Energy
Posted on Thursday, May 17, 2007I went to the Energy Show at the RDS recently and I was just amazed by the things I saw in Dublin.
Amazed, I tell you!!
The tall buildings, all the traffic lights, the beautiful cosmopolitan people rushing around with their phones, closing high-powered stock deals and ordering the overthrow of foreign leaders. And the speed! Jesus, you couldn’t believe the speed of everything, which I suppose is easy to understand because you only have about half an hour before you get back in your car to drive the hundred-mile commute to your architect-designed dog box -sorry, town-house - in the Dublin suburb of Monaghan, just in time to collect Sorcha and Fiachra from the Thumpin’ Toddlers montessori prison-camp.
Fantastic. It’s just like living someplace good. Almost. If you close your eyes.
When I lived in Dublin years and years and years ago, there was one restaurant in the whole town, and it was shite. Not so today. Nowadays, you’re up to your bollocks in ciabatta. (Ok, I know it’s only griddle cakes, but you’re not allowed to use that kind of language any more. That was talk from the old Ireland, before people lived in places called Kwerk, or drove sangth-banged on the rang-dabangt).
Oh it’s just amazing. You have the LUAS, paid for exclusively by Dubliners, and the DART, also paid for by the Dubs, without a penny coming out of the pockets of the Culchies. Not one bob. Not a sous! That’s why the National Dublin Plan is such a success. And the amazing thing is how they let us use all their facilities, like the National Concert Hall, the National Aquatic Centre, the National Inferiority Complex. Yep! They allow us to use the whole lot, thanks be to God.
I’m particularly fond of the National Inferiority Complex. It’s what drove the evolution of AA-speak over the last ten years, a form of speech impediment that now afflicts over half of all Irish teenagers and twenty-somethings. This is a phenomenon where people have become very embarrassed to have local accents and instead speak with a ludicrous mid-Atlantic twang that makes you run to switch off the radio sometimes in case your ears get damaged. I promise you I’ll research this in detail and come back to you with a full piece very soon, but for now, we’ll let it rest. Let’s return to the RDS.
At the Energy Show, you couldn’t move here nor there without falling over a wood-pellet boiler. Everywhere you look there’s somebody trying to sell you a wood-pellet boiler or a solar panel, and this is not surprising, because we are facing an energy crisis such as we have never seen before. To put it plainly, unless we do something now, we’re fucked. Putin has us by the mebbs. He controls all the gas. Ireland has no bargaining power, and soon we’re going to be in deep shit, at the end of the pipeline. Oil? Gimme a break. Oil production has peaked, it’s on the way down and here come the Chinese to burn what’s left. Oil equals fucked, ok?
So. You’d imagine the government would be carefully conserving what we have of our own, wouldn’t you? You would of course, if we were Danish or Norwegian, but we’re not, are we? No - we’re Irish, and that means we’re stupid. As I mentioned to you in a recent item, we gave away all our natural gas so that a private consortium - one of whose members is the Norwegian state oil company - could sell it back to us at full market price, and now that the wood pellet burner is emerging as the future, I can see clearly what’s going to happen. Look up at whatever hills you have near you. See those gigantic machines ripping the trees out of the living earth? That will be the Norwegians collecting our forests.
And those little blue figures will be our police arresting any farmer who objects to it.
Stumble it!
May 17th, 2007
“Nowadays, you’re up to your bollocks in ciabatta. (Ok, I know it’s only griddle cakes, but you’re not allowed to use that kind of language any more. That was talk from the old Ireland, before people lived in places called Kwerk, or drove sangth-banged on the rang-dabangt)”
That’s one of the best vignettes of modern Ireland I’ve read, Bock. Hilarious - I love it!
May 17th, 2007
By the way, the new site’s come up a treat! Well done!
May 17th, 2007
Took me ages to figure out sangth-banged on the rang-dabangt, and I’m only in the next county. It was worth it though - I’m in bits laughing now.
May 17th, 2007
I live in de orient,no cabiche.
sign the petition ye heartless bastards!!
May 17th, 2007
couldn’t agree with you more,well written and very funny.
May 17th, 2007
Not that much speed in Dublin, mainly Coke.
May 17th, 2007
Aw Bock at least us dubs know what a “rangdabangt” is for! I heard they put one in Mullingar once and had to have it removed as the locals were driving over it!
May 17th, 2007
I’m with Sam. That line about the ciabatta made me blow my cover. My job’s not that funny.
May 18th, 2007
Good man Bock, I was struggling with the Sangth-banged for a while too.
On the subject of energy, although I am currently propelling enough diesel to heat 6000 households for a year, in Sweden, I would be buying in the Solar panels now while the going is good. I already heat the house with a pellets boiler integrated into a central heating system which runs on electricity on low peak demand.
Don’t blame the Norwegians or Shell for the Natural Gas fiasco, blame the morons who are giving away the natural resources to them,ie the Government.
May 18th, 2007
Sam: You’re too kind. No, really.
Mr Sneeze: Is not permit to laughing, please.
HZC: Shut up and cook something.
Jonijoe: Thanks
Flirty: Yeah? I suppose.
Aisling: Don’t count on it. I saw plenty of people going anti-clock on them. And of course, skangers driving stright through them, just like the Biffos. Staary bud?
Sassy: Sorry.
Tim: Oh, I don’t blame the Norwegians. I blame the crook who gave it away.
August 9th, 2007
[…] crook of a minister, Burke, was accepting equally large amounts of dosh for giving our national energy resources away, free, to a crowd of murdering fuckers from Shell Oil! Is it any wonder I’m […]