Noonan’s forecast: water will be scarce
With great regret, I have to respond that I’ve not heard a more nonsensical statement for many months.
It is a fact that on the bulletins which carried Mr Noonan’s statement about the scarcity of Irish water, the reporters covering the other stories of the day were shivering and sheltering under battered umbrellas, as the allegedly scarce resource did its best to drown them.
And they were scattered throughout the length and breadth of the Four Green Fields currently controlled by Mr Noonan’s government and, as of recent times, by Irish Water.
The clocks go backwards this week, the winter season moves inexorably and darkly forwards atop all of us, including the good Minister for Finance.
The first cold rapiers of the freezing downpours are already lashing the drenched population upon which Mr Noonan has had to inflict many other (and necessary) hardships for years, and, in all fairness, the least we are entitled to this October is the kind of pure truth in which I specialise here.
To quote Brian Cody of Kilkenny, it is virtually criminal to describe our national supply of H2O as a scarce resource.
The facts are clear.
We are on the doorstep again of the flooding season across the nation, when that allegedly scarce resource rises up and attacks us on all fronts.
It will come down from the clouds in endless torrents for days and weeks on end. It will turn small rivers into raging monsters that will flood towns and cities, destroy many of our homes, probably even murder a few of us before the winter is over. Is that not the truth?
The Shannon will rise up again, as always, and ferociously and foully steal tens of thousands of acres back from the decent farmers along its banks. The lesser rivers and lakes right across the land will do the same.
Trillions of angry tons from the Atlantic will destroy long reaches of our poor coastline in a drastic attack (the Minister for Finance will have to put his hand in our pockets again to try and remedy the damage, before the next tourist season).
In the Burren of Clare, where I currently reside, huge lakes called turloughs, foaming with countless litres of that allegedly scarce resource, will appear monstrously and frighteningly overnight, to occupy priceless grazing land for the flocks of the stoic North Clare and South Galway farmers.
The Spanish Arch area of Galway City will be flooded again, for sure; the town of Clonmel will need its kayaks and snorkels, and even the Minister’s own constituency will see many instances of flooding and impassable roads, and all the truly appalling downstream consequences of the misbehaviour and excesses of the element which he has described, on the record, as “scarce”. Unbelievable.
The good Minister has scarcely put a foot wrong, as he guided us financially through the last few years.
I honestly salute him for that, with no reservations at all and, as we have seen so often, all politicians are entitled to make an error or two in their judgement and statements.
Sure that is life. I am a gentle enough hack, and I do not wish to be personal or offensive towards Michael Noonan, but I do notice that he is a man who never seems to be equipped with headgear of any kind in his public appearances.
I am sure, give his position, that there are always aides and drivers and guards to put large umbrellas over his person on rainy days.
If, as is still commonplace, those aides are family members or old friends, I have no problem with that either. It is the way of the political world.
However, though we know that the interior of the wise Noonan head is splendidly protected by luxuriant waves and locks of political wiles and guiles, it is also gleamingly true that he is, in plain language, a baldy, and shorn of his crowning glory for years.
Accordingly, since bald men (and I have a balding spot myself) are dreadfully vulnerable to quick, sharp showers of freezing rain, and sometimes the aide may be slow to react, it is certain that our poor Minister will be more than rarely reminded before winter ends that the allegedly scarce resource has the power to scourge to the bone.
I speak no word of a lie there.
