Days of wine and roses

‘The price of a pint is going up again,’ one old codger would announce. ‘So long as it doesn’t get scarce,’ would be the inevitable reply, shot back in a manner suggesting that he was the first one to think up such a witty response. It seemed that people could live with a culture of scarcity so long as it did not involve essentials like alcohol. In recent weeks I find myself cutting out unnecessary trips by car and making the most of each journey. The old culture of scarcity has kicked in again in a conscious way. The motivation for this has been the rising price of a tank-full of petrol for my modest Volkswagen Golf. I’m thrifty by nature and as country people say, I “didn’t lick the pot for that”.

A generation has grown up in a culture of abundance and people are wondering how they might cope if the economic rug is pulled out from under our feet. There is a set of survival skills that have not necessarily been passed on because of the relative plenty of recent decades. There has been an absence of struggle to fulfil the basic aims of life and there is a subsequent lack of satisfaction and of ability to cope in difficult circumstances. One employer told me recently that he cannot find tradesmen who are problem-solvers. Difficulties are passed over to the next person or on to the next level of management rather than tackled and sorted out. This inability or unwillingness to solve problems in the work-place is replicated in the family life of those reared in the culture of abundance, he said. That is why, he reckoned, we have a high suicide rate, especially among young males and an increased rate of relationship and family breakdown. Those who struggle together develop bonds that are not as easily broken.

There is a set of skills and habits that has not been passed on to those reared on abundance. They have also been spared much of the humiliation that sometimes came with the saving and recycling ways of other times. There are very few children or young adults now who have worn hand-me-downs. The days of ‘first up – best dressed’ have long passed. I remember once wearing pre-worn trousers that had been patched at the knee. By the time the hand-down trousers reached me, the patch was somewhere between my knee and my ankle. I needed to eat ‘another bag of flour’ as people used to say, before I stretched enough to ‘let the trousers down’ and bring the patch back to its original position on the knee. The irony of pre-stressed jeans and torn designer trousers on sale in contemporary high-street shops at premium prices does not escape me.

Some of my own frugality was learned from a pair of unmarried aunts whom we often visited or stayed with. They had been ‘in service’ all of their lives and their housekeeping skills were as formidable as the parish priests that they ended up working for. Their meagre ‘carbon footprints’ were more than offset by their recycling skills and ‘green’ credentials. They were eco-warriors before their time. Both were naturally thin and tall and their spare-ness spilled over into diet and food-preparation. They would live ‘on the clippings of tin’ and they could make a filling meal out of meagre food resources. One of them used to knit woolly jumpers for her nephews and when we had ground holes in the elbows, unravelled the cuffs and used the back of the sleeves as handkerchiefs for runny noses, these pullovers would be taken back for washing and unwinding. The woollen thread would then be re-used for making multi-patterned rugs for the floor.

My father had inherited the thrift-gene as well. In our youth he used to make clothes for us on an old Singer sewing machine. Another of our aunts was resident in Donegal at the time and she used to wear heavy tweed coats. She was a cigarette smoker, rarely taking the ‘Gallagher’s untipped’ from her mouth while she worked. This gave her shock of white hair a yellow fringe and the falling ash from her cigarette used to occasionally burn holes in the lapels of her coat. My father would take the spoiled coat, cut out a new pattern and make a smaller school-going coat from it for us. He also cut our hair with hand-held clippers. This was something of an ordeal as no matter how well the clippers were oiled, they nipped the hair on the neck and pulled lumps out when they got clogged. Still, it saved going to the barber shop where more than the clippers were ‘well oiled’. I used this cost-cutting measure later in boarding school when, as students, we trimmed our own hair with razor-blades held firmly behind combs with our thumbs. This was immediately after asking our parents for extra pocket-money for haircuts.

Grandmother, on the other side of the family, was famously thrifty. Her bed-sheets were made from flour-bags and the bed-cover was patch-work quilt. Heavy coats were used as extra bed-covering on winter nights. Every scrap of fabric was used up and made to look beautiful in the process. At night she sewed lace-work to earn extra cash. Even her recreation was productive. Like my paternal aunts, she had no problems with obesity though she was familiar with concepts like ‘hot-dogs’ from her time in America during the ‘roaring twenties’. There was little problem with refuse. Anything edible was re-cycled using inventive ways of presenting old food in new guises. What became inedible for the family was passed on as food for the animals or fowl outside. ‘Wilful waste makes woeful want’ was the ‘mission statement’ in her kitchen.

How horrified they all would be to see people paying a small fortune for plastic bottles full of water or to hear that the price of a tank-full of petrol now costs the price of a small farm. The people of the developing world are similarly scandalised by our decadent lifestyles and aside from any economic shocks that we might be in for, there is the awesome possibility that they will rise up some day and judge us for our greed and for the extraordinary ‘wastefulness’ of our society, as the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, described it recently.

Growing old is not for sissies

‘Aye - There’s raisons for everything and currants for bread’. Another nugget of wisdom was fired after me as I edged out the narrow back-door, while making my rounds of the sick and housebound for the First Friday. I had been trying to reassure my monthly friend that the postponement of her medical appointment might be for good reason. Conversations with the elderly often veer on to medical matters and occasionally the roles and titles of ‘Father’ and ‘Doctor’ get confused. The last time I visited her she had asked me, with typically forthright humour, to say a ‘selfish Mass’ for her. I knew what she meant and I appreciated the spiritual insight that she showed as she knowingly tried to twist God’s arm to her medical advantage.

It was raining heavily and I sprinted from porch to car to porch again, sheltering with hunched shoulders under umbrella or porch-way as I waited for the mobile elderly to make their measured way to their front doors. ‘Old age is not for sissies’ said the late American actress Bette Davis. Her quip has been paraphrased as a best-selling book titled ‘Growing old is not for sissies’. The lady with the quick-fire wisdom whom I had just visited was certainly no ‘sissy’. In fact, I suspect that she thought I was a bit of a ‘sissy’ myself because of the lady’s umbrella that I was unwittingly carrying. ‘I know what to buy you for Christmas’, she had joked earlier. A man’s umbrella was what I lacked, she helpfully told me. There was no time to explain to her that umbrellas and myself part company easily so I recycle them by borrowing brollies that people leave behind in the chapel. I then leave them behind me somewhere else, perpetuating the cycle for as long as the umbrella lasts.

Americans, usually the most politically correct of peoples, have a medical term for those whom we call the housebound. They refer to those who are confined indoors by illness or age as ‘shut-ins’. Whatever about the terminology, the reality for many elderly is an existence that is largely confined to the four walls of their house or even their room. The priest who ministers to his parishioners monthly may be one of a small group of callers who visit them regularly. Being privileged to live at the heart of a parish, a pastoral priest often has the latest in local news, knowing who is ill or in hospital or what is happening locally and we can often help to keep people in touch with the community of which they were once an active part. The monthly chore of visitation is not something that is necessarily looked forward to, yet I always conclude it with a certain satisfaction and sometimes with an all-pervading sense of sadness. The stale odours and the stickiness of the sick-room and the physical flakiness that sometimes goes with neglect can permeate and linger for a while following the final house-call. The thought of what might lie ahead for any of us who are fortunate to reach old age can be disconcerting. More reassuring are their interjections in my favour when they observe me from the pillar of great age and tell me, ‘sure you’re only a gasan’!

There are characters whom I have met over the course of the years of First Friday visitation who remain vivid in my memory. The crotchety, complaining ones, contemptuous of all that is modernity, are generally easily forgotten. It is largely the quirky characters who have retained their sense of humour that live on in the memory. Others remain fixed in my recollection because of their long-suffering or their interesting life-stories. When I linger on the routine that often confines the elderly, it makes me acutely conscious of the freedom that is mine and the independence and opportunities that I enjoy. There is a freedom of an internal kind, though, that the still-active may not have mastered. The process of ageing sometimes frees up the elderly from the inhibitions and the neuroses of adult living. They occasionally reach the stage of ‘not-caring in the right not-caring way’ as Patrick Kavanagh once described it. I suppose it is the lure of attachment to status and success, so common in the generative years, that are shed and the detachment of childhood that is regained in the process of letting go. It is the honesty that comes with this shedding that can be most engaging.

‘And where are ye from?’ an elderly witch-like lady who was on my First Friday list once asked me. She had the sharp features, the long, lank hair, the gap-toothedness and the high-pitched, cracking voice of a broom-stick driver but she was most amusing, kind and informative. ‘Crossmaglen’, I proudly informed her, knowing that there was a certain negative prestige in being able to say that I came from ‘bandit country’. ‘Oh’, she exclaimed as she cackled long and shrill, ‘I suppose you never go home’. That put me in my box, as the saying goes.

Those lazy, hazy days of Summer

Those lazy, hazy days of Summer

Who remembers rainy summers? It’s curious how the tedium of bad-weather summers is forgotten or glossed over as we reminisce on times past. In the Tír na nÓg of our youth the sun was always shining during the holidays. The days were long and warm and filled with all kinds of inventive good fun. What is there to remember about a day spent staring close up at the rain streaming down the misted, narrow windows of childhood? Only traumatic times or the bright fun-filled moments get caught in the fragile web of memory. The ordinary and the tedious; all that is now labelled ‘boring’ by a demanding generation, gets lost in recollection. It is as if it was not worth the space on the disc of our human Random Access Memory.

One of the summer chores of a country child was helping with the savin’ of the hay while the sun shone. All hands, even young hands, were welcome in any harvest-field. Hay-making, of necessity, took place during a period of good weather. It was a delicate and worrisome task for the concerned adults. The hay had to be cut at a carefully chosen time. Weather conditions needed to be warm and breezy with the promise of a few days more of good drying conditions. Turning hay by hand with a pitchfork was a tedious but skilled task. It required a deft and skilful turn of the wrist while wielding a fork-full of heavy, moisture-laden, hay-in-the-making. The narrow line of cut-grass had to be flicked over like a fringe so that the moist layer underneath could be exposed to the sun. In the turning over, a whole new under-world of frogs, worms and insects was exposed. If the hay had been cut mechanically, there was the possibility of finding animal or bird casualties. Corncrakes’ nests were often destroyed by the blades or wheels of reaping machines.

If weather conditions were favourable, the hay was turned a few times, manually or by machine. It was then combed into fluffed-up rows of bristling dry stalks to await the devouring mouth of the baler. In especially bad weather, a farmer might have to abandon his hay until the weather changed or even lose his crop altogether. Some farmers of the old school took up their pitch-forks and whisked the endangered hay into ‘laps’. These small whorls of hay looked like croissants and were deftly shaped so as to run off the rainwater that threatened the crop. Another emergency procedure was to pile the dried hay into small hay-cocks with the added protection of a covering of jute-bags.

The arrival of the baler signalled the beginning of the end of a farmer’s hay-worries. These dangerous gobblers of hay and straw were generally hired, with their driver, from local contractors and were paid by the number of bales excreted. These were ‘stooked’ or stood up in tripod-like formation until they could be loaded on to a flat trailer and transported to a hay-shed. They were fiendishly hard to manage. Bales of the traditional kind were small but dense and heavy. The bands of baling-twine that held them tightly together were taut and hard to grip. The cut-hay was sharp and occasionally prickly as well where a stray thistle had managed to become part of the harvest. The skin immediately below the harvester’s fingernails was inevitably peeled back by the end of a day ‘at the bales’ and the underside of the farmer’s famously sun-tanned arm looked like a pin-cushion, pierced by the spiky ends of the hay-stalks on the side of the bales.

The chance of a ride atop a trailer-load of bales was much prized by holiday-bound children. It was a potentially dangerous trip as bales were an unstable cargo and bale-builders were of mixed ability. Driving a tractor at funereal pace through an open field was often allowed to the young too as all adult hands took to lifting and building the bales on to the trailer. First lessons in driving were often received during hay-making. A feeling of inclusion and of belonging to the adult world was enhanced as all hands helped with the hay-harvest. There was, in the North, an unofficial deadline of having the hay in by ‘The Twelfth’. It was not as if we were going anywhere on the day but rather a parody of the concerns of our more Northern neighbours.

The era of hay-making is all but over. Our mechanised age has speeded up the process and largely beaten the weather-worries as tall, green-cabbed harvesters spit out their large spools of rolled-up hay and silage. It’s a common and ugly sight now to see black polythene balls of fodder, seemingly abandoned by all but the crows, in the corners of our fields. In removing the excess labour, the risk of crop-failure and the awkwardness of the oblong bale, we have also removed the camaraderie of the hay-field, the harvest-sense of satisfaction on the part of the successful farmer and the adventure-fest that often marked the start of the summer holidays for a country child.

The green green grass of home

There are few sights as beautiful as the Irish countryside on a sunny Midsummer evening. Driving back home through Monaghan and Louth my eyes feast on the festival landscape that Midsummer serves. The gentle light of a sun that is staying up late allows the colours to emerge in the glad-rags of their best-dressed, seasonal plant-hosts. The sloping drumlins of Monaghan, like shop-window displays, present their goods to the seeing eye. The grazing livestock in the pasture lands provide polka-dot contrasts to the gentle greens of the swards and meadows. Here, jet-black Angus cattle, spread out over the grassland in well-spaced symmetry. There, cappuccino-coloured Charolais cattle lie on a hillside, soaking up the last rays of the sinking sun and chewing the cud over a day in the life of a beef-bred bullock.

A murder of crows opportunistically hunts in the stubble of a recently-shaved silage field. A few shy rabbits vigilantly graze on the headlands. A stream of vehicles weaves its impatient way home. People with problems in their faces grip their steering wheels tightly; their eyes trained on the left-hand side. Roadside grasses have reached seed-stage. The gentle lilac of a spread of full headed hay-seed defies the reaper on the verge of the motorway, nodding and swaying in the wake of the traffic-thread. The carefully cultivated verges of the recently constructed roadways are a credit to the planners and to the planters. A stray rape-seed plant reflects the yellow sun as it dims and sinks towards the receptive horizon. Other newer crops like maize plants, with their strong shining leaves and stalks have filled in the furrows and hidden the bio-degradable covering that protected them in their infancy.

As I moved into the plains of Louth, the sheets of grain in the generously-proportioned fields were taking on the first shades of ripeness. The trimmed-back sycamores in the hedgerows glowed purple in their tenderest shoots and the elderberry bushes splashed out their frothiest blossoms. The oak and the ash have filled out the winter gaps in their branches and the chestnut has shot up chandeliers of blossom, pointing to the buttermilk sky. Pig’s parsley or hogweed reminded me of childhood ‘loanins’ and of stories about its leaves and roots being fed to swine in poorer days. More prosperous times were suggested to me by the Dynasty-style, dormered mansions that dwarf their single-storied predecessors hidden further down the laneways. The industrialisation of agriculture was evident in the giant spools of cut sward rolled into a corner awaiting fork-lifted help.

I used to wonder what all the talk was of Ireland as an ‘Emerald Isle’. ‘Surely grass is green everywhere’ I generalised. I thought that talk of ‘forty shades of green’ was mere emigrant sentimentality. It was only when I touched down at Shannon in daylight, following my first trip abroad, that I realised just what it was that enthralled visitors and returnees. I had discovered that grass could be sunburnt-brown, wiry and sparse, like the combed-over hair of a balding man, or tall and dull-hued in a desert-drought. As our aeroplane tilted and hovered in its descent, the patchwork of fields below, that I saw through the dull surface of the cabin window, appeared vivid and bright, luscious and shining in the wake of an autumn shower. Now I knew and understood all that talk of Ireland green.

Sometimes I try to impress on people who live in the area of Mid-Louth that they have an environment and living conditions that are second to none. Those who are fortunate enough to live in the villages and in the countryside mostly enjoy a quality of life that many city-dwellers can only dream of. Emigration is no longer almost compulsory for many of our young. The climate is temperate and predictable in its unpredictable Irish way. Communities are largely homogenous with no serious ethnic or political tensions. Farms are generously proportioned and fertile. The environment is rich in its diversity and largely unspoiled. Family and community life is still strong despite the inroads of modernity and the confusion that social change inevitably brings. Maybe I’m being romantic or utopian in my reading of the countryside but then I was driving home from the wedding banquet of my niece!

It all reminds me of a poem by Alexander Pope. The poem is called ‘The Quiet Life’.

‘Happy the man whose wish and care / a few paternal acres bound, / content to breathe his native air / in his own ground. / Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread, / whose flocks supply him with attire; / whose trees in summer yield him shade, / In winter, fire. / Blest who can unconcern'dly find / Hours, days, and years slide soft away / In health of body, peace of mind, / Quiet by day, / Sound sleep by night; study and ease / Together mixt, sweet recreation, / and innocence, which most does please / With meditation. / Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; / Thus unlamented let me die; / Steal from the world, and not a stone / Tell where I lie’.

School’s out for summer

School’s out for summer

At gatherings of teachers I often try to impress on them that they have no idea of the depth of impression they are capable of. Teachers routinely underestimate the effect that they have on the young minds that they mould. Ours may be an information age, with access to answers at the touch of a fingertip on a button, but technology and the Internet do not have the capacity to influence us after the manner of a good teacher. The moulding of character is an essentially human privilege. As our students and teachers look forward to the summer break and release from the goldfish-bowl world of the classroom, it is good to remind ourselves of the pedagogues of past and present who left their stamp on us and on our communities.

There are very few people who take to studying easily or enthusiastically. Most adults express regret that they did not ‘stay at the books’ a little bit longer. I confess that I escaped from the books and from my ‘A’ Level studies prematurely. I was only sixteen when I decided, without benefit of advice from anybody, that I was through with school. I simply did not return following the Christmas break. Almost six years later, I went back to the books as a ‘mature student’. Some people say that the terms mature and student are mutually contradictory. Whatever about maturity, I sat behind the desk again following an interval filled with all kinds of experiences. Twenty years later, at the end of a three-year post-graduate course, I sat down to what I hope was my final examination this side of the day of judgement.

In the family bar I used to hear old men occasionally speak bitterly of their teachers. Most of their generation did not progress beyond Primary School and their experience of a tough or an inadequate schoolmaster often soured them. The sarky, sarcastic comment of a teacher is often remembered long after the physical punishments have been forgotten. The contrast with contemporary classroom experience is stark. Children routinely say that they love their Primary School teachers. Graduation ceremonies are generally sentimental, tearful farewells as students move from one level to another. The idea of a fear-filled, punishment-heavy routine is beyond their experience.

The layers of help available to contemporary students are a constant source of surprise to me. Learning difficulties are usually spotted early on in a student’s life and appropriate and sensitive help is offered. Children no longer leave school illiterate even if contemporary standards of spoken and written English leave a lot to be desired. The range of options open to them as they ponder their future is impossibly broad; the possibilities and choices from which they decide were unimaginable to past generations.

As in all professions, there are structural and personnel difficulties and a particular culture that goes with the job. Teaching has its share of jargon and fads, in-words and social experiments. Teachers are accustomed, like many of us, to getting lots of unwanted advice from people who have never stood in front of a class. The culture of complaint weighs heavy on them as they try to balance the rights and responsibilities of school, students, parents and staff. The solution to every social problem is dumped on them as more courses are recommended. People forget that we are all teachers, if only by example.

The recent success of the Irish economy and the foundation-stone of our prosperity have been credited to the high educational standards of Irish society. We have come a long way from the hedge-schools and the town Academies. The infrastructure of education owes a lot to Church bodies and almost every educational opportunity most of us got came from parish schools and diocesan or Religious colleges. This leads to accusations of over-control on the part of the churches yet ‘control’ is the one thing missing, in the view of many observers of modern character and culture.

My own experience of school was generally positive. I have had some truly inspirational teachers and have sat through some abysmal attempts to teach. Most of the latter were at third level. Over the years of priesthood I have got to know the profession from the inside and have made many friends from their ranks. Primary School business forms a significant part of a pastoral priest’s workload. I am still shocked, however, when teachers spell a word wrongly or use bad grammar. My child-like idealising of ‘teacher’ has never quite left me. It’s like hearing a priest swear!

‘Free at last, free at last, I thank God we’re free at last’ are the words of an old Negro spiritual song. They might well be adapted to describe the feelings of our students as they leave their cages in the classrooms of the country. I have no doubt that most teachers will be feeling a little of the same exhilaration as they turn the key in the school-door. Even the priest will breathe a sigh of relief as the school-year cycle goes into free-wheel until autumn. If the opening hymn next Sunday is, ‘Free at last, free at last, I thank God we’re free at last’, you’ll understand why.

When being young was very heaven

On a summer morning in 1968 the pupils of Anamar Primary School, which I attended, gathered to meet a C.I.E. bus at the border and headed off to Dublin, to the zoo; to the ice-cream factory and to visit a former class friend in a school in Drumcondra. The school was for the partially-sighted. When we arrived I saw, for the first time, young men with the pigment deficiency called Albinism. These young Albino men were gathered in huddles, listening intently to transistor radios which had their antennae extended. I had never seen a person with the pigment deficiency before. I was puzzled by these different looking people with white hair and pink eyes and even more puzzled by their intent listening to the new-fangled transistor radios for what was obviously breaking news.

It was an age when the technology available to us was scarce and cumbersome. Radios were hardly portable and listeners generally went to the family or communal radio and sat around it rather than carry around their own personal set. If anyone at the time had told me that these young people were an invading tribe from another planet, listening in to messages from their extra-terrestrial leader, I would have believed them. I later learnt that the news that was so preoccupying these teenagers was the assassination and death of Senator Robert, ‘Bobby’ Kennedy while he was on the election campaign trail. It was June 6th 1968.

Many people of a certain generation remember exactly where they were or what they were doing when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered in 1963. I was too young to remember or to register any memory then but I remember the assassination of his brother Robert. The fortieth anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s death; the illness of his brother Senator Edward Kennedy and the breakthrough of Senator Barack Obama as Democratic Nominee in the upcoming American elections have reminded many people of that period, a generation ago, when enthusiasm and hope was so high. The poet William Wordsworth is often quoted in his description of a period when idealism was similarly high. He was an early admirer of the reforms of the French Revolution, though he later repudiated his support for it. Two centuries ago, he wrote a poem on the Revolution that contains two lines which are particularly remembered. The larger extract reads:

‘Oh! Pleasant exercise of hope and joy!/ For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood/ Upon our side, we who were strong in love!/ Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven!--Oh! Times,/ In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways/ Of custom, law, and statute, took at once/ The attraction of a country in romance!’

Senator Obama’s rival in the election will be the older Senator John McCain. The parallel with Wordsworth’s ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity,’ which is how he described poetry, is further heightened in the following imagery from the same poem:

‘The budding rose above the rose full blown. / What temper at the prospect did not wake/ To happiness unthought of? The inert/ were roused, and lively natures rapt away!’

The early decades of recent centuries have been times of idealism and optimism. Each succeeding century offers a blank sheet on which humankind must write another chapter of our ‘his-story’ as we call it. In Northern Ireland we appear to have effected our own revolution in community relations. A certain realism has replaced the heady idealism of the 1960s and we are still living with the fall-out from the excesses that almost always follow periods of revolution and rapid change. It has been said that an elderly Chinese politician was once asked what he thought was the legacy of the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century. He replied that he could not adequately comment on it because, as he explained, ‘it is much too early to say’.

Wordsworth counselled us not to build castles in the sky; not to be overly optimistic. He wisely noted that our dreams and visions need to be rooted in the messy reality that is human nature and the natural world. Age brought perspective and the idealism of youth gave way to the mellowness of his more mature years. All idealists are, he wrote, ‘called upon to exercise their skill,/ Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,/ or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!/ But in the very world, which is the world/ of all of us - the place where in the end/ we find our happiness, or not at all!’

The end of the oil age

Joseph was imprisoned. He had been betrayed and sold into exile by his own brothers. His salvation and his freedom lay in a dream. The story in the Book of Genesis tells of how Pharaoh had a troubled dream one night. In his visions he saw seven fat cattle as he stood by the river. The fat cattle, rising up out of the water, were joined by seven scraggy and mean looking cattle. They all stood on the river-bank. The dream ended with the lean cattle eating up the fine, well-fed ones. Pharaoh woke up. He later returned to sleep and the dream recurred with seven full ears of corn and seven thin ears as the central symbols. The dream-story ended the same way. Pharaoh was mighty troubled by these nightly visitations and found nobody among his staff who could competently explain them to him. Joseph made his name and his best career move by explaining to Pharaoh that seven years of good fortune were to be followed by seven years of ill-fortune and famine. Pharaoh elevated him, gave him a wife and followed his advice to stockpile food against the lean years. Egypt alone was prepared for the seven years of famine that followed, as foretold by Joseph.

It is unlikely that real famine will hit our end of the world but it looks as if the years of plenty are receding. The credit crunch has been followed by an oil squeeze. We are all feeling the effects as transport costs rise and food and heating bills spike. It may help to reduce our collective carbon footprint by making us reflect on our use of fossil fuels and on our dependence on oil. The crisis has not so much hit us in the pocket as mugged us at the pumps. It has forced us to reflect on our relationship with the energy sources of the past; those we now enjoy; the possibilities of an oil-free future and the end of the oil-age.

The last time I remember such a crisis was in 1973. The problem then was a scarcity of oil. I was in boarding school in Newry and we were asked by the College authorities to encourage our parents not to feel that they had to visit us. The head of the oil producing countries organisation, OPEC, was Sheik Zaki Yamani. We had a joke that he had told the countries of the West, ‘Ya Mani – or no oil!’ The Sheik made a prediction a few years ago that sounds startling coming from such a source. He said, “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil”.

My earliest memory of a pre-oil age is of my grandmother gathering sticks or ‘brosna’ as she called it, using the Irish word. She collected small, brittle twigs from under the nearby ditches and stored them overnight in the plate-warming, bottom oven of her ironically named Modern Mistress Range. These sticks were used in the morning to kindle the fire that was the focus of the household. Gathering sticks was a common chore as was ‘splitting sticks’. Many people still say that they prefer the drama of a real fire in their sitting rooms over the push-button illusions that gas or electric fires present. As children we used to play outside in the summertime, often building fires of wood as we camped and cooked eggs or tinned beans for ourselves. Our mother knew when we had been sitting around the camp-fire for when we returned in the evening she would tell us that we smelled ‘like the tinkers’.

The fuel most commonly in circulation then was paraffin oil for the various lamps that were used inside or outside. Every household also had a supply of ‘methylated spirits’. This was used for lighting the Tilley Lamp; for cleaning the windows with dampened, crushed newspaper; for singeing the down off a freshly-plucked chicken or for removing stains. It was also abused by street-drinkers, sometimes with terrible results. With the coming of the mechanical age and the TVO Tractor, with its twin-fuel system, farmers needed small amounts of petrol to kick-start their tractors before turning over to Tractor Vaporising Oil when the engine got going. The widespread use of diesel came later. Switching over to TVO, following the high-octane, petrol-fuelled beginning, came to be used as a simile for those men whose drinking habits began with a couple of ‘half-ones’ before switching over to bottles of Guinness.

The largest fuel stock back then was probably the coal-pile. Some households bought coal by the ton and a ‘ton of coal’ was a common prize in raffles. Coal, slack and shingles were piled up outside, covered over with a few sheets of tin or galvanised iron and brought inside as needed. It was liberally burned in the ranges and fireplaces of the time with their huge, inefficient fire-boxes and roaring chimneys. Turf was not widely used, although older people had worked at ‘saving’ turf and families still had turbary rights in assigned strips of nearby bogs. Nobody worried about their carbon footprint or about global warming. The price of a barrel of oil on the international market was thought to be only of interest to sheiks. Ten shillings worth of petrol at the village pumps went a long way. The only ‘tiger’ around then was the ‘tiger in your tank’ of the popular petrol advertisements. As we Celtic Tiger cubs reel from the effects of price hikes, it’s good to remember that our dependence on the ‘black gold’ of the Arab world, like every dependence, had a beginning and may well have an end.