An Irishman's Diary

IF NOTHING ELSE, tomorrow night’s World Cup qualifier between the Republic of Ireland and Kazakhstan makes for a fascinating contrast in geography. After all, it pitches a team from a small, wet island in the Atlantic against one from – you probably didn’t know this – the largest land-locked country on Earth.

I learned that and other facts a while back when preparing for a public interview with the only Irish-based (some of the time) Kazakh I’ve ever heard of – the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra’s principal conductor, Alan Buribayev.

Our interview took place not long after his alleged compatriot Borat had become famous in the West. But even though Buribayev seemed to have enjoyed the joke, half an hour talking to him was enough to remove any danger that I might have taken Sasha Baron Cohen’s slander on Kazakhstan seriously.

Still in his early thirties, the conductor had a CV that would make many older conductors feel inadequate. And as we say in these parts, he didn’t lick it off the ground. On the contrary, as I learned, the Buribayev family alone had more culture than some western countries.

One of the conductor’s great grandfathers wrote a classic work that still opens the opera season in Almaty every year. A great-aunt was the leading Kazakh composer of the last century. Buribayev’s mother is a pianist, and his father a cellist and conductor. Meanwhile, just to round off the picture, when we spoke, Buribayev snr was also Kazahkstan’s deputy minister for culture. Despite which pedigree, Buribayev jnr is also relaxed enough to enjoy pop music. Pressed on which point, he argued that Queen were the “greatest band ever”. But nobody’s perfect.

I SAY KAZAHKSTAN is the largest land-locked country on earth. It does, however, border the Caspian Sea, which is actually the world’s biggest lake. And it also contains about half of what’s left of the Aral Sea, the drying up of which was one of the 20th century’s greatest environmental disasters.

In his brilliant travelogue about the old Soviet Union, Imperium, Ryszard Kapuscinksi described flying over what had once been the bottom of that sea but which was now a new desert, complete with sand dunes.

Later, on the ground, he visited a former fishing port from which the water had retreated by 60 kilometres. The rusting trawlers now rested on sand. And, in the unlikely event they ever floated again, they would find the 178 species of fish that once populated the Aral reduced to under 40.

The reason for the catastrophe was Soviet central planning, in particular irrigation. Because the two great rivers that fed the Aral Sea had first to pass through many deserts, Moscow stupidly decided that the water should be siphoned off to grow cotton, rice and other commodities.

But not only did the Aral Sea shrink, predictably, but the diverted water was largely wasted on the insatiable sands, where one of its effects was to conduct the layer of salt that lies under every desert up to the surface. Add the vast amount of chemicals dumped on the doomed harvests and environmental ruin was complete.

In the later years of communism, drastic plans were considered to reverse the desertification. One would have involved blowing up the mountains where the rivers rose, and thereby releasing the glacier waters. But this would have required nuclear explosions, which might have been badly received elsewhere.

And as Kapuscinski quipped, while the explosions would certainly release water, “they would release it only once, and then in such quantities that there would be a serious risk of drowning a significant proportion of the former USSR”. The plan was not adopted. Happily, less drastic remedies have since succeeded in reversing at least a little of the damage.

ALAN BURIBAYEV AND the Irish football manager Giovanni Trapattoni have at least one thing in common. They both recently received a two-year contract extension.

And perhaps the similarities don’t end there, since Trapattoni is on record as saying that music was a vital part of his education as a manager.

Specifically, he claims Mozart has influenced his thinking about the “tempo” and “logic” of games. So it’s clear that he considers himself something of a conductor.

Or at least he did before the European Championships, during which he dropped his baton, and could only watch while such maestros as Spain’s Iniesta turned his planned four-movement symphony into a 90-minute-long prestissimo, for which the Irish midfield was confined to playing second fiddle.

In fact, Buribayev and Trapattoni may have one other thing in common.

I see from their schedules for the 2012/13 season that both will be taking on the Germans, Wagner and Brahms in Buribayev’s case. Maybe they could share tips.

But first of course there’s Kazakhstan. And speaking of tips, as a survivor of Poznan and Gdansk, I have one for those hardy few Irish supporters travelling to Astana this weekend.

As different from Ireland as it seems, Kazakhstan has also had a famine. It was almost as bad as ours, and more recent – in the 1920s and 1930s, when Soviet-orchestrated starvation and emigration reduced the population by a quarter. It’s not the only good reason for doing so, by any means, but may I suggest that, out of respect for the locals tomorrow, we for God’s sake give the Fields of Athenry a rest?