Coming In To Land.

A snug stove-warmed corner with a comfortable seat and a good book, and with a big strong window between oneself and the weather, whereby one can glimpse angry breakers through the vicious horizontal hail showers, all make for a particularly Irish species of bliss. Yes, in its way, I love it!

I was enjoying such delights  lately at the house of our John, in Co Clare, also known as 'The Loop Head Smart Engagement Centre'. Having trained in civil engineering and hydrology at Galway and London, he has travelled much before coming home to roost where he grew up, with his Romanian lady and their baby. Along the way, especially in Romania, he picked up serious skills in managing the relationship between development projects of one kind and another, and their host communities. Wherever and whatever the project, from mines to motorways, he found very similar problems, and he developed a methodology for addressing them.*

Our John.

Currently high on his agenda is the establishment of wind farms, in such a way that they constitute welcome assets rather than resented intrusions for the adjacent communities, integrated by agreement with leisure facilities such as woodland trails. I suppose most people agree that it is a great thing to harness all that wind energy, but when it comes to erecting wind turbines of course there are problems; it must be done sensitively and with respect for local residents. There will be plenty of Don Quijotes tilting at them, and by no means all for daft reasons!

I recall with pride the campaign that I was involved in myself, against a Loran C mast about 1000ft high being erected on Loop Head. It would have seriously impacted that wild and open landscape, which has only come to be much appreciated in the years since, mainly through the efforts of an active local committee. But what really got me going against The Mast were the downright deceptions practised by a patronising representative of Irish Lights, at a p.r. meeting they called.

He tried to ‘sell’ it as necessary for the safety of fishermen and other seafarers. Too bad that some of us were up to speed with the much superior GPS system that was coming out, and anyway we had been using Decca receivers with a lat/long readout for some years. It turned out that the people really behind Loran C were the French Government, who did not like to have to depend on the Americans to guide their nuclear submarines and force de frappe. The local community rallied, and we won!

However there is a class of people whose favourite sport is ‘tilting at windmills’, and it has to be said this can be very tiresome. The fact is we must have electricity, and those wind turbines are a huge improvement on big chimneys spewing pollution. But no matter how good any particular idea may be, there will be those who see in it nothing but a scam; they construct a whole identity out of being smart enough to do so. Then indeed there will be those who do in fact manage to make a scam out of anything, and the better that thing is, the more successful scamming it may be. The welfare state, the EU, the organic movement, even the Church all come to mind.

It is extraordinary, if you take the EU for instance, that over half the voters of Great Britain appear to see in it nothing but a dark and sinister plot to deprive them of their liberty. I was there lately myself. I find a tense and apprehensive atmosphere about it, rather like that in a plane trying to land in thick fog on a dark and stormy night.  Brexit took off bravely enough, but now it’s time to land; the plane is juddering and creaking, and they cannot see where they are going.

We must consider whether we can help them to get safely down to earth, for it will be a disaster for all of us if they crash. We must understand that an unacceptable gulf had indeed opened up between the elite who ‘get’ Europe and in fact make it, and those who, experiencing a radical disconnect between it and any version of politics which they may just about relate to, concluded that it is another scam.

It seemed to me at the time that the European elite were getting ahead of themselves when they changed the name European Community to European Union. The latter is reminiscent of the Soviet Union, while the term Community is much less threatening. Few people want a European superstate anyway. Merely changing the name back to Community would send a signal that might well help that wayward ‘plane to land safely! But perhaps we could have a Union within the Community, like a couple of Russian dolls, if some are determined to press on to a United States of Europe.

Europe as a whole in fact needs to sort out its ‘operating system’. Unfortunately, this raises spiritual and religious problems that our contemporary culture is very poorly equipped to deal with, and we would prefer not to have to do so. We must go very deep to get to grips with them. ‘If a man wishes to know the deepest ocean of divine understanding, let him first if he is able scan the visible sea’, said our Irish Saint Columbanus more than fourteen hundred years ago. He was described by Pope Benedict XVI as ‘one of the Fathers of Europe’.

The Gannets’ Way is all for that approach. However, unable to keep the sea all the time, we turn to those lands closest to it, Ireland and Portugal. They have a lot in common besides being on the western seaboard of Europe. Of course there is their size, and also being both republics of catholic culture that have quite recently ‘escaped’ into the delights of affluence and secularism, and are experiencing these days a resultant spiritual void. In asserting their independence, they both had to struggle with more powerful neighbours, and are relatively free of the temptation to throw their own weight around. It may be said that Portugal did have an empire, but it is notable that if so, it was mainly a trading one, more interested in establishing posts for that purpose than in colonialism.

The catholic bit is important in this context because it implies seeking one’s salvation by finding one’s place within a universal totality, albeit it a strange one, fully present in each particular manifestation; the Whole that catholics believe in is nothing less than the Body of Christ, with the strange property that it can be present in a piece of bread. For protestants this is all too much, something of a scam in fact which is presumably what they are protesting, for which I cannot blame them, but it does have the result that they tend to envisage salvation on a more individual or national basis.

So I hope for some useful synergy in the contribution of Ireland and Portugal to the urgent task of developing a rebooted ‘operating system’, so badly needed by not just ourselves and Britain and Europe, but for the whole world. I'm all for recognising that we are facing existential challenges, but let's remember that there’s a lot more to life than merely lurching from one crisis to the next, and these crises may be better appreciated as divine nudges, in the direction of our great but so dimly perceivable ultimate consummation. Which is all very well, and indeed on the way ‘saving the planet’ is very necessary and good, but let it be fun too! Actually it's a lot more likely to get done if only we can find out how to enjoy it.

So much for the ruminations of an old man, on a winter’s night in Ireland while the wind whistles in the chimney! Meanwhile, I must try to get back on that sea, on the Gannetsway. Soon it will be time to head for Portugal again. The Fundit scheme only has three weeks left to fly and will struggle to land! Beyond trying to fix the ‘Anna M’, this is an opportunity to involve more people actively in one little attempt to develop a beautiful and sustainable way of life. Please take a look at:

 https://fundit.ie/project/restore-the-anna-m-1

Clare Coast.

*astoneco.com