Faithfully keeping a diary every day of one's life has many advantages. Unfortunately, it's the disadvantages that show up on New Year's Day.
When I look back through a couple of decades' worth of New Year resolutions, I find a record of fairly continuous failure, whether it's on the vows most women make at this time of year (lose a stone/ walk more/watch less TV) or on the vows more specific to my own past situation (learn to love constituency work/clinics).
It strikes me, given that dismal personal track record, that I'd be better advised, this year, to offer some resolutions for consideration by others, politicians among them.
Starting with the Government, would it not be wonderful if the entire Cabinet resolved to stop complaining about being under-appreciated?
There is a tedious nagging tone common to almost all Government utterances these days as ministers cope with any form of criticism by looking wounded and saying: "After all we've done for you!" The citizen elects public representatives to do the best they can with the economy and other difficult issues and retains the right, not only to free speech but to dissenting free speech when the economy does well. The idea that, when the good times roll, the citizen, or any representative group thereof, should belt up and be grateful has nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with pre-Revolutionary French monarchic thinking: don't talk when your mouth is full of cake.
One resolution all political parties absolutely must make is to operate more in the long than in the short term. Just as the 1990s saw the world of commerce getting hooked on profit at any cost, so the decade saw the world of politics get hooked on the next day's headlines and focus group.
In politics, the most effective figures have been those who know how to get on board any handy controversy or deliver headline-grabbing decisions. The problem with politics based on short-term popularity-seeking measures is that it diverts attention from policy-making related to long-term objectives. And if that last sentence makes you yawn, let me give you an odd example of why it should not.
A few weeks before Christmas, a Dublin friend of mine got a cheap flight to New York, in order to do her Christmas shopping. Despite the exchange rate, which militated against her coming back with many bargains, she nonetheless rated the trip a huge success because it was so much easier to get around in New York than in Dublin. But, just as the infrastructure of Dublin cannot match the current needs of business and family life, so the infrastructure in many parts of rural Ireland is failing to match current needs.
A resolution to deal with racism might usefully be taken by all political parties. In the last century, America was the melting pot. In the coming century, Ireland is set to become another melting pot. While we have laws which will prevent the appearance of the modern equivalent of "No Irish need apply" notices, we have little or nothing built into our education system to alert us to the processes leading to racism and the need to prevent it.
Nor am I suggesting that we can postpone addressing this problem by dumping it, as we dump so much else, into the education system. Anti-racist measures should be applicable to every policy, every piece of proposed legislation and much more. Our trade union movement must show leadership here, since they, more than any other collective in the State, know that racism tends to emerge most virulently when minorities, especially foreign-born minorities, start to get jobs in a country.
Thus far, the plentiful supply of jobs and the fact that many of the immigrants in the past couple of years are only now coming into the workforce have prevented this from surfacing as a major issue, but we cannot rely on that for the future.
Media, too, could make a new year resolution to be truly pluralist. Up to the end of the century, it may have been acceptable for newspapers to make front-page announcements of their celebration of Christian and largely Catholic calendar events while ignoring the events important to Jews or Muslims. Up to the end of the century, it may have been acceptable to do what was essentially tourism coverage of minority groups. Neither option will be acceptable in the new century.
And no doubt the newspaper of record will give a shining example by developing coverage, ideally in the appropriate languages, for and by newer citizen groups, rather than simply about them.
Two resolutions for State-sponsored bodies, one general, one specific. The general resolution I would propose is this: that all State-sponsored bodies develop a programme for training new board members. One reason for this is that many of the people appointed to State boards are put there because some politician views them as loyal personally or in party terms and are assumed to know the functions of a board member.
The specific resolution I would propose is that the Irish Medicines Board rescind its decision to force all of us to get a prescription in order to buy a herbal remedy we can get in any other country in the EU (not to mention the USA) without such a prescription.
The board has taken this action to protect us against the possibility of overdosing on St John's wort (which is extremely difficult), or taking it with another drug or food that might interact badly with it.
This despite the fact that the most frequent of the relatively infrequent problems associated with this old remedy is that it makes people a bit sensitive to sunlight, such a huge problem in Ireland. People who are taking the stuff do so because they have read about it and are therefore more likely to be well informed about its effects.