Kate Holmquist: Give Me A Break

IT’S THOSE horrors again. Worries about the mortgage and school fees balloon into bigger fears such as “what am I going to die of?” and “what if I have it already?” and “what will happen to the kids?”. I remember that today is my mother’s birthday and I’m the same age as she was when she died and maybe that’s why I’m having one of those anxiety-about-death moments.

At least it’s not the yellow fridge dream. The kids still laugh about the time I woke up in the middle of the night convinced that we’d been taken over by a malevolent yellow refrigerator. (Dream experts say that you should always write down your dreams. I don’t think mine are worth it, somehow.)

So I’m lying here awake, trying to distract myself from the obvious worries about money, death and despair and thinking, Holy Moses, that Coalition deal. What if we were actually taken over by the Greens? Now there’s a nightmare.

I have all the time in the world for Arctic foxes. I understand what banning Arctic fox farming represents – making Ireland a more caring, environmentally friendly society and all that. It appeals to the young people, especially, reared on David Attenborough documentaries. Although my environmentally aware eldest did tell me today she couldn’t bear to read one more article about global warming because it was just too stressful and confusing.

When I was a kid, our “global warming” was the impending nuclear holocaust, namely, those evil Russians. In kindergarten, there would be air raid sirens and we’d all have to go down to the basement and kneel with our heads under our hands in crash position.

There were piles of cardboard boxes everywhere. The teacher told us they were emergency rations, crackers mainly. A five-year-old’s imagination can run riot given the prospect of living in a basement in the dark with the meanest teacher ever born and surviving on crackers.

About a thousand Hollywood apocalypse films later, here I am, a grown woman lying awake thinking that once the mortgage and essential bills are paid, all we’ll have to live on is the husband’s dole money, so it will definitely be crackers for tea by the end of the week. I’m not one of those celebrity journalists paid a fortune like they are in RTÉ. It would take ten of me to pay one Pat Kenny. Six of me would pay Marian Finucane. More importantly, it would pay 10 young Pats and 10 young Marians who could fill the radio with interesting talk all day instead of the same old guff.

It was an odd moment, on Sunday morning on her radio programme, when her first speaker was Eamon Ryan, invited to speak about “the elephant in the room”. Ryan launched in to a sensibly scathing criticism of RTÉ presenters’ salaries, saying pretty much what I’ve just said, which was that in today’s economic climate it didn’t make sense to have a few people paid the equivalent of about a hundred people. “Right,” she said in that smoky voice and then it was on to the next item. No debate whatsoever. It was so awkward.

What was her rationale? To take the criticism on the chin but not have to answer back? Sorry, Marian, you grey fox you, fair play and all that, but this is the sort of thing I lie awake thinking about.

Eamon Ryan is the best of the Greens and it’s his ilk I’d like to see running the country but I don’t know how many people of his calibre the Greens have.

The way those modest Greens run themselves by consensus, with everyone having a vote, is truly democratic, but wouldn’t it be awfully boring having them in charge?

They’re so serious, and there wouldn’t be any scandal (unless you call John Gormley climbing into a diplomatic limousine a scandal – did you see Hillary Clinton’s armoured car on Sunday?). A Government intent on transforming the country, rather than scoring points off each other, would be bad news for journalists, especially radio and TV journalists, who thrive on conflict. Consensus is so dull.

Having the Greens running the place would be like living in Sweden, with public transportation running on time, and proper childcare and affordable housing and people caring more about the collective quality of life than their individual salaries. Where’s the fun in that?

Young people think differently though, and the current baby boom shows what a young place Ireland will continue to be. The young are idealistic. They don’t have time for posturing masquerading as high-brow political debate with leaders like Bertie Ahern who still can’t string together a comprehensible sentence after 31 years in politics.

The best way to involve the young, is to save Artic foxes, reverse Fianna Fáil’s education cuts and preserve “free” university education. The rest will follow once they get involved. How clever those Greens are. And I shouldn’t lie awake worrying about my children, because it’s their world now, not mine.

I’m boring myself now. Back to sleep.

kholmquist@irishtimes.com