For the record

I had a post about how much I love Ireland followed by a post about the insanity of Stormont, where politicians are paid very handsomely to sit around and argue while doing jack for the people who live here (other than maybe whip them up in opposition to each other). London pays the bills and keeps the merry-go-round spinning.

Yes, the political sitchYAYshun (as we would say here) is a mess. A compromise that was the best available in 1998 has worn thin, its many weaknesses now apparent. Nonetheless, I am still content with my choice to live here. I instinctively knew it was the place for me, but the evidence supporting my decision keeps growing. I was talking to my neighbour Marshall the other day and he told me he grew up in a house a few blocks away on Gilnahirk Road and lived in the 1970s in another nearby neighbourhood. That made me realise that my neighbourhood (built in around 1900) is still highly desirable, as are the neighbourhoods surrounding it that were built between 1940 and 1980. In other words, we don't abandon our neighbourhoods here and move on to something shiny and new, in ever-widening circles, the way they do in the U.S. Granted, U.S. patterns of suburban development were fueled by two things that never came into play here: white people wanting to move farther from black people and federal subsidies to encourage the buying and frequent use of cars. Northern Ireland has always had good public transportation and has never had a significant minority population. I'd say segregation exists in lower income neighbourhoods, which are either Catholic or Protestant, but middle and upper class neighbourhoods are integrated, religiously speaking.

When I moved back to the states in 1980 after six years here, the thing that hit me hardest was the waste. Then, I was aware of "land yachts"--gas guzzling cars--and the amount of food thrown away by my university's cafeterias every day. Now, I'm aware of entire neighbourhoods being thrown away, and office buildings, and parks, and demographic groups. I guess when you live in a big country instead of a small island--a big country that is keen to encourage consumption--everything is expendable. Because I'm focused every day on climate change, I find this as unbearable now as I did in 1980, when I was literally wringing my hands over Americans' glib materialism.
9-1