The emperor needs no clothes, thanks to global warming, so turn down the heat

AFRIEND told the story in slightly scandalised tones about a classmate of her daughter, a teenager of whom I know nothing except the following. In sixth year at school, the poor lamb is plotting her future career and has her heart set on a course offered by a college in Belfast. With this in mind, she has been making casual preliminary enquiries about where she might stay when she makes the move across border. Some uncle with a warped sense of humour suggested that her first port of call in seeking accommodation should be Tiger Bay, or maybe Sandy Row.

These place names, dripping with pantomime villain loyalism, meant absolutely nothing to this 21st century child of the Republic. She simply did not get the joke, such as the joke was. And it emerged in subsequent cross-examination by the uncle that the depth of her ignorance was beyond his fathoming.

He is one of a generation reared on a constant drip of news stories about Shankill Butchers on one side and Divis Flats snipers on the other. Though most of us have never spent much time there, we oldies of the Twenty-Six Counties have a knowledge of Belfast geography coloured (coloured orange and green) by the Troubles.

Thank goodness the young lady planning to venture north does not wake up to daily reports of atrocities and terrorism as we did in the seventies, eighties and nineties. Still it came as a surprise to her elderly relative that she imagined, with unimpeachable logic, that Ulster Unionists must be the local fans of the European Union.

It is the case that some residents of Norther Ireland continue to define themselves first and foremost by their place on the sectarian spectrum. But where they spend July 12 is of zero interest to the likes of a wide-eyed adolescent southerner who looks to her own future rather than Ireland’s past. And that is probably how it should be…

I arrived home the other day to find young Persephone making a placard, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ as she wielded a hefty red felt tipped pen to daub a slogan. For a moment, I fancied that she had become a Marxist and taken up the cudgels on behalf of the world’s oppressed proletariat.

Wrong.

Our daughter is not someone in any way caught up in the age old conflict of left versus right, an artificial and antiquated measure of opinions as far as she is concerned. Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael too, it is all the same to her and politics as we have known them are to her a closed book, one she simply cares not to open.

Similarly, all attempts to interest her in the ebb and flow of Brexit have fallen flat, no matter that our economic relationship with the UK is key to her prospects and to those of her peers. My efforts to tune her in to the finer points of affairs in Westminster and Brussels have completely failed to ignite any answering spark.

So what was it that had her nailing a board to a stick and reaching for the felt tip? Global warming, of course, because global warming is the issue that really matters above all others. And Persephone’s generation have copped on to this fact, perhaps because they are the ones who may pay the greater price for ecological melt down.

Or perhaps they are like the little boy of the story calling out that the emperor has no clothes, blessed with insight unsullied by maturity Our leaders should not be assessed by achievements measured in terms of frictionless borders or party point scoring. The criterion that counts most of all is whether they have steered us away from the abyss of climate change. To quote the words which Persephone, after considerable thought, adopted as her slogan: ‘ There Is No Plan-et B’.

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the recent wave of global warming demonstrations by school children is the reaction of us oldies. The demands set out by the youthful protesters for eliminating fossil fuels and cutting pollution make such obvious sense that we cannot oppose them. Responding to that agenda in the new politics, one we can all relate to, whatever our age.