All we want for Christmas is ...

ALL I want for Christmas is — world peace?

A job?

Our lives might have been turned inside out, our world may be a darker, more uncertain place than ever before, and the future may look increasingly grim — but one thing is certain.

We’ll still be writing to Santa this Christmas. And here are just some of the letters that are already en route to the North Pole:

Joe Duffy, broadcaster and author

Dear Santa

All I want for Christmas is a new dictionary that doesn’t contain the words , “default”, “ratings agencies”, “recapitalise”, “bondholders”, or “sovereign debt”. This would be called a happy lexicon. Anyone that uses words that are not in the new dictionary would be sent to Athens — a week for every word.

I also have my eye on a second-hand green goddess Bedford fire engine — Dublin Fire Brigade have told me if I buy one they will allow me to answer the false alarms in the capital.

I collect model fire engines and need just another one to make the 1,000 — as I have 999 already — so please Santa dig deep.

Having released my own book, Just Joe, a few weeks ago — I’d love other autobiographies; the second volume of Bertie Ahern’s memoirs called Thanks for the Memory is surely due out soon. Eamon Dunphy’s volume on Modesty should be a best seller — alongside Giovanni Trapattoni’s new self-help book, English made incomprehensible, which should be a sure fire winner — in Italy. As for my three kids’ wishlist — an iPhone, iPod and iPad — please remember Santa, iPay!

Above all Santa, this Christmas Eve load up your sleigh with sackfuls of your magic dust, sprinkle it over Ireland, and give us back our sense of proportion — health, family and community will get us through times of no money, better than money would ever get us through times of no health, family or community.

* Joe Duffy presents Liveline on RTÉ Radio 1. His autobiography, Just Joe, is published by Transworld.

Professor Stephen Cusack, Consultant in Emergency Medicine, Cork University Hospital

Dear Santa,

I know how well-meaning you are and thank you so much for everything last year, but could I just start by asking that you to please stop sending us those trolleys?

Every year you send more trolleys, good times and bad. It’s now gotten to the point where the public think that we are the trolley department and that we ‘do’ trolleys and that I am the “Professor of Trolleys”.

But you know that we have a staff of highly trained and qualified people who live to treat the acutely sick and injured. We’d really like to do just that and not have to ‘warehouse’ every other patient in the hospital.

So maybe this year you could send us some of the equipment we need to give our patients the best treatment that they deserve. The equipment we got back in 2003 was just brill, but that was eight years ago and machinery gets old and worn and needs replacing and the way things are now it’s only you, Santa, that’s going to be able to help us.

The Health Service spends €2 million for each breast cancer patient that it treats.

And they do an excellent job for that disease now in Ireland. Maybe you could find the €25,000 or so that would get our department a new ultrasound machine? Certainly hundreds of patients per year would benefit.

Finally, Santa, if you could do anything, anything at all, about the centralised Orwellian bureaucratic nightmare that is now our Health Service I would really appreciate it. I could make some suggestions, but I’d really have to be sitting on your lap so that I could whisper in your ear. You’d never know who could be reading your mail!

Your friend,

Stephen

Pat Falvey, motivational speaker, entrepreneur, adventurer, expedition leader

Dear Santa,

I know you’re having many problems at the North Pole, and that in the near future you, your elves and all the polar bears may not have a place to live because of global warming and climate change.

So next year I’m going to visit you. It will be one of the hardest expeditions our team of Clare, Mick, Bill, Freddy and I has ever undertaken.

It will take 60 days, which will be equivalent to 120 marathons, of hauling sleds in the most hostile place on earth, while walking on thin ice with 14,000 feet of water below us. It’s scary because we will have to endure freezing temperatures which will go as low as minus 60 degrees, and ice so thin that at times we will fall through it and have to swim to safety.

Millions and millions of people will be affected by the ignorance of man which has caused all our weather systems to go crazy. We see it every day on the TV. Massive flooding, shrinking ice caps, people dying from the cold in some countries, flooding in others and famine in more.

So for Christmas can you bring to each home a booklet with advice on how to help Santa’s home, the North Pole, and the colder regions of the earth which in turn will help us to save millions of other people’s homes and lives.

You might also like to know that we will have Freddy T Bear coming with us and Freddy and Dr Clare O’Leary will be keeping all the young people posted along the journey.

PS. If you have any influence over the movement of the ice, can you please send us a map of a safe passage to the North Pole and we will see you around the 26th April 2012.

Please have a bottle of champagne waiting for us, and if possible you might get Rudolph to drop us back to Norway afterwards as we’ll be very tired.

* Pat Falvey is the managing director of Irish & Worldwide Adventureswww.patfalvey.com

Dr Sam Coulter-Smith, Master, Rotunda Hospital

Dear Santa,

My name is Sam and I am Master of one of the biggest maternity hospitals in Europe. It’s been a really tough year for me and my pals at the Rotunda. We’ve been getting busier and busier over the last few years and we really need your help.

Can you transform our hospital into a spanking new building with enough space for all the pregnant mums we look after?

My second ‘ask’ is that our shiny new hospital has enough midwives and doctors to run it safely.

We have been really good at saving money and being very efficient, all the while providing a really safe service. However, the people who fund us in the HSE don’t really understand how tough it is here; we can’t go on like this much longer.

They’ve been investing in cancer services and trying to reduce the number of patients on trollies in A&E departments.

But my big fear is that we’re going to lose our stressed and overworked doctors and midwives if maternity services don’t receive proper attention very soon.

So, Santa, can you please persuade the people who fund our health service to understand the need to address these issues?

I know these requests might sound familiar, Santa, as I recently found a copy of a letter Mr Bartholomew Mosse, the founder of this hospital, sent you back in 1745.

He was very worried at the time that he did not have enough money to pay for the running of the hospital. He was searching for a generous benefactor to help him buy the drugs and equipment for the hospital.

Otherwise, he would be unable to pay his staff. You may remember that he took great pains to point out that if his hospital did not receive the necessary funds, then all the improvements he had made and the safe environment he had created for women giving birth would be put at risk.

It’s amazing, Santa, that over 200 years later I am now writing to you asking for almost the very same things. You helped Mr Mosse then, so I really hope you can help me this year.

Have a great Christmas!

Alex Barclay, crime writer

Dear Santa,

On Christmas Eve, as you fly over the rooftops, you’re flying over homes that hold unfinished manuscripts, notebooks filled with ideas that have travelled no further, and letters that end with “I just wanted to say…”

You are flying over unwritten words. And often, unspoken ones. Next year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, the 100th anniversary of the birth of John Cheever, the 50th anniversary of the release of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. So, I would like you to pass on a message to anyone who has a story to tell, a letter to write, even a sorry to say:

Whether 2012 will be the best of times or the worst of times, whether your story is short or long, whether a Nurse Ratched is blocking your path, write your unwritten words, speak your unspoken ones.

They may change your life, they may change someone else’s. So, open up your heart and mind.

Break skin, see blood, feel pain, but let the page take it.

Think, laugh, cry, scream, and commit to paper.

Lots of love, Santa, and thank you for everything, alex b XX

* Alex Barclay’s new Ren Bryce novel, Blood Loss, is out in May.

Jenny Huston, radio presenter

Dear Santa,

I hope this letter finds you happy and well in the North Pole.

I know I usually write hoping for music-related presents, but this year, Santa, I’m asking for a big one. I would really, really, really love a summer for Christmas!

I want the whole season Santa, not just a random day. It’s not just for me, it’s for everyone here.

We deserve a little pick-me-up and nothing lifts the spirits more that sun on your face. Please Santa, three months of sunshine. Imagine a festival season without rain ponchos or wellies? BBQs! It really would be the best present ever.

Have a think about it before you say no, Santa. I promise to be a very good girl. No more cursing (honest).

If summer is too tricky, would a new waterworks for Ireland be possible? Since the rain doesn’t seem to want to stop, we may as well get a decent shower out of it!

I’m fond of our lush green sod, Santa, but considering the abundance of precipitation it’s annoying to be short both in water supply and pressure. I dream of those showers abroad Santa, you know the ones that pummel your back with the most amazing massage each day? That’s the dream.

Please Santa, sunshine and water pressure.

Failing that, an iPad 2 would be fab!

Thank you Santa. Please send my best wishes to the elves and the reindeer.

Yours truly,

Jenny Huston.

* Radio presenter and author Jenny Huston presents the latest indie-rock music weeknights on RTÉ 2fm (Monday – Thursday 9pm-11pm.

Claudia Carroll author

Dear Santa,

Lookit, I know you’re out the door this time of year and chances are that you’re paying the poor elves time and a half since Halloween, but I faithfully promise this will take up no room whatsoever in your sleigh. And I know plenty of others with higher motives than mine will wish for world peace, a safe and strong euro fully nursed back to health, an end to hunger, homelessness, war, etc.

So I’ll leave that to the more altruistic and meanwhile humbly ask you for the following.

A decisive, once and for all ending to all TV programmes with the prefix ‘X.’ What can I say? ENOUGH.

And no, it’s not just because this year’s X Factor was utter rubbish, or because it’s just not the same without Simon’s casual cruelty and Cheryl’s doe-eyed flirting up at him.

Trust me Santa, my tone deaf Auntie could do a better job than some of the finalists this year, and if you’d ever heard her murdering Someone Like You after a few Xmas G and T’s, you’d know that was really saying something.

Similarly, an end to all programming with the prefix ‘Celebrity’. This to include Celebrity Big Brother, Celebrity Strictly Come Dancing, Celebrities eat slugs in the jungle to try and re-jig flagging careers, Celebs watch paint dry,

Celebrities get dung thrown all over them, then have live TV debates about who flung what at whom and what party they were affiliated to at the time.

Or, as it was known in my house, Aras 11.

Ah go on, Santa. Think of the blessed peace .…

* Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, Claudia Carroll’s latest book, is published by Avon (HarperCollins), €9.49.