Secret Sardinia

It’s good to have a store of sunny memories on an evening like this in Sherkin, as I sit with a whiskey by the stove and a south-westerly gale with rain lashes our island home. Secret Sardinia … My mind goes back to the few happy days that Fiona and I spent in the Anna M around the north of Sardinia and Maddalena Island six years ago, on our way to Rome. But what kind of images does this title of a short film on aljazeera.com conjure up for you? Sparkling emerald blue water, hidden bays, beautiful hills roamed by flocks of sheep and goats and old-world villages?  

     All the more shocking to discover what the film was in fact about, namely the NATO exercise areas in Sardinia and their horrific effects on the local people and animals, with many cancer deaths, deformed babies, lambs and kids, and about the usual official efforts to cover it all up. It is all an horrendous desecration of a most beautiful place, of a piece with so many factors that would make it hard for me to take the kind of innocent pleasure that I used to in cruising.

     Unfortunately it is among many other such desecrations, which if at all possible are kept away from offending the sensibilities of us affluent consumers, who should not be allowed to consider too deeply the costs of our life-style and the gross imbalances it involves, awareness of which might not alone spoil our fun but also be bad for business! At least we Sherkin islanders are far from the small class whose main business in life is to keep the goodies flowing in vast quantities. Unfortunately this seems to somehow involve the supply of those trillions of dollars worth of oil and arms, and to Hell with the consequences. They certainly struck gold with the Ducky, him of the Golden Gates!

     So ‘the economy is doing well’, everyone can afford to fill their fuel tanks and the Ducky is likely to be re-elected. He is so lucky with the tar sands and fracking, which mean America is self-sufficient again in oil and exporting it to Europe. A glance at AIS shows a steady stream of tankers heading in our direction, and I am told that most of the oil in Whitegate (our refinery in Cork) and Millford Haven in Wales now comes from America. Why wouldn’t ‘the economy be doing well’? 

     The ‘War on Terror’ has of course been another bonanza for the arms industry, while failing spectacularly in its alleged purpose. What better way to breed terrorists than to bully, bomb and impoverish whole populations? It is interesting to recall that the standoff with Iran dates back to at least 1953, when Great Britain and the US orchestrated the overthrow of a democratically elected Prime Minister who had the temerity to require the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to open its books to his Government. One thing the many trillions of dollars spent on ‘defence’ since have notably failed to deliver is a safer and more secure world.

     The Ducky came to power promising to bring home the troops and spend money on infrastructure at home. It does not seem to have happened. Spending more money on the health or social welfare of his citizens was of course always too much to ask. In the event he has only provided the icing on the cake for the rich, while in the last four decades, according to Robert Reich, a former American Secretary for Labour,  ‘the median wage has barely budged. But the incomes of the richest 0.1% have soared by more than 300% and the incomes of the top 0.001% (the 2,300 richest Americans), by more than 600%. The net worth of the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans almost equals that of the bottom 90% combined.’ President Trump’s ‘tax cuts, his evisceration of labor laws, his filling his cabinet and sub-cabinet with corporate shills, his rollbacks of health, safety, environmental and financial regulations: all have made the super-rich far richer, at the expense of average Americans.’

     One has to admire the sleight of hand, also exercised in a slightly different way by Prime Minister Johnson and his cronies in Britain. Let us hope that the politicians elected today in Ireland are a little better at delivering their promises, but of course we are feeling the same pressures here; and whats more, we are in danger of finding ourselves in the front line between two opposed camps. The question is, can Europe really offer an alternative? How can all the talk about a ‘Green New Deal’ be made to stand up? For it is by no means clear that our ruling politicians are really that much different to the Tory and Republican ones.

     In Ireland at least the system is not subject to the same tidal waves of money. What’s more it looks as if the establishment parties are going to take a beating. But whatever the good intentions around, the Green New Deal will not happen unless it is taken up not alone at the 'top end' of politics, but also pushed at a grass-roots level as widely as possible, and indeed people are willing to make sacrifices in order to do so. I wonder how that might happen! I'm looking forward to see how the new Government here turns out, though my hopes are far from sky-high. At least, thank God, there are no NATO exercise areas around here, and lets keep it that way!

On the Sherkin ferry.