THE OPTIMIST:The golfers will win at golf, the footballers will win at football, and we'll find another €3.6 billion somewhere, writes SHANE HEGARTY
IT'S ALMOST 2012, so murmur a whoo-hoo while half-heartedly circling your index finger in the air. Tonight we're gonna party like it's not 2011 any more. It has been a rotten 12 months in many respects, if not quite the utter cad that was 2010 (even Reeling in the Yearshas wiped those tapes), and we're guilty of approaching 2012 with great trepidation. If we must treat it like a houseguest we've been dreading, however, then let's polish up the good china, get out the doilies and greet it warmly. You never know, it might bring some surprise gifts, deliver a few good anecdotes and not leave too much of a mess behind.
As ever, sport will dictate the nation’s mood, but there is cause to look forward to a stellar 2012. This, after all, is the year in which the Republic of Ireland soccer team will win the European Championship. The cagey, focused style of the team will prove a perfect way of restricting glamorous opponents to long-range shots and wild kicks at Glenn Whelan, who for three weeks will play with all the brilliance of Roy Keane at his absolute grumpiest.
It will mark a high point in a year of sporting glory. Our golfers will continue to dominate the majors, with Darren Clarke winning the British Open again after a four-night bender, at the end of which he woke up in a bunker on the 18th, chipping in for victory.
The cricketers will be feted for winning something that most people didn’t know they’d entered in the first place, and our Olympians will pick up a record haul of medals in London, aided by the realisation that tickets sold out so quickly because the Irish had block-booked every single event.
The boxer Katie Taylor will be presented with gold when she arrives in London because the organisers know that no one can possibly defeat her and because they want to save the Irish people the anxiety of watching their dreams being jabbed by a Russian.
In May, the Heineken Cup final will be contested between Leinster and Munster. Jonathan Sexton's three drop goals (two from the halfway line, one a backheel) will be cancelled out by Ronan O'Gara's three drop goals in the final minute. With the score deadlocked at the end of extra time, the teams will agree to share the trophy. (This result is perfectly feasible and should not be considered a consequence of this writer's refusal to alienate either section of The Irish Times's loyal rugby readership.)
All of this will further boost national and consumer confidence in an economic year that won’t be nearly as rocky as everyone predicted. The successful Italian bond auction, following the Spanish auction before Christmas, will set the tone for a fragile but palpable European and US recovery.
Ireland will continue to build on its strong export showing and will meet its budgetary requirements in preparation for a return to the bond markets in 2013. But what will really cheer everyone up will be the moment, in January, when Kevin Cardiff cleans out his office in preparation for his move to Europe and finds another €3.6 billion he didn’t realise was lying around.
This will come just in time to pay off the bulk of that month’s €4.2 billion repayment to the bailout fund. While the Government decides how to restructure the budget so as to alleviate the more severe cuts, it decides to reward the put-upon Irish public by buying them an iPad each.
This will further enhance Ireland's reputation as the digital capital of Europe, which will also see the development of a cloud-computing infrastructure second to none. But the final triumph will come with the results of last year's Europe-wide research into primary-education standards, which will show that Irish children lead the way in computer multitasking, namely playing Grand Theft Auto IIIwhile downloading pirated copies of Twilightand changing all the settings on their parents' iPhones.
It will be a less tumultuous year on the political front once it has been decided that a referendum isn’t needed on the changes to the EU, although there will be some fun to be had from watching Labour’s parliamentary party reduced to just Eamon Gilmore.
Instead, most of the attention will be diverted towards the courts as, early in the year, charges are finally brought against a clutch of leading bankers and former politicians.
It will emerge that the years of painstaking detective work into the banking crisis have been spent on developing a watertight case. The subsequent trial will be sensational, with the public queuing up for seats in the courtroom. Farming, which is already on course to have another great year, will get an extra boost thanks to the demands on the streets outside the courthouse for rotten cabbages and tomatoes.
In entertainment news, the miniseries Titanic: Blood and Steel, filmed in 2011, will trigger a new market in themed tourism. Ireland will come second in the Eurovision Song Contest, a result that will be seen as far better than winning the damn thing. Irish films and actors will win a slew of Oscars. There will be disappointment when our X Factorhopeful is eliminated after forgetting the words to the sob story written for him or her by the show's producers.
However, Sinéad O’Connor will lift the nation’s spirits by marrying again.
THE PESSIMIST:
Even if we avoid asteroid collisions and Judgment Day, next year promises to be worse than the one just ending, writes
CONOR POPE
THINGS ARE GRIM, but they can always get worse, and in 2012 they will. Over the next 12 months the big news will be the end of the world. If the doom-laden predictions of ancient Mayan calendars – and Hollywood studios – are to be believed, then the winter solstice on 21/12/12 will mark the end of days and the moment when an angry God descends to smite us.
Some of us, anyway. According to the blockbuster 2012, world leaders are, as you read this, building some amazing space arks that will ferry hundreds of thousands of the Chosen to safety on the moon. If you’ve not yet got the call, chances are you’re one of the ones being left behind. Sorry.
The next winter solstice is obviously a concern, then, but the end of everything could come even sooner. While 433 Eros might sound like a Capel Street sex shop, it’s actually more depressing than that. It’s the second-largest near-Earth asteroid on record, and it’s coming our way.
At the end of January this cold, hard rock the size of London will whizz past our planet, and although scientists are saying that it will be 27 million kilometres from us at its nearest point, a slight deviation could make a big difference. Remember the dinosaurs.
There is a chance we’ll avoid being hit by a giant rock, but our chances of avoiding another referendum on Europe are remote. The good news is that, when it comes, the campaign will be conducted in a dignified and civil fashion with no scaremongering from either side. Only joking.
The campaign for the vote, likely to take place in March – with a rerun pencilled in for late September after we get the answer wrong first time out – will be, as ever, shrill and hectoring and terrifying, just like Tonight with Vincent Browne.
While we’re busy tearing strips off each other over Europe, the euro will be busy collapsing with the help of moody ratings agencies. Before the spring is out, the currency will have changed its Facebook status from “single” to “it’s complicated” and the punt will have made a not-entirely-welcome return. People lucky enough to have savings will see them shrink dramatically, inflation will gobble the wages of those lucky enough to have jobs, tracker mortgages will die, interest rates will go through the roofs of our increasingly worthless properties and the search for someone to design our new punt will begin.
We won’t have much money for an artist. Perhaps Don Conroy, who taught generations of us how to draw birds on The Den, would willingly step in. As we won’t be able to pay even his small fee, each note will feature a bird drawn by one of his pupils and a sentence in a child’s handwriting, reading: “The Central Bank of Ireland promises to pay the bearer of this note almost nothing at all because we’ve surrendered our cash for the next 50 generations to shadowy bondholders. Sorry.”
Almost as distressing as the collapse of the euro will be the collapse of the Republic of Ireland at Euro 2012. Some commentators have speculated that qualification will ignite an economic revival, but that will happen only if we do well – and, having been drawn against Italy and Spain, that seems unlikely.
Even if we do make it out of the group of debt, we will then face England in the quarter-finals. And can you imagine anything more depressing than being walloped by our oldest enemy in the knockout stages of a big tournament, with the not-remotely-racist and utterly charming John Terry scoring a hat-trick? No? Us neither.
Jedward will get the Late Late Showgig after Ryan Tubridy announces he's off to the BBC, while Westlife will pick up their special key-changing bar stools one last time in the spring to enter Eurovision with a song written by Ronan Keating and Brian Kennedy. Amazingly, they'll win, and RTÉ will be forced to cancel its 50th-birthday celebrations as it scours its sock drawer for the money to host the competition in 2013.
The London Olympics will generate a little excitement here, but for the wrong reasons. We will fail to produce any medal contenders of note except, maybe, that boxing lady who wins everything all the time. You know? What’s her name? The one newspapers ignore when talking about Irish sporting heroes?
Nor will we convince any countries to establish a potentially lucrative Olympic training base here. We have, however, convinced the organisers to allow the Olympic flame to pass through Dublin. What looked like a good idea at the time will probably seem a lot less clever when the torch is stolen on Marlborough Street in early June and sent to its watery grave in the Royal Canal.
Following on from the success of this year’s two-day budget, the Taoiseach will give each Minister a day out next December. Dubbed Enda Days, the 15-day austerity fest will frontload every tax increase and cutback for the rest of time into a single budget. However, as the rest of time will, at that point, be less than three weeks, we won’t care and will start running up huge and utterly unsustainable credit-card bills, because nothing could go wrong with that plan, now, could it?
