A DARK conversation with a worried friend, the prophecies of an Irish saint, and the visit of a young local election candidate with words of warning and hope on his lips.
We’ll start with the saint.
He was born, believe it or not, on this very day, a Wednesday, about 1,500 years ago.
St Columcille, after whom the modern-day Donegal village of Glencolmcille is named, was a gifted scholar, healer, and one of Ireland’s three patron saints - the other two being St Patrick and St Brigid.
He founded some 30 monasteries here, including a major monastic settlement in Derry, before eventually falling out of favour and being exiled to Scotland, where he settled on the island of Iona.
The Scottish village of Kilmacolm is named after him.
However, Columcille (also known as Columba) is possibly best known in his native land for the disturbing prophecies he made about it.
My grandmother used to talk about St Columcille. She explained how he’d warned that the seasons would change so drastically that winter would be the same as summer. That there would be no fish left in the rivers, and that people would no longer be able to distinguish between a man and a woman.
He prophesied, she said, that there would be a coach without a horse and that the news would arrive on the top of sticks. I was seven. None of it made sense.
Columcille, I read many years later, is also said to have foretold the Viking raids on Ireland, the Great Famine, the Penal Laws, Catholic Emancipation, the struggle for Home Rule, and Fr Matthew’s Temperance campaign.
Last week, a friend rang to worry aloud about the dire state of the country. The climate. The people. The disrespect, the anti-social behaviour, the violence. The environment. The ill-health.
She told me about St Columcille’s prophecies for what he had described as “the latter times in Ireland”.
They matched, more or less, she said.
“Ah come off it,” I said.
She sent me a copy.
Dear God. It was enough to make your heart shrivel.
“Arrive will the time when you would grieve to dwell in Ireland.
“There will be bad weather and the regular order of things will be inverted.
“Fish will forsake rivers and only the leaves on the trees will show the difference between summer and winter.
“Trees will not bear fruit, nor will the earth pour forth its exuberance.”
“Men for their sins will be scourged by rough tempests and hurricanes.
The people, Columcille warned, would become cold, hard-hearted, impious, and adulterous.
“Malice and hatred will prevail.
“Lying will overflow the country.
“Falsehood and deceit will prevail.
“Benevolence and neighbourliness will disappear and age will be treated with disrespect by youth.
“Strife and bickering will rage in the bosom of every family.
“Diseases will abound and remedies will fail.
“Sprightliness will not dwell in the young.
“Manners will be fickle and marriages will be without witness.”
There would, he said, be discord between father and son, and between mother and daughter.
“Chapels and shrines will be plundered.
“Learning will be oppressed and both the arts and the sciences will be brought low.
“The old people will mourn the times they shall have lived to see.”
Now, it was the Bank Holiday weekend and I was taking a break in the Saturday sunshine and pondering it all.
Is my sense that what Columcille said is coming scarily true, or is it nothing but a case of confirmation bias?
A big black people-carrier rumbles up the drive.
Out steps a young man. Tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed, courteous.
He introduces himself and the men with him.
He’s running as an Independent candidate in the forthcoming local elections with, it emerges, the support of a TD whose common-sense, practicality and incredible work-ethic has always impressed me mightily, naming no names.
The young man talks about how he wants to bring common sense back into the running of the country.
“You can stop there. You had me at ‘common sense’, I tell him.
After a bit of chit-chat, he hands me his leaflet and climbs back into his people-carrier to continue with his day.
I go back to the deckchair and read it.
The housing crisis. The nearly 14,000 homeless people.
The under-resourced community hospitals, the dire state of water networks and wastewater treatment plants, the way raw sewage has been left to overflow openly in a village park in West Cork for more than a quarter of a century.
The dismissive and punitive attitude of the EU and the Irish government towards Irish farmers who are being treated like a band of environmental terrorists. The way their children aren’t allowed to build on family land because of how the planning regulations are structured.
The appalling treatment of Irish fishermen. How they are the forgotten people of Irish politics and how the Irish state has literally handed one of this country’s richest resources to foreign fishing fleets.
The business closures across cities, towns and villages as a result of VAT hikes and the relentless increase in rates and bills.
The mismanagement of finances, the failure to address housing, rural planning, local infrastructure. The alarming state of the health service.
How the actions of the government have left this young man deeply disheartened.
As his people-carrier bumped back down the drive, I wondered whether he’d heard of the prophecies of Columcille.
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