Beware of Greeks....

"How sweet 'tis to roam by the sunny Suir stream,
And hear the dove's coo 'neath the morning's sunbeam.
Where the thrush and the robin their sweet notes combine
On the banks of the Suir that flows down by Mooncoin.

Flow on, lovely river, flow gently along.
By your waters so sweet sounds the lark's merry song.
On your green banks I'll wander where first I did join
With you, lovely Molly, the Rose of Mooncoin.

Here I am at Mooncoin, Co Kilkenny, where we have the use of a more convenient place for Fiona to recover from her hip operation. No gannets, but still the tide flows not far away in the beautiful river Suir. We have had some perfect evenings for wandering on its banks, though I fear a contemporary swoon with lovely Molly is hardly on the cards; the sweet notes of the thrush and the robin, the lark's merry song  are being drowned out by the ghastly roar of jet skis and speed boats zooming around in circles, which one can hear a mile away. I wonder if there are any larks left nowadays anyhow. I vividly recall how the sky would sometimes ring with them in my boyhood, and I would peer up, enchanted, trying to spot those blythe spirits, but now for years I have heard none.

      Yet there is still much beauty in the world. Our Luke and David are taking a spin to old haunts in Co Donegal, and send back photos full of memories for me, such as this one of Malin Beg Uig. It is very peaceful here, but the Uig is wide open to the south; still, sometimes in fine weather I would leave my fishing boat there, to save the steam down from Teelin when salmon fishing. One day, with engine trouble, I just managed to get into the Uig, where I managed to find a mechanic to fix it. We were moored a little to seaward of where the punt is in Luke's photo, and a breeze got up from the south to send a jopple in. The mechanic, very delighted to get his feet back on concrete, leaped ashore with alacrity which combined with a wave to tip myself into the sea. John and Jerry, the crew, were on the slip. John was afraid I would drown and rushed to help me out. Jerry laughed and said 'Do ye think we'll get rid of the fecker that easily?' This English public school-educated (albeit by catholic monks, which makes quite a difference) bloke was evidently a bit of a 'Greek' to him!

    Our favourite berths for a drift were off Malin Mor or Glen Heads, but of course you had to compete to get to the good spots. I started off with the second-hand traditional half-decker Cnoc Mor, double-ended, clinker built; a Viking boat with a diesel engine plonked in it. It was the lively evenings with a fresh breeze that were good for fishing with those old 15mesh deep nets, which the fish could see and easily dodge beneath in calm weather, and besides it was illegal to fish in daylight. On this basis, the fishery had been the mainstay of many a livelihood for years, with a nice country home and a biteen of land!
 

     After clattering down past Carrigeen Head and Slieve League a few times, the water could be seen squirting up between the boards under the cuddy floor as the Cnoc Mor bounced off the waves. The question was, when I came back aboard to her in the afternoon on the mooring in Teelin, whether the water would have got into the reduction gear, and I would have to change the oil in it as well as pump all that water out. It took a while to get around to such a sophistication as an automatic electric pump, and even then, it didn't always work!

    Eventually I managed to finance a new, semi-displacement Ocean Tramp, built of GRP, the Screig n'Iolar. She let no water in, and could batter down to Malin Mor Head in half the time. These were boom times, in the '70s. Too bad there were 65' trawlers, financed by BIM, coming out of Burtonport and shooting up to 20 miles of nets. Enlightenment also meant that, instead of being rewarded with a bounty, fishermen were now to be breaking the law if they were to cull the seals. The upshot of it all was that before long we were feeding more fish to the seals than we were landing. 

     Technology 'came to the rescue', with nets becoming available which were much harder for the fish to see, and deeper too; they worked in daylight, but were illegal. Some fishermen took to hoods and slash hooks to fight off the Navy's ribs, and there were shots fired at fishermen; but now the game was up. Between such travails, pollution in rivers and whatever was happening on the high seas beyond our ken, the coastal salmon fishery was destroyed. If you want to eat salmon now, you will have to settle for a pale shadow of the real thing, reared in a polluting fish concentration camp.

    'Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes'’ - Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts - was Virgil's take on The Iliad and those clever Greeks. The problem is as old as European civilisation. Even the Greeks themselves, as the story of Prometheus shows, were aware of the problematic nature of mankind's technological aspirations; however, St Paul tells us how the cross of Jesus was mere folly to them. From Galilee, that other great source of our civilisation, we hear Jesus saying, according to St John, 'It is the Spirit that giveth life, the flesh availeth nothing!' However he also said 'Seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you,' affirming humanity's quests, only insisting that they be grounded in the Spirit. Europe and the Catholic Church have been struggling to get the right balance ever since.

    In the last couple of centuries, the tension has been building. Our civilisation now generally thinks with the Greeks, that the Cross is mere folly. We glory above all in our technological prowess. We pride ourselves on asserting 'the flesh'. We complain that the Church of Christ is life-denying, even while paying lip-service to wisdom. Meanwhile, while we tend to put our faith in sanitizer rather than holy water and our churches stand empty, our city is busy destroying itself. But unlike Zeus, our God is not bent on punishing us, and perhaps even science itself might come to our help?

    I am thinking of the new physics, and the revelation that while Newtonian or Greek physics, or however one describes viewing the world as made of fixed and static particles, has a certain utility, things are not actually like that. We are now told that the world is an interplay of infinite energies, a dance of waves that may have its rhythms but is not constricted by time or place; at least, such is my very limited understanding of quantum physics. So yes, even science might come to realise that the spirit alone availeth, and we might even find believers again who can cast out devils and heal the sick!

    We will find no new hope unless we repent of foolish ways of thinking. We have to start by debunking the idols and learning to love our enemies. Considering what a dreadful wreck we have been making of the world, especially for those on the wrong end of our extravagant fantasies, we might even learn to understand where the likes of the Taliban are coming from. We might at last learn a bit of humility. We do need leaders with a sense of context, not 'meritocratic' experts who make it by fiercely swotting, concentrating on their limited sphere of expertise, proud of their 'scientific objectivity' while it has a curious habit of aligning with certain financial and commercial interests.

    We might even learn to listen to the likes of those 'backward, uneducated, conservative, deplorable' people who ask, while they watch the surge in Covid infection following hard on the roll-out of vaccines, does it not appear that there must be a connection? How can the great and good be so sure that the vaccines are not pushing the variants? Are they not rather something in the line of a Trojan Horse? Well, no doubt it will take 20 years or so to be sure, one way or the other. Meanwhile, it's looking to me like another case of the 'war on terror'. It has taken 20 years or so for the realisation to dawn that it has only succeeded in pushing terrorism deeper and wider; but many still refuse to recognise this even now. Give us a break!

The 'Anna M' entering Teelin Bay, by Nutan