Has anyone seen Russians watering horses at Lough Neagh recently? No? Phew. When I was growing up my granny used to tell me that I would know the world was coming to an end when the Russians watered their horses at Lough Neagh.
She wasn’t a catastrophist even though she had lived through two world wars, the partition of Ireland and the worst years of the Troubles. But she was a woman of simple faith and she put her trust in St Malachy, the former archbishop of Armagh, who is said to have had the ability to predict the future.
The Russian story was one of his insights – though Russia, as we know it, didn’t exist when St Malachy was knocking about Armagh. Famously he also predicted all the popes down to the Day of Judgement – another apocalyptic moment to look forward to. Malachy’s prophesy was astonishingly accurate about the popes up to the late sixteenth century when the document was discovered, but you have to go through all sorts of contortions to make the succeeding popes fit his descriptions.
Growing up during the height of the nuclear stand-off between the United States and the USSR, I took some comfort from the fact that there were still quite a few popes to go before the end of time. Sadly, dear reader, St Malachy’s list has run out. We should all be dead by now. But the apocalypse is a tad late, and Pope Francis is toiling away in the Vatican in the hope and expectation that humanity still has some future ahead of it.
Putting it politely the prophesy is most likely a fraud perpetrated, scholars say, to advance the cause of a candidate for the papacy who conveniently fitted one of the descriptions. ‘Uncovering’ dusty documents was the medieval equivalent of fake news on Twitter.
For those of you of a catastrophic mindset – and who isn’t these days? – St Malachy has another prophesy in his reliquary which can bring us some discomfort in modern times. Again, the authority for this is my granny, god bless her.
We will know the world is coming to an end when you can’t tell one season from another. Now I know the Irish weather is notoriously fickle, and having spent a few cold, wet summers in mildewed caravans in the west of Ireland, I was convinced at an early age that the seasons were colliding.
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But a wet weekend in Lahinch is nothing to what is happening around us now. The weather in these islands is pretty topsy-turvy at the best of times, but the conflagration on the continent is textbook apocalypse stuff.
If I’d had my way, this week I would have been in Italy. But after a July trip to Bologna last summer, my wife refused to go anywhere in Europe this year on account of the heat. Last summer’s temperatures – in the late 20s centigrade – look positively Baltic compared to the heat Italy, Greece and Spain are enduring this year. Her foresight at the moment I was readied to press go for Sicily in July can only be described as Malachian.
The world has endured ‘weather events’ in the past – but not of the severity or frequency we are experiencing today. What people have had to put up with across the world, makes the plagues of Egypt look quaint. If only it were raining frogs.
Not only are the effects of global warming being felt in the skies above, but now scientists have identified the subterranean impact too. Changes to the structure of the earth beneath our feet is causing cities such as Chicago to sink.
Scratch the surface and you will find conspiracists and climate deniers aplenty. But science is pretty well of a single mind that the global crisis is man made, driven by forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution, our ruthless exploitation of fossil fuels, and exacerbated by our insatiable greed for plastic junk shipped halfway round the world.
Governments – focused primarily on short-term goals – have so far proved themselves to be inadequate to the challenges. Without question they are failing us and future generations. Will this year’s events waken us from our slumbers? Or will we outsource our concerns to climate protestors with their stunts at public events?
Humanity has always worked on the principle that ‘something will turn up’ – a solution that provides easy answers to complex problems. Will technology save us from ourselves? Only one thing is certain, there’s no point in asking St Malachy. Sorry granny.
