Trust us, it’ll all end in tears
IT’S that time again when journalists with no sense make predictions for the coming year that will turn out to be wildly inaccurate. But rather than boring you with specifics, we’re going to take a wide-angle, bigger-picture view of the year ahead, and we’re going to make one single grandiose prediction. It is a prediction based on the wisdom of our ancient tribal elders, the true leaders of the country — the Irish mothers. And the prediction is: It’ll all end in tears. And basically we’re suggesting that you can apply this to pretty much anything that’s going on right now and there’s a good chance you’ll be right, the way Irish mothers are always right in the end. Not that they’re ever the type to say I told you so, or to constantly remind everyone that they had said it from the beginning, and we all thought they were being foolish, but who’s the fool now?, etc
Let’s start with a lighter example. Prince Harry and the actress. You don’t need to have the foresight of an Irish mother to see that’s only going in one direction. Look at the two of them. High as kites. The only question is whether they come down to earth with a bang before they get married or afterwards.
Moving on. Social media? That’s not going to end well, is it? Conor McGregor? We hope we’re wrong, but right now, that has all the signs of a messy, tear-filled ending. There is a slight worry too that Saoirse Ronan could end in tears at least temporarily, but actually we have faith in her that she can avoid that inevitability.
It is generally agreed that the current government will, almost by definition, end in tears. It is pretty much built into it that tears is how it will end. The only question there is whose tears and when. Our prediction is 70:30 in favour of it not ending in tears in 2018. But that’s barring events, and if there is one thing that is more certain than things ending in tears, it’s that there will be events, and some of them will not be good events. Brexit, you could argue, has already ended in tears, to which we would say, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The tantrums and tears there are only going to get worse. Trump will end in tears again too. But not Trump’s tears. And as for Gerry Adams, as much as they think they can control that succession, there will be tears along the way, mark our words.
The weather is certainly going to end in tears. The rise of extremism will continue unchecked in that department, and we won’t even have Gerald Fleming to wink us through it. As Storm Dylan might say, a hard rain’s gonna fall.
And then of course, there is abortion. That conversation too will end in tears all round, no matter what happens. There will be no celebratory ending to that one, either way.