"Lifejackets may become compulsory at sea and on inland waterways next year for children under 16" reported our admirable Marine Correspondent, Lorna Siggins, last week, of an interim report on water safety, which also proposed age limits for drivers of those evil devices, jet-skis.
Good. Couldn't be faulted. But the report might as well have suggested alterations to the orbits of Saturn's moons or new routes for trans-Pacific submarine currents; as Lorna added with laconic tellingness: "The report does not indicate how such new powers could be enforced, beyond stating that they should be made statutory at both national and local level."
Well, of course. Rather than deal with the actual practical unrealities of trying to get any water law enforced, the report did what all such reports do when faced with a problem, that is to say, it started speaking Persian, recommending that "the Minister should provide a legislative framework to allow local authorities to enact the necessary by-laws; equip himself with the means to apply uniform national conditions; and direct the action group to set up a generic set of guidelines for local authorities. . ." Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph, I've had enough.
Catastrophe
Do you understand what "a generic set of guidelines" actually means in Persian? It means doing shag-all, as every law or proposed law to with the water in this country means shag-all, not to be taken seriously in formulation and to be utterly neglected in execution. We are creating the conditions for an absolute maritime catastrophe, a seaborne Stardust, and will reel in astonishment - well, bless my soul, how could such a disaster befall such an undeserving, blameless people as us? - when it does.
Two years ago, a new and perfectly admirable law was passed for our inland waterways, which insisted that all cruisers retain their sewage in tanks rather than flush it directly into the waters. Some law-abiding friends - at very considerable expense - converted their cruiser to be canally retentive.
All their waste would be stored within the craft, and would be emptied at special discharging points, where machines (which very definitely had drawn the short straw in the pre-life lottery for machines) would have to inhale and swallow the contents of the tanks into tanks of their own.
Mmmm. Delicious.
An excellent idea: and by midsummer of last year, the entire system had broken down. Whoever was supposed to be emptying riverside suction machines of their waste was failing to do so. The shore tanks were full, so the cruisers could not empty their tanks; and instead had to limp about the Shannon, bursting.
No policing
So my friends removed the internal sewage storage system and re-introduced a direct discharge system - regretfully, but inevitably. And why should they not? For not merely were the shore tanks never serviced, there was absolutely no policing of the system. There were no water bailiffs to check on the boats to see if they were complying with the law on sewage, or, come to that, with any law: speeding, engine-oil pollution, proper berthing. Once again - and God forgive me the Haughey cliche of 20 years ago - it was an Irish solution to an Irish problem. In other words, we wave a lazy legislative wand at a tiresome social issue, and hope it will go away through unenforced whim alone.
The plight of the Shannon, with its increasing e-coli population and various plankton swarms, is merely a symptom of the problem, which will not go away just because every now and then one speaks to it rather severely in Persian. Far worse is the state of the pleasure boats which ply to our offshore islands throughout the summer, unregulated, unlicensed, uninsured and laden with lardy, unlissom Americans without lifejackets, the vessel itself without any flotation devices.
Catastrophe is waiting; and it will happen.
Why have we this perverse attitude to the sea? How is it remotely possible that of the 156 seamen who gave their lives for this country during the last world war, only nine were until last weekend officially registered as dead, the rest remaining in a legal and lazy limbo in which their fate does not seem to have mattered? How is it possible that some 40 families of the dead have never been given the posthumous awards that are rightly theirs?
Marine heritage
On the very day this newspaper carried the story of the perfectly shameful neglect of these men, we also carried a letter from that great and kindly gentleman John de Courcy Ireland, whose work to remind us of our marine heritage has been not so much Trojan as Odyssean. He wondered at the cost to Ireland of the liquidation of Irish Shipping in the 1980s.
John, you ask in vain. Aside from pockets like Arklow, Waterford and the Claddagh - destroyed in deliberate detail, and with it all its great seafaring traditions, by Galway Corporation; would a Gaeltacht ever have been so ravaged? - culturally and gastronomically, throughout much of independence, we turned our backs on both sea and Shannon. It would be perfectly possible to correct this historic delinquency by assembling a package of laws, enforced by water bailiffs and coastguards, to bring order and safety to our waters. Or on the other hand, we could simply address the problem in Persian. Which is it to be?
Oh, Persian, I think.