Denial still our deadliest delusion - Inaction on climate change

OUR politicians, because good ones know us better than we know ourselves, understand that there is little to be gained by sharing challenging, bad news with us — and still less by insisting that we make fundamental changes to unsustainable lifestyles or expectations.

We elect politicians to give us good news, to tell us that everything in the garden is, and will remain, rosy. We elect them to tell us that that the budget after next will eliminate the loathed, but necessary, universal social charge, and to tell us that they will eliminate hospital queues and over-crowded classrooms, too.

This is not a peculiarly Irish problem, but our cultural optimism, our devil-may-care belief that it’ll be all right on the night, means that we sometimes, too often really, have a dangerous indifference to reality and a hard-wired reluctance to focus on unavoidable, pressing issues. Like Charles Dickens’ Mr Micawber, we cling to the idea that “something will turn up” and that a long-dreaded day of reckoning can be put off just one more time.