A frozen country - Different crisis but same lesson

IF YOU were in Chicago yesterday you would have been faced with snow and temperatures of -12°C. If you were lucky enough to be in Oslo you would have been a tad cooler, temperatures around -15ºC were recorded in the Norwegian capital.

Moscow was not so bad at -10ºC. New York had it easy at a moderate -1°C, while Paris was marginally colder at -2ºC.

With a world-record low of -71.2 °C, Oymyakon in the Sakha Republic, in Siberia, has the distinction of being the coldest town on Earth. Yesterday the hardy locals had to endure nothing worse than -51ºC. A comparative if bracing romp in the park we must assume.

Dublin, Wexford and Edinburgh faced a moderately challenging -4ºC.

If you were lucky enough to be in Portugal’s Madeira, where they claim to have the world’s most perfect climate, you would have enjoyed a balmy 16°C. Pina coladas rather than hot whiskeys; sandals and shorts instead of salt and grit, sauntering instead of skating.

Yet, of all those countries, and the very, very many more in the grip of sustained cold and snow, only one seems as if it has been smashed by an asteroid; only one seems utterly unable to cope with entirely natural and predictable events.

A combination of very hard (let’s pretend) winter weather and institutional failures have brought large swathes of the country to a standstill and, surprise, surprise, closed schools, but not businesses. How can it be good for our children to inculcate them with such a culture of feebleness and inability?

A few centimetres of snow, coupled with a shortage of gritting materials, means planes stopped flying and buses stopped running. This modest enough set of events, the National Roads Authority warn us, could close most of the national roads network. Dublin City Council has warned that it may need the help of the army to keep our capital open. Joining the unfolding pantomime with predictable enthusiasm Defence Minister Willie O’Dea tells us that his storm troops are ready.

Yesterday afternoon Minister for the Environment John Gormley said his department would co-ordinate a national response to the problems caused by adverse weather. Speaking after a meeting of the Government’s “inter-departmental emergency response group,” Mr Gormley said the “unprecedented” conditions had not just affected roads but had severely affected education, water supplies and agriculture.

What does he mean by “unprecedented”? Unusual; rare maybe; but certainly not “unprecedented”.

It may be convenient – indeed, necessary – to describe them as “unprecedented” if you are utterly unprepared for them. Or if you have spent your time tilting at windmills – incinerators with planning permission and stag hunting say – rather than ensuring that the country’s local authorities are in a position to provide all of the services we expect of them when we need them most.

Though the Government response has been poor local authority staff have, as they always do, done as much, if not more, than could be expected of them.

If you consider the last few weeks and months in a wider perspective the cold and the floods have surely confirmed again that what passes for Government leadership pertaining to these expected and regular disasters is not up to the job.

Just as there was no effective plan to deal with floods, there is no plan to deal with a period of unusually cold weather either.

Equally, it is unimaginable that there is a plan to deal with periods of prolonged drought either, even though scientists have been warning us to expect drier summers for years. If the terrible state of our leaking water supply infrastructure is anything to go by, little enough has been done. This, despite the acknowledged fact that up to half of the country’s drinking water is lost through leaky and decrepit local authority water systems.

We are in an economic and social crisis because our Government was not up to the challenge of managing the economy or controlling the banks. The country is at a standstill because our Government has not prepared for this kind of predictable weather. Families and business are still trying to recover from recent floods because we did not have either adequate preventative measures or responses in place. We have been, the experts tell us, a hair’s breadth away from water rationing over the last few summers.

Yet, time after time, we vote for the same people, the same parties and the same ideas. Are we so pathetic that we can no longer even imagine an alternative, much less put one in place?