Time to batten down the hatches?

THIS must be what they call the calm before the storm. It was surreal at Dublin Bay yesterday as swimmers frolicked in the sea on a balmy day. It felt like summer. Except it’s the middle of October, and there was something unsettling about it. Only the slight breeze across the water gave a hint of the uneasy undercurrent. This was, in the modern parlance, fake weather. Not to be trusted.

This sense of unease beneath the surface is all around us. And our human capacity for denial is being stretched all the time. We managed to tell ourselves for months that even if the UK leaves the EU, we would somehow be allowed to have no border on the European frontier. Somehow the rules would be stretched for us to have a hole in the membrane of Europe where people and goods could move freely in and out. Britain was committed to this, we told ourselves, as if what Britain is committed to mattered. And Europe was talking it up too, as if Europe’s platitudes about us being a special case ever mattered. But it allowed us to bask in the warm breeze for a while and convince ourselves that Hurricane Brexit would not hit with full force. But slowly the scales are falling.

There was something becalmed about the Budget too. It almost drifted past us. Low key, no surprises, no real pitfalls. The farmers sure, but the farmers can always be pacified. It was peace in our time. Fianna Fail had a half-hearted go at some of it and claimed credit for the rest, but largely there was no whirlwind to reap. And we were tempted to think that things were fine. There was even talk of two more years of this detente between Government and Opposition.

But no sooner was it done than we hear that both Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are looking for reasons to blow everything up and have an election. Leo lords it around Cork while Micheal tries to have an Ard Fheis. Backbenchers are starting to get riled up on either side. Tribal forces are at play. Just a slight breeze across the water now, that distant rumble of thunder at a picnic that we try and ignore, but that is an intimation of the mortality of this peace-inour-time Government.

And abortion lies ahead of us too. And we tell ourselves we will be more civilised this time. But already that notion that we can do this without civil war is starting to fray at the seams. The winds are whipping up. Not helped by a powerful Hollywood alleged rapist. Not helped by a young women having to stand with extraordinary bravery outside the court where her father was sentenced for killing her mother, to tell other women to get out when men try to control and abuse. The winds of change are blowing too in the uneasy truce between men and women.

Could be time to batten down the hatches…