HEART BEAT Maurice NeliganI have written previously that we all need something of which to be afraid. This has been so since the beginnings of time.
Some things were feared with good reason: dinosaurs; sabre-toothed tigers; natural disasters; warfare; etc. Other times the fear was of matters less immediate, eg the almost universal fear of the Deity and of possible tribulations in the afterlife.
There are trivial fears also: spiders; the dark; ghosts; and other phobias that can disturb the most rational mind. One is reminded of Franklin D. Roosevelt's phrase in his inaugural address in 1933: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
The point I was setting out to make was that by ignoring many of the items in the daily news, we could certainly lessen our burden of fear. Right now, in consequence of having the time to attend the world media, I am beset by two such fears, both of which I hope will ultimately prove to be groundless.
Firstly, am I suddenly going to be drowned by a catastrophic rise in sea level caused by global warming? Sitting in my armchair looking over a calm sea, I wonder each day if I am to be like the old lady in the bawdy song Seven old ladies, "who had barely sat down when the rising tide caught her". To those of you who are unfamiliar with this song, I can only say you were well brought up. If it is not going to be me, is it my children, grandchildren or whoever who are going to draw the short straw?
Since I began to worry about this, the Maldives should be gone and more immediately, Rossbeigh would be an island. The bit of my property labelled on the map as "subject to flooding at spring tides" should surely by now be under water.
In the 20 or so years that I have been here it has never once, to my knowledge, been flooded. Only very occasionally does the tide reach our boundary wall and such occasions do not appear to be becoming more frequent.
I seem to remember a prophesy to the effect that in the last days that Ireland would sink beneath the seas and that the rest of the world would be consumed by fire. There's a choice for you all, drown or burn.
Let us come to the point, when are we talking about? We all want to know when to "eat drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die".
Mind you, according to the lesser fear-makers we are doing pretty well already. We are eating too much of the wrong foods and becoming fat. We are drinking and carousing too much and God only knows what other nice things we are fecklessly abusing. In reality, of course, we are only warming up for the big one.
It may, however, not ever come to that because the ceaseless drip of daily doom points with satisfaction at a second current fear that may or may not metamorphose into reality. The birds might get you before global warming.
Not the birds as in Hitchcock, but the birds as in avian flu. It will not have escaped your notice that every dead duck, goose and swan throughout the world is being listed and its obituary posted over the wires.
Don't ask me how many people died last week in Africa from Aids-related illness. Get real, that's only Africa, for God's sake. This is us. Forget about wars, starvation and other examples of our inhumanity; let's make sure that we're all right.
We are now apparently about to embark on mass vaccination of poultry. The mind boggles, but I am sure our vetenarian colleagues know how to set about this. How do you know each one has got his shot and how do you know the vaccination took?
Does the successful bird carry a little card around with him? Do the rest of them get a little bell to warn us of their approach? Migratory ducks and waders are apparently the real baddies, a sort of avian al-Qaeda. Meanwhile, we just wait with bated breath.
We in Ireland are lucky. Our Department of Health or the HSE or the Minister of Trolleys are fully awake and abreast of the situation. We have ordered 400,000 doses of anti-bird flu vaccine. It'll be here sometime. I know we have four million people but this initial lot is for healthcare workers and other necessary groups.
We can, I suppose, leave the gardaí out seeing the ease with which they came through the virulent attack of the blue flu. Leinster House will not be ignored and rightly so, as how would the rest of the State do without their sterling leadership?
Incidentally, our improvident neighbours in the UK have ordered 120,000,000 doses, enough to vaccinate their population twice over. One in 10 of our citizens will be covered and if so, leave it to the frontline doctors, nurses and paramedics, and the very young and old, the groups most at risk. The WHO says a pandemic is likely and we should prepare. So we should, bearing in mind that this is the same WHO who vowed "Health for all, by the year 2000."
In view of the fact that we do not have the facilities and beds to cope with our present health problems and that we could scarcely manage to deal with a tragedy of Stardust magnitude, how could we deal with this? This time the stewardship is signalled and the standard response of "it wasn't me" will not suffice.
I was about to go out and feed the birds but on second thoughts I'll leave them alone; the murdering bastards.
Maurice Neligan is a cardiac surgeon