We frighten ourselves senseless in the superstitious hope that nothing can be as bad as our fears. But the signs aren't great, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
IRELAND has always been rich in bad omens, never short of bad signs. Always dead lucky like that. But really, how many ways do we have to be told that the country is in a jocker? (A jocker: a funk, a desperate state, radically weakened, hungover.)
The hawthorn brought into the house, the shoes on the table, the hat on the bed – there are a thousand ways to presage disaster. The nation is as alive with the thuds of pictures falling from their walls as it is to the boom of snow sliding from its rooftops. A picture falling from the wall of a room is said to foretell a death.
What I'm trying to say is that we didn't need that cedar in Meath which has split in two – or sundered, as The Irish Timesput it, a bit biblically, on Saturday.
Irish history is rich in sunderings as well – look at republicanism, or left-wing movements, or Ronan and Yvonne.
With the national genius for springing new traditions on you when you least expect them, a local historian, Martin Dier, informed us that in Celtic Ireland the fall of a sacred tree was followed by a catastrophic change in the world order.
In other words, it could be a bad sign, depending on your view of the world order that pertained before the sacred tree fell. The cedar tree in question sundered last Tuesday, one week before the budget from hell.
In town, and perhaps more worryingly, sales girls in Dublin clothes shops have started greeting members of the public with some warmth and perhaps even a smile – always a bad sign.
Despite the fact that they have received all of the money the country had – and quite a lot of money that it did not have – the banks did not bother to sweep the pavements outside their buildings during the week. I thought that a bad sign.
The banks probably don’t have the time to shovel snow, poor things. Too busy picking up their bonuses to invest in a couple of brushes. But the pedestrians limping past their local branch of AIB were muttering ancient incantations all the same.
Sometimes the signs are good. A friend of mine fell badly in the snow and was picked up by a kindly teenager.
The kindly teenager insisted on helping my friend into a shop, and staying with her to make sure that she recovered from the shock of the fall.
On hearing about this afterwards my friend’s friends grew almost tearful with optimism and started talking about the goodness of young people, and how they are constantly maligned, so that their marvellousness, which should never be in doubt, always comes as a shock.
However, the friend who had been rescued was quite put out, and a bit annoyed at being so comprehensively saved. She is only 44, she said, and felt all the adolescent compassion a little premature.
She thought her teenage heroine a bad sign. For her. For her the sight of teenagers pelting Filipina women with snowballs was less personally worrying. Luckily there were plenty of examples of this alternate type of heartening teenage behaviour around last week.
Sometimes a sign is so bad that one finds oneself giving a brief shout, as if stuck with a pin. On Friday, in the wake of another unsurprising opinion poll, there was a mention on a serious radio programme of the possibility of Gerry Adams becoming leader of the Opposition.
But the advertisements on the radio – uncensored and even unmanaged as they appear to be – contain the clearest news bulletins. I’m not just talking about Eircom’s advertising of its burglar alarms, with which I admit to being slightly obsessed.
Burglar alarms are themselves a bad sign, and sold to the terminally frightened.
However, surely the fact that up till recently Eircom was boasting that it would give its new customers over €200 off a burglar alarm augured very ill for us all.
The absolute top radio advertisement at the moment, by quite a margin, is for the Michael Littleton Memorial Lecture. It is to be given tomorrow night, December 7th, just after the budget from hell. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
Anyway, the title of this lecture is, “Malignant Shame in Ireland and Its Role in the Rise and Fall of the Celtic Tiger”.
I mean no disrespect to any of the people involved in the Michael Littleton Memorial Lecture, which is to be delivered by Dr Garrett O’Connor tomorrow and broadcast at a later date, when I say that every time I hear the advertisement for it I smile with a certain amount of what I like to think of as tenderness; and that I am glad every single time that I hear it, which is pretty often.
“Malignant Shame in Ireland and Its Role in the Rise and Fall of the Celtic Tiger” is too specific to be an omen. It is too enterprising to be a sign. It’s too public to be a prayer. It is somehow simply perfect. It makes me happy.
I think that we frighten ourselves senseless in the superstitious hope that nothing can be as bad as our fears.
Good luck in the budget from hell.