It’s the Saturday before the European and local elections. I am standing on the Grand Parade, with a younger, more eye-catching companion, both of us committed members of Friends of the Earth Ireland, both of us wanting to call voters to vote, and to vote GREEN!
I am bedecked this hot, hot day in Cork with a sun-hat, and, perched on top of my glasses, a set of clip-on sun specs. I’m hoping I’ll survive the two hours plus of heat. (I reached three-quarters of a century about ten weeks ago, so am now of the brigade celebrated in the Psalm: “Seventy is the sum of our years; or eighty, for those who are Strong”! I’m hoping to be among those who reach the company of the Strong!
We stand forlorn and awkward a while. We deck the table with climate posters, and write up our key message “VOTE! FOR PLANET AND CLIMATE!”, using coloured markers on the back of a pale cardboard box,
supplied by my mother-companion, from the trove of her children’s booty. Our first interested bystander stands a while, assessing. Age, gait and garments proclaim him farmer. But he withholds that information, taking on instead the cloak of “anti-green” warrior, as he engages. He quotes Farage and Trump and some Scientists of like persuasion in order to attack the notion that the current climate change is induced by humans. Being armed myself with FoE’s Myth-Buster list, I respond that while the climate has certainly changed before, today’s RATE of change is unprecedented. He is unimpressed. I offer a percentage of peer-reviewed scientists’ opinions that supports our position. He has his own scientists to quote back. I suspect that, when any one of us holds a position passionately, and it is bolstered by, or laced with, fear, we are hard to shift from that position. Shifting feels too dangerous. Anyway, I pull what I hope might be my trump-card at the end of maybe ten minutes: “Well, whose opinion and judgement WOULD you MAYbe trust?” He slipped uneasily into vague generalizations. I tried to pin him down: “Would you trust the Pope? Would you trust Pope Francis?” “Ah sure he’s only an auld fella. He’ll believe whatever they tell him.” I eye him quietly. “I think you’re a farmer,” I say. “Are you a farmer?” He begins to laugh, then nods. “Whereabouts do you farm?” “Millstreet.” “Oh! That’s a famous place” says I, just for a change of tack. “What’s famous about it? What do you know about Millstreet?” says he, disgruntled. “I know Mr. Duggan. He did Eurovision a few decades ago.” Touché! I do know Millstreet, and have managed to side-step Climate-change, and can wrap the conversation up.
In the event, the farmer was the Only Irish person who engaged at any length with us around climate that day. I did though get a proposal of marriage from a young intoxicated lad in his twenties, out for the afternoon with a gang of lads and lasses of his age-cohort. It was my clip-ons that drew him! His mate tried to peel him away, for the girls were in a hurry, and urging him on. He would not be moved! I said to the pal by way of distraction, “What’s your name?” “Oisín,” dúirt sé. “Oisín from Tí na n-Óg?” says I. And the leading lady, coming back to collect her lads, stopped in her tracks. She then addressed me in the most fluent and mellifluous Irish. Nothing daunted, I replied in kind. And, though under pressure of their time, we swapped a few delighted and zestful lines appropriate to the urgency and humanity of the situation. And they went their way.
The final Irish person was a man in his fifties – seated opposite us, on one of those polished-marble-looking
street-seats, contemplating us over his ice-cream cone. I approached him armed with my Pringle cheese-and-onion tube of “free slogans”. He drew one out. It won his favour. “I was going to vote Green anyway,” he announced. Then “What are you doing yourSELF to make a difference?” – an unexpected challenge! I
offered that I wore a coat and a hot-water bottle inside the house, instead of putting on the heat in winter. He was unimpressed. “You’re probably like me,” he said “You’re just naturally warm anyway. No credits there!” He was kind of right. “So, what ELSE do you do, that I don’t do myself?” I thought a second: “I boil the kettle in the morning, put the water into my thermos flask, and it does me the whole day for cups of tea or coffee, if I just stick them into the microwave for a minute. And maybe too it washes a few dishes for me. “And then,” I went on, “if it’s wintertime, I boil another kettle, and this time it does my night-wash and my hot water bottle.” He was impressed. “I never thought of that,” he said nodding, and took another free slogan as a sign of appreciation.
That day, though no other Irish engaged with me, there were others who did: from Tahiti, Canada, Australia, USA, Germany, France, Italy, Brazil, Ukraine, and many Elsewhere. And they all got their free slogan. Each wanted to speak among other things about climate, about how to find a public toilet, about their Irish connections, about could I loan them a biro to do their postal vote.
It was lovely meeting the world on the streets of Cork – enjoying our common humanity – sharing our
languages of English and Irish, of smiles and nods, and our interest in shaping a better tomorrow for our
children. My companion gave me a lift home to Blackrock in time for Mass. The elections took place within the week. The Greens fared badly, and my heart since is crestfallen. The planet feels more vulnerable than ever. It needs our help. We cannot allow ourselves be discouraged. We are children of the living Creator God – male and female – made in the Image of the Creator. We, creative-ones, can rise to the challenge – as individuals, and, especially, as communities. A single companion can stir in us the courage and creativity required to risk visibility, and connection and change – on the Grand Parade, or Any Where.
In the event, my companion shared with Friends of the Earth, and unknown to me, a photograph taken by our Italian slogan-sharer. And so, I discovered myself on their website – surprised at first, to recognize myself, and then to taste my minor celebrity – for a brief day, on a city street, with a straw hat and clip-on sunspecs, and a collection of slogans in a Pringles cheese- and-onion tube.
Life is for living – in all its/our colours. Here’s the photo: That’s me, wearing the Papal colours! And here is one of the Free Slogans – a Cree Proverb:
“Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last river poisoned, and the last fish caught, only then will we realize that we can’t eat money . . .”
Máire O’Donohoe OSU