Enough to worry about without the Trump card

Country Living with Francis Farragher

I suppose I should have been upset at Donald Trump’s recent little success – many of my colleagues seemed to be going through great personal turmoil at his elevation – but maybe I’m at, or very close to, an age, where I see little point in developing any great angst about the Putins, Trumps or Clintons of this world. The sun will still rise in the East and set in the West, subject of course to the wrong buttons not being pressed.

Now straight away, I can hear the critics chirping away that it was types like me back in the 1930s, who yawned quietly and slept solidly, as one Mr. Adolf Hitler was making his way up in the world. Maybe that is the case, but with the passing of time, I just don’t believe that losing a night’s sleep over a super-billionaire in the States getting the top job in the world is going to make any great difference to civilisation.

For the life of me, I don’t understand how a man who needs tens of thousands of people to help him keep track of his truckloads of billions, would ‘dirty his hands’ for a paltry 300 or 400 grand a year to be the boss of a country that would have to wreck your head with all its diversity, in terms of wealth, poverty, injustice intelligence and crass stupidity. But as the saying goes, ‘everyone to their own liking’.

I have to admit to a slight feeling of shock at about 5.50am on the Wednesday morning of November 9, when I roused the mobile from its slumber to discover that Mr. Trump was expected to romp home, despite all the opinion polls indicating that his ‘goose was cooked’.

It was much the same as the feeling during Midsummer when the Brits, in a moment of stubborn nationalism, decided to give the two fingers to the EU and to paddle their own canoe in the world of European politics and economics over the coming years.

While in my heart of heart, I believe that none of these developments is particularly positive for our Green Army, the notion of them preventing me from enjoying a good night’s sleep, a few pints in the local, or a good boiled dinner from the home stove, is quite preposterous.

This whole business tends to go in cycles and in a decade’s time we’ll have a liberal democratic president back in the United States; Britain will have sailed back into the EU; Fianna Fáil will be seeking a third term in office; Mayo will have ran Dublin to a point in the All-Ireland final; and a giant statue to Enda Kenny will be unveiled in Castlebar’s finest plaza.

Maybe this uncaring attitude smacks of selfishness and a lack of concern for the rest of mankind but regardless of who’s in charge at the White House or Leinster House, we’re still absolutely guaranteed to have Benjamin Franklin’s two great certainties still staring us in the face – death and taxes.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.