Reflecting on the week that was

A LOOK AT THE WEEK THAT WAS

IREAD the weekend papers on a Monday. My Monday mornings are slow these times, they have room, a lovely accommodation. For me, Monday mornings are the best part of being self-employed; they’re my weekend. I read a story about a cluster bomb that landed without detonating and rolled down a service ramp into an underground hospital. A doctor picked it up in a corridor, the rooms at either side of him filled with bleeding people, torn and dying. He examined it; he wasn’t sure what it was, this strange elliptical object filled with small metal spheres. I wonder how it would feel to be the manufacturer of that undetonated bomb, reading that story. Would he feel disappointed, worried about the next contract? Would he call a meeting with his engineers and his quality controllers and his line managers? Or would he thank God or the universe or blind random fate that his product malfunctioned that day in that hospital corridor? The hospital had moved underground after it was targeted repeatedly by Russian and regime planes. They cottoned on quickly and pounded the ground above it with bunker-buster bombs until the earth closed around the rooms of lacerated children and women and men and the doctors and nurses who were trying to stop them dying.

The bombs still rained on ancient Aleppo on Tuesday. Budget day in Ireland. Fivers, tenners, fifty-centses here and there and I can’t tune my car radio and after a while I don’t care. Imagine the slog of being a politician. I don’t know how or why they do it. All those voices in their ears. It’s easy to be a communist or an anarchist or a radical or a space alien or anything else you feel like being when you live in a free democracy. I know one thing for certain, though: the twenty grand that was ‘given’ to first-time buyers will be added on to the price of the houses they buy.

I’m only a small bit psychic but this is a part of the future I can see with crystal clarity. I was in Dublin all day Tuesday. A man was standing on Dame Street with his hand out shouting: “Please, please, I’m f***ing starving.” I looked at the ground and walked past him. I couldn’t get him out of my head all day. I still can’t. Why didn’t I stop and give him what was in my pocket? At least 25 dead in Aleppo, including five children.

There’s a woman called Fadumo Dayib. She’s Somalian. Her mother sold tea at the roadside, and lost 11 children. Fadumo Dayib is a Harvard graduate and a model and she works for the UN in refugee camps. She’s running for the presidency of her home country. There’s a fair chance she’ll be killed. In Somalia, nine out of 10 girls have their genitals mutilated. Fadumo Dayib rails against this, and all the other things that are terribly wrong in her country. Al-Shabaab has already threatened her. The world should hope she wins; the world should make sure she survives.

Fadumo Dayib is hope for mankind. The UN should protect her, just as it should protect Aleppo. It won’t, though. There’ll be meetings and resolutions and vetoes and admonishments and threats of sanctions and the bombs will rain on. At least 15 killed on Wednesday in a marketplace in Aleppo.

All day Thursday I worry. I have an event on Friday in Dublin. I don’t know which suit to wear. I remember fondly when I only had one suit. And what if I have to speak? What will I say? I give a lecture to undergraduate students in UL and I think it went OK, but I’m never sure. Sometimes I stand up to speak and I cannot control my voice: I drop vowels and trip over plosives and say ridiculous things. There’s a voice in my head that sometimes quietens, but never fully stops, reminding me that I know very little.

I sometimes wish I was a scientist. I read a story on Thursday about a possible breakthrough in hydrogen extraction. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. It’s abundant in all the wrong places, though, and extracting it from water requires a lot of energy. But scientists are inching closer to solving that problem, and a day might come where all our earthly endeavours will be powered by a fuel that wars won’t be fought over, and all our emissions will fall as rain, clean and pure.

Imagine if some of the trillions spent on weapons were given to those scientists. Rebel shells kill five children at a bus stop in Aleppo.

Istill haven’t decided what to wear by Friday morning. I’m starting to panic. I see Fadumo Dayib in the paper again. She says: “If loving my land means I will die, so be it.” There’s talk of a no-fly zone in Syria, of US intervention, of war crimes charges against Putin. Talk. The bombs rain on in Aleppo. Donal Ryan Donal Ryan’s latest novel, All We Shall Know, is out now.