Glorious Irish day cannot be beaten

I CAN only hope the extraordinary weather of last week has continued into this one.

As columnists must submit their copy ahead of publication date, it is impossible to know what the skies may deliver on the day it appears. But certainly, as I write this, it is a beautiful outdoors.

Earlier, walking on the Seven Heads in west Cork, I looked down over acres of gorse, a carpet of gold above a blue sea, beneath a blue sky. Out of the wind — there was an east wind this morning — the sun was so warm that we discarded our jackets (leaving them under a bush for collection upon our return) and, indeed, we came upon a couple basking in a sheltered corner of a beach who had discarded very much more than their jackets.

We had to turn our heads as we passed — such goings-on in West Cork! These days the season might well be mistaken for summer, and the stretch in the evenings and the clocks going forward add to the spell. The month of March in Ireland with temperatures of up to 22 degrees? Surely, we are bewitched — or is it some uncanny compensation for the shame revealed by the Mahon Tribunal’s findings, the unmasking of the greedy, self-regarding crew that dealt in lies and threats and Dulux rainbows? A robin sings on a treetop behind the house at all hours of the day and, the other evening, a thrush’s song was so loud that it drowned out the non-stop litany of political perfidy and finaglings detailed on the radio. It beggars belief that those honoured with high office and huge salaries should not value that honour, and history’s record, but stoop to sell themselves for the sake of a few dollars more.

On our recent excursion to South East Asia, my wife and I visited Angkor Wat, the ruins of an ancient civilisation rediscovered by a Frenchman in the Cambodia jungle in the mid-19th century. What the spung trees (Tetrameles nudiflora, a large, buttressed, deciduous tree, growing up to 40 m in height) have done to the once-proud edifices would seem a perfect metaphor for the havoc that greed, arrogance and unfettered power has wreaked upon our political system.

The roots of the trees crawl through the buildings and grip them like the tentacles of giant octopuses. They find every opening, widening the fissures, undermining the foundations. Above them, the trees they feed soar unassailable over the institutions they have fed on. The roots hold the ground in their grip while — to use another analogy — the heads look down like preying mantises. Unreachable and unaccountable, they have buried all opposition to their growth.

But the spung trees, unlike unprincipled politicians, are innocent. They do not hatch plans or conspiracies. They did not require disfunctional human hierachies to support them, or feed on failed human systems to sustain their growth. It is sheer chance where a seed falls and puts down roots, sprouts and reaches for the sky.

Now, in the case of beautiful Angkor Wat — and the magnificent edifices of Angkor Tom, a once-extensive city, with flag-paved roads and moats and terraces — nothing can be done to save them from ongoing ruin. Where the spung trees have rooted, they will continue to squeeze to dust the beautifully-carved limestone blocks, the likenesses of great kings, warriors and lissom maidens, and the weather will help.

To kill these trees with giant power-saws or poisonous weed killers (or dynamite) would wreak much worse destruction. The seeds took root and grew, time cannot be reversed, nature takes its course; the advance cannot be halted.

Here, in Ireland, we wait, in all good faith, to see things change and hope that those scandals that outrage us today may be things of the past tomorrow.

Meanwhile, looking up I see that outside my work-room window the long day wanes, the sun slants across the field, the rooks fly home, black shapes against the sky. The evening is magnificent, could not be bettered anywhere on earth. “Forget the tribunals and the outrage!”, I tell myself. “‘The world is too much with us.’” Wordsworth, the poet, was right.