WELCOME to storm season, that extended period we are becoming accustomed to every year when new names come at you faster than a rollcall in a creche.
Here comes Isha, tempestuous and cranky! Followed by Jocelyn, who came crashing in the door before we even had time to clean up after Isha’s meltdown.
Who’s next – Kate? Kevin? King Kong?
And what’s that nutter doing in his swimming togs on the diving board in Galway? You’d be wrecked from the wave overtopping alone.
Teresa Mannion must be exhausted altogether, the poor crater. Trying to keep abreast of it all on social media is a fulltime job. You have the Carlow Weather lad outflanking all the official forecasters and about a thousand amateur meteorologists following suit – probably the same lads who were epidemiologists during Covid – with their scary-looking maps covered in isobars and manic patterns recalling Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
Then there were the stories from punters who spent whole days on a plane to get from Birmingham to Dublin, only to arrive back in Birmingham again later that night – the plot of a particularly depressing Beckett play if ever I read one.
Of course, following anything on social media feels like observing a bin fire in a paper factory.
As Storm Isha raged on Sunday night, I had the misfortune of tuning into the #RoomToImprove hashtag on X, a programme you’d show aliens to convey Ireland’s medically certifiable relationship with land and property.
Not that I’m casting any judgements. I was watching, too, making snide little comments about the poor sods trying to get a small box added to their house without incurring an IMF-sized debt. Making massive assumptions about their marriage based on a sideways glance.
People were mostly losing the run of themselves because of what Dermot was trying to get the cash-starved couple to add onto what was an already compromised build. Much of the storm-in-a-teacup commentary was centred around a two-grand planter. Lads, ‘tis far from two-grand planters we were reared.
Of course, everything worked out in the end, and we should be used to that now, given that the format has been running since the time of Saint Brigid and it rarely diverges.
I would give my right arm to see an episode where it all goes to hell during the happy kitchen scene at the end – champagne glasses smashing on expensive marble worktops, builders headbutting carpenters, Dermot in a headlock … It’s exactly the shot in the arm the format requires.
Name that super Páirc!
SPEAKING of storms in teacups, it seems like everyone outside Cork is having a good ol’ laugh at the debacle over the proposed renaming of Páirc Uí Chaoimh to Super- Valu Páirc.
The general line in Dublin is that we’d be better off focusing our energy on what we do on the pitch. Ouch. With the stadium in a hole to the tune of €30m, the truth is that beggars can’t be choosers and some unpalatable prospects lie ahead for the hardcore GAA people including big rugby fixtures, a Bruce Springsteen concert which will see the footballers nudged to Páirc Uí Rinn for their home round-robin game and whatever you’re having yourself.
There have been plenty of these controversies over the years, of course. I swore I’d never refer to The O2 as anything other than The Point but now I call it the 3Arena without batting an eyelid.
The answer to the perennial question ‘Is there anything sacred?’ seems to depend on who’s paying. Where will it all stop, I wonder? The Brown Thomas Cliffs of Mohair? Newgrange by Energia? How long before Jeff Bezos reads a proclamation on the steps of the GPO as he opens the 1916 Amazon Fulfilment Centre?
Using AI, post-haste
SPEAKING of post offices, I don’t know if you all caught the brilliant Mr Bates vs the Post Office mini series. TV drama series rarely have such a big impact on politics but this one certainly caused a huge furore in the UK.
Due to a software glitch, more than 700 sub-postmasters were falsely accused and convicted of having their fingers in the till, leading to jail terms, bankruptcy and four suicides. It is a shining and terrifying example of the dangers of overreliance on automated systems and perhaps a portent of things to come, should we not legislate correctly ahead of the AI revolution.
This case is not the only recent example. Between 2013 and 2015, a computer falsely accused 34,000 people of welfare fraud in the US state of Michigan, and in Australia. The ‘Robodebt’ scandal saw fines issued to 470,000 people on benefits, leading to at least three suicides. There’s a lot to be said for human oversight, after all. Anyone who’s ever been lost up a mountain shouting at the maps app on their phone will know that.
