A FLOCK of waxwings and a swallow in the one day show just how gullible and hysterical we have become. The cross channel idiocies of the BSE panic should have cured us of Ball respect for those who threaten the end of the world is nigh. But it was reassuring to see the twin harbingers of summer and winter from Africa and the Arctic simultaneously.
According to the phobiaphobics who have been frightening the wits out of us now for the past 10 years the conjunction should have been impossible for waxwings only visit Ireland when northern European winters are harsh. For the seasons of swallow and wax wing to have overlapped confirms what we all know - Europe has had a particularly cold and enduring winter. My farming friend in Newcastle, Co Dublin tells me that planting here is three weeks late; in Finland the poor unfortunate Finnish farmers, blinkingly emerging from the perpetual night of their winter, have found their lands rock hard and covered in snow just when they should have been putting plough to soil; enough to make you finish farming.
They told us
Yet this is the very phenomenon the Global Warming Fraternity has been swearing was of the past, assuring us that what with This and That, and mean temperature increases over the globe, the polar ice caps would melt, the seas would rise, winters would cease to be winter and would instead be mild and wet, with summers warm and moist.
Well done, GWF. Nearly right. We have just had the coldest winter in memory, but with a markedly low rainfall, following the hottest, driest summer in history. Otherwise spot on. You promised us weather, and we got weather; it was just wasn't the right weather, that's all. Never mind. Better luck, the next time.
The point is not that the GWF was wrong. We are all entitled to be wrong; as, apparently, we are entitled to be credulous. We certainly believe everything that's fed to us these days, which is good for newspapers, and certainly good for journalists: Koala VD epidemic! Nuns at risk! - but of dubious value for politicians and policy makers. Maybe the answer is to appoint a special caste of Government Doubters, who will always purr at politicians in power, that the Scare is Greatly Exaggerated, Minister.
Doubt required
We need such people, not just now, but always. There can be no finer example of the need for doubt than the fate of the exemplary work of the medical historian J.D. Salisbury, who 25 years ago showed that the Black Death was not nearly as calamitous as historians had been making out. It was a superbly argued, meticulously presented case which has never been tackled, never mind refuted; yet historians continue to claim that one third of the population of Europe died in that plague, though there is no evidence for this whatsoever.
The truth is, we love bad news; start reading a history book which reports that the Salesian empire now entered an era of prosperity and peace Unequalled in human history, we fast forward for news of the next calamity. The problem in the past, decade or so is that calamity is not merely of entertainment value; calamity management has become endemic to government.
Remember herpes? Perhaps not. Herpes 10 years ago was going to end the sexual revolution and have us all scampering back to our solitary beds, neatly attired in steel pipes; until AIDS came along. And AIDS was the perfect plague for our times. It attacked those on the margins of society - homosexuals, junkies, haemophiliacs and therefore made us all feel guilty.
So, what did we do but pretend that we were all at risk, and pantomimed an elaborate mummery of care, best illustrated five years ago with the cutesy AIDS quilt, of excruciatingly embarrassing memory, with a patch dedicated to every American who had died of AIDS. One AIDS spokesperson said: "The values of the quilt - love, compassion, understanding - are easier to deal with than sex and death."
Quiltishness spreads
If you didn't know what values quilts stood for, now you know; love, compassion, understanding. Quiltishness spread its quilty grasp of statistics and aetiology everywhere as everybody scrambled onto the quilt of we are all at risk public virtue. AIDS spokespersons warned six years ago that by 1996 Ireland would have at least 10,000 people who are HIV positive, though Ivan Yates went one better, and said by the year 2000 at least 20,000 people would be HIV positive and Dublin might be the AIDS capital of Europe.
Quiltish compassion spread everywhere like a, ah, blanket. A "culture specific" counselling service for Irish people with HIV/AIDS opened in London, costing £120,000 a year in 1989, wailing for the flood of AIDS sufferers to come in the door. Those, who doubted that the epidemic was going to be on the scale were reviled with a new and delightfully nonsensical word: homophobe.
The outcome of this pandemic - as we were warned it would be - is that the virus reference centre in UCD has done 101,066 tests, and 1,585 have proved positive. New HIV cases last year totalled 30. in over a decade and hall, some 224 people have died of, AIDS, almost all of them from the originally vulnerable groups. Nearly 3 000 tests have been done, among hospital workers treating HIV infection. Only one person has shown up positive. The Eastern Health Board has discovered HIV rates amongst Dublin prostitutes is low. The Irish only HIV clinic in seven years saw about only 1,000 people - one every three days or so, and its funding has been ended.
None of this is to diminish the suffering of those people who are afflicted; nothing I can say here can do that. But maybe as the beef hysteria distorts European trade, and anyone who has ever eaten a British made winegum apparently needs counselling, the comfort is that this is today's terminal panic. The next one will be about knickers or toenails or pigs' dandruff. In the meantime: Shteady, Shimon.