during the lifetime of the field.
55% of Ireland’s gas requirements are supplied by the Corrib gas field. Ireland’s energy import dependency has decreased from 88% in 2015 to 69% in 2016 due to the Corrib gas field. That’s still a huge energy security risk.
But it is better than the alternative.
Liquefied natural gas is fracked, 30% higher in emissions, and imported — which is itself an energy transport issue.
Turning our back on exploration for natural gas in Irish waters, which gives us a degree of energy security, and is a plan for transition doesn’t make sense except as virtue signalling.
I am delighted it was monetised politically in opposition, but government is about bridging the gap between what is promised and what is possible.
We want the light switch connected to a power source. We need an economy that provides the expensive care and medicine for us to be pain-free.
So much nonsense has been said and written about Ireland being a third-world country. Nobody who ever said it has any idea of that which they speak.
The danger is that the acute phase of Covid-19 could last for years. That could push us back towards the edge of what it means to be first-world.
I can’t remember polio thankfully, but I do remember the 1980s. We were sort of the same as other western European countries, but the differences were stark and embarrassing.
Maybe this time the danger is that we all regress together, and the difference won’t be as great.
There is an unreality about the sustainability of our lifestyle. The Greens have captured that.
Elsewhere there is a cavalier sense of any policy, however reckless, being used as self-assembly for a dodgy shelf set.
All the while, as some die alone and others stand with very few for company at a graveside.
We are anesthetised economically with temporary subsidies, funded by debt.
No matter. The lights still come on.
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