Salmond’s faux pas

The consequences of a "Yes" vote in Scotland would have been almost unmanageable and taken decades to fully implement and recognise.

Inland Fisheries Ireland, a statutory body under the aegis of the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, published a report this week that challenges the advisability of Bord Iascaigh Mhara’s plans for Europe’s largest salmon farms at two sites off Galway.

Yesterday’s Central Statistics Office figures show that the economy is growing at its fastest rate in seven years. This would have been unimaginable even a year ago.

It is an extraordinary, curious and life-affirming juxtaposition that in a world where Isis have made public crucifixion an almost everyday expression of humanity’s capacity for barbarism; in a world where Scotland may cede from the United Kingdom; in a world where an 82,300 capacity Croke Park might be filled twice over for a football final that does not involve Dublin, that we can still find the time and enthusiasm to organise 900 arts events to mark Culture Night.

The impact that decades of scandal and hypocrisy have had on the Catholic Church’s position in this society can be seen in the fact that only 14 young men are taking part in the first year of study needed to join the priesthood in Ireland.

Scots go to the polls today to make what is, perhaps, the most momentous decision of their lives: whether to stay within a 300 year union with England or go it alone.

Recent days have seen a significant increase in the global response to the Ebola crisis: China and Cuba are sending doctors, the World Bank approved a $105-million grant, and the United States pledged 3,000 troops and training for hundreds of health care workers.

Given the Government’s insistence that an improving economy will be good for everyone, it is sobering to reflect on the increasing number of people being forced to live on the streets of our towns and cities.

Tomorrow the people of Scotland will vote on those most powerful and seductive ideas — the freedom to manage their own affairs and the intoxicating prospect of ending a relationship with a once-brutal and dominant neighbour that Scottish nationalists have, for centuries, described as exploitative, limiting, outdated, unwelcome, and a tarnished relic of a kind of Rudyard Kipling imperialism no longer acceptable, in Europe at least.