Paul Hopkins: Armageddon outta here while I still can

In his warning about a sustainable economy, Tanaiste Simon Harris recently paired major wars and our ageing population as twin threats to our fiscal health. And then, before I had time to digest my imminent annihilation by a misguided drone on a ghost housing estate or that we holders of the bus pass are getting the blame again, like during Covid or when getting the bum's rush to trade down our hard-earned homes, the booklet drops through my letterbox.

You know, the booklet. The Be Emergency Ready booklet that is, from the Department of Defence and other vested State agencies.

Emergency my foot. We've been living in a permanent emergency for most of this century. The housing emergency, the health emergency, floods and storms, school places for special needs, abject poverty, renewed emigration. Couldn't find any data in the said booklet about how to deal with these emergencies. In fact, the whole tone and 'advice' in this booklet is anodyne, and obvious to anyone who got past their primary cert.

Where I lay my head, our community has of late been hit by sewage problems, power outages, no water pressure and the WiFi disappearing into the ozone layer. Not a mention of how to deal with these emergencies in my life.

I guess in the scheme of things the Government's emergencies equate to wars and rumours of war. After all, this is what Minister Harris has said. Putin, Iran, China, Trump... take your pick. And then there's always Sellafield running amok. (You'd forgotten that one, eh?)

I remember getting my first booklet from the powers-that-be. Way back in the early Sixties. I was 10. Back then, the leaders of the two most powerful nations, America’s John F Kennedy and the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev, found themselves at loggerheads at a specific and scary point in history.

In 1959, a leftwing revolution in Cuba had ended with a government under Fidel Castro. The regime quickly severed formerly strong ties with the US by expropriating US economic assets and developing close links with the Soviet Union.

Given Cuba’s geographical proximity to the US, in March 1960 President Dwight D. Eisenhower directed the CIA to plan for the invasion of Cuba and overthrow the Castro regime. Following his election in November 1960, President Kennedy learned of the plan, concluded that Castro was a Soviet client posing a threat to Latin America and, after consultations with his advisors, gave his consent for the clandestine invasion to proceed.

After two days, US special forces were defeated by the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs.

Embarrassed, Kennedy decided to have another shot. US intelligence reports, however, indicated there were expanded arms shipments from the Soviet Union to Cuba. For many months there was growing concern the weapons included ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads.

The world held its breath. Ireland held its breath. And my very first booklet dropped through our letterbox, advising us of what to do in the event of a nuclear war. My father read through it and told my brother and me that we were to go live under the stairs in the event of Armageddon. "It'll be great," exclaimed my brother and went off to look for his torch.

Immanuel Kant argued that hope is essential to motivating our action. Without the hope that things will turn out well, why bother to do anything at all? Flip that philosophy and ignorance is not only bliss – it is arguably necessary.

Imagine what life would be like if you spent the entire time dwelling on the probabilities of how things might turn out. Become emergencies. How would you behave if you had a flashing statistic saying: "One per cent of the population will die in a car crash," every time you turned on the ignition? Or how would you feel if, as you got married, someone piped up from the back, "There's a high chance a this won't last! Dodge the bullet now?" Would you? And stop playing the lottery if you knew that you had a greater chance of being killed by a tornado, struck by lightning, or even hit by meteorite than winning?

We humans are experts at either utterly ignoring what might happen in the future or being just downright bad at basic probability. The result is that when we choose any action or decide on any path, we usually do not give much meaningful thought to the possible future outcomes or implications of that choice.

Emergencies like climate change and our indifference to it... comes to mind.