The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry’, so says Robert Burns.
The phrase comes to mind as both an Irish and EU audience await details of America’s tariff plans on ‘Liberation Day’, as pundits and commentators make futile grasps at what tariffs could mean for the economy at large.
Many people working in the pharmaceutical industry will be nervous, as will others working in tourism and distilleries.
But right now, conjecture it remains, as with all the American president’s grand, vague pronouncements so far.
If and when tariffs are introduced, and reciprocated, we will not know the impacts for some time.
We are suspended, puppets on a string, awaiting the capitalist movements of the great minds that have been elected to such an elevated and hierarchical and all-important position.
Other world events recently remind us, however, that even if we did know exactly what these tariffs entailed, all our best-laid plans can be gone in an instant.
An earthquake hit Myanmar at about lunchtime on Friday, and whatever the children, the mothers and fathers, the workers, and the military had planned for dinner that evening, those thoughts were gone in an instant.
What they were going to do for the weekend, what they had to get from the shop, which relative to collect, who they had to see; all those plans evaporated in an instant.
As the death toll reaches the thousands and the number of injured is even higher, the scale of the damage and the number of lives lost is enormous.
That was an act of God, both literally and figuratively.
There is no one person to blame, no political system running the world to suit the minority. No man, no matter how wealthy or egotistical, can cause an earthquake.
They cannot create earthquakes yet strive to do as much damage as they can on earth, devastation on an epic and evil scale.
This week Al Jazeera carried footage of children killed in Gaza in their Eid clothes, their outfits for celebration at the end of Ramadan.
A baby who was going to celebrate his very first Eid, girls and boys in their best new clothes on their way to buy sweets, are all now covered by a funeral shroud.
That is not an act of God; that is an act of vile, human, murder.
Taken all together, do we have these men in power who want to be godlike?
And the form they’ve adopted is a malevolent, pagan monster, without reason or rationale?
Debacle in the Dáil
Closer to home, and not causing quite the same scale of disaster but nonetheless an irritation, is the behaviour of people in the Dáil who, let’s remember, earn €113,679 annually and that’s before they get any ministerial add-ons.
That’s about €9,500 every four weeks, for those citizens who live month-to-month.
Give your colleague the two fingers and see how fast that wage packet disappears, or simply go into work and roar at people for an hour or two.
Go into a meeting and change the rules of standing orders, completely disregarding the fact that you know full well what will happen when you do.
This is not to criticise the Opposition entirely; they have a principle to argue, and it’s a valid one, but let us remember that Enoch Burke was suspended from his job for for his behaviour in his workplace, including interrupting and shouting at people.
It is incomprehensible that this is the only weapon in their arsenal.
Meanwhile, in our Business pages this week we celebrate students from Kinsale taking part in the Model Council of the European Union debate.
It’s safe to assume that there isn’t much shouting taking place at that, where young adults work to ‘build consensus through negotiation and compromise’.
That leaves us with two options: send all our well-paid TDs on a course for teenagers to put some manners on them, or cut out the middleman entirely and fill the Dáil with people who aren’t yet eligible to vote.
The worrisome thing is, it’s not that difficult a choice to make. Some politicians are elected on the basis of ‘better the devil you know’, but that idiom is rapidly losing any rationale with the ‘devils’ we are stuck with.
