‘Don’t let the old man in,’ is the advice of my dear wife, Fiona. She also informs me that at the age of 79, I should not count on being able to take folks sailing again next year. However, aside from any physical problems, the real poison of old age is the decline of confidence.
Confidence of course is the basis of any human activity, not least of money. ‘Neither a borrower or a lender be’ is lovely advice, but the entire world economy depends on the delicate balance between lenders and debtors. Mysteriously, nobody expects all that debt (235% of world GDP) to ever be paid back,- not that the lenders ever had it in the first place - central banks print it with the simple proviso that the borrowers will be able to pay the interest on it.
When this becomes questionable, interest rates have to go up to persuade lenders to take the risk. When governments have to borrow to pay the interest, they are embarking on a dangerous spiral that is liable to end in hyperinflation. We may find even a great and productive country such as France as a rudderless ship drifting on the rocks. This cannot be allowed to happen, so the rest of the Eurozone, one way or another, will have to try to take her in tow.
In Ireland we experienced this in the financial crash of 2008. Now, however, our Government is swimming in cash, with a record surplus of about 23.2 billion euro in 2024, largely due to a bonanza in the corporate tax take and other revenues from a few huge American corporations in the tech and pharmaceutical sectors.
According to David Murphy, writing in RTE news today, ‘Pfizer has 4,000 employees in Ireland and is one of the largest corporate taxpayers.’ He further states,- ‘The pharmaceutical and medical device sector accounts for 65% of total goods exported from Ireland and 90% of products sold to the US’. Naturally, those who run Ireland Inc, and anyone else who considers such matters, must get the jitters from President Trump’s antics, and it is small wonder that they would not want to upset the likes of Pfizer.
Commission President Von der Leyen appears to be getting away with her failure to release her correspondence with Pfizer's chief executive regarding the purchase of billions' worth of vaccines, in spite of the ruling of the European Court of Justice to do so. No doubt her defence is that said vaccines were most urgently needed and saved millions of lives. I have been doing a spot of research on my own account, laboriously counting Co.Clare deaths in RIP.ie for the last 10 years. That represents a fairly stable demographic, since it is mostly the indigenous population that use it. This was the result:-
Year - 2015 - 2016 - 2017 - 2018 - 2019 - 2020 - 2021 - 2022 - 2023 - 2024
Deaths -885 896 909 1054 996 1003 1213 1259 1258 1268
It would take an enormous amount of careful research to pin down exactly what has happened here, but to me there are some fairly stark stand-outs: - there was not actually much of a pandemic here in Co Clare (see 2020), but there has been a surge of death in the wake of the vaccine roll-out, which has been sustained ever since. The fact that there is a widespread tendency to refuse to even consider such facts fails dismally to inspire confidence in the institutions that do so.
The whole covid affair has sparked a great deal of anxiety, along with the wars in Ukraine and Israel, the climate alarmism, the unpredictability of the American administration, and the unsatisfactory politics going on in Ireland and Europe etc etc. In short, if there was such a thing as a barometer of confidence, it would be very low at present!
Not alone money, as we have seen, but life itself depends on confidence. When this confidence loses its moorings,and we find ourselves tossed about on a stormy sea with no direction, all we can do is find other means of orientation. Such in fact is the human condition. Money in particular may be a good servant, but it is a very disappointing and unsatisfactory master, to put it mildly. The same may be said for any structure which bases itself on money, notably governments. When they are set up as ends in themselves, they become systems of idolatry, false gods. They say with Pontius Pilate, Truth, what is that? The question is raised ever more urgently, especially with the advent of AI.
We are challenged to immerse ourselves in the quest for truth and thus the establishment of confidence more and more as we age, and if we do so, even as death draws nearer, this becomes the blessing of age. Relentlessly, we are pushed on toward finding faith in the one true God. The direct experience of the sea, including the genuine encounters with one's inner self and with other sea-farers which it involves, is a fine aid for this process. The sea has often been referred to as a mirror to our souls, notably by Charles Baudelaire. 'Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer! La mer est ton miroir...,'- but beware! It is dangerous, even while the authenticity of one's experience depends on exposure to this danger. It is tempting, though not a good idea, to defy this danger with a false confidence and with pride.
There is a reason why the first thing someone does, who wishes to establish that they have arrived as a billionaire, is to acquire a super-yacht. For that matter, if you happened to be a psychopathic monarch, acquiring a splendid flagship fits pretty well with acquiring a church! We need to eschew this tendency. For my part, I have found recent years fairly harrowing, but I have survived. I’m hoping to go to sea again in my eighties, with renewed purity of heart, and thus to pass on this plank of the heritage that came down to me!
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| The Mary Rose,- sunk under the King's nose in the Battle of the Solent, 1545. |
