It Beyon-s in past

BEYONCE has removed the ‘ableist’ term ‘spaz’ from a lyric on her new album.

I know this because I heard it on the BBC.

The same BBC I was watching the previous evening when one of those old Top of the Pops compilations was screening.

Apart from a reminder of how good a year 1978 was for music (Kate Bush, Bob Marley and Sham 69, among others) it was one of those epiphanies that the past has become not so much another country as a parallel universe.

One of the acts featured was ‘Jilted John’ whose lyrics to the song — most commonly recalled for its chorus of ‘Gordon is a Moron’ — went something like (with obligatory asterisks):

“O she’s a sl*g, and he’s a creep. She’s a ta*t, he’s very cheap.

She is a s*ut, he thinks he’s tough.

She is a b*tch, he is a p*ff.”

This was on Top of the Pops. At half seven on a Thursday.

Even Ronan Keating would struggle to find the lyrical gymnastics to sanitise that for 2FM.

I’M OLD enough to remember when we were all in it together. It was two years ago I think.

But even at the peak of our solidarity over Covid, it was always clear some of us were more in it than others.

To fight that crisis, pubs, hospitality workers, artists and kids were asked to carry a heavier load than most.

So it is now with Ireland’s farmers and the climate crisis which in 2022 has finally got our attention after a summer of killer weather around the globe.

The farming sector is being asked to do its bit because the way we do agriculture produces a third of all the greenhouse gas we pump as a nation into the atmosphere.

Amid demands for a 30 per cent cut in those emissions, farmers offered 22 per cent. The Government has split the difference and settled for 25 per cent.

Rural ACTION: World is burning due to climate crisis

That hasn’t stopped the usual suspects declaring it “the death of rural Ireland,” — aka the wiliest political lobbyists in the business.

And while they come in the guise of protecting the “family farm”, make no mistake that they have the interests of the big agri food industry too.

And the greatest trick they’ve ever pulled — ably assisted by the hapless Green Party — is to paint the climate crisis as a divisive battle between people in rural Ireland and those bike-hugging, salad munchers above in Dublin.

But despite what the lobbyists might have you believe, the status quo is not an option.

That status quo has the world on track for more than three degrees of global heating which won’t leave much farming here or anywhere else.

One of the keystone values of rural

Ireland is safeguarding the future for the next generation. Same in the city. The winds of change are coming one way or the other. How hot and how wild is still something we can influence by what we do in this decade. Urban and rural communities will need to be helped to do that and get through the transition to come in the same way we found a €40 billion pot to keep people home from work during the pandemic.

And this time big business interests like those in the food industry should be picking up the bill. Of course they’d rather the story stays about what the rest of us should do.

A bit like the CEO of Shell, Ben Van Beurden, who this week offered the helpful suggestion that people should “eat seasonal fruit and recycle” to put out the climate fire that he and his fellow CEOs have made $3billion every single day for the last 50 years from fuelling.