Date Published: 24-Mar-2011

The news agenda rumbled onwards so noticeably at the weekend – the 24-hour news channels which had been putting out round-the-clock coverage of the awful tragedy of Japan, changed their focus to the war action in Libya.

Suddenly, we were getting those stock images once more of apparently surgical strikes by cruise missiles, the ‘Star Wars’ style images of the world’s most sophisticated aircraft roaring away from the decks of carriers. Why, they even broke out the stock footage of submarines launching those extraordinary missiles which seem to wobble around in the water briefly before coming flaming out of the waves.

On Sunday afternoon as Sky News went into ‘war mode’ I thought it can’t be long before we begin to see reporters ‘embedded’ with the UK forces, except that this time, it is unlikely we will see what they call ‘boots on the ground’. Those terms which reporters seem to love like ‘fire and forget missiles’ came into use all over the place.

However, the lessons of Afghanistan may have been learned. In other words, it’s grand to play ‘Star Wars’ on warships hundreds of miles away from the target, or in planes that fire their missiles from another country, but don’t get dragged into a ground war with the likes of Ghadaffi, or indeed The Taliban.

The remarkable change in the news agenda in a matter of hours was a disturbing reminder that the world does tend to move on from even the most dreadful events. Japan and its tragedy became item number two. I thought, how many now remember the shock and awe of watching the scenes from Haiti in the wake of its enormous earthquake?

In the case of Haiti, the sheer grinding poverty of the country meant that the wreckage we were seeing drifting by in extraordinary rivers was largely composed of tin roofs and rubbish from shanty towns . . . in Japan, it’s been made up of waves of cars, lorries, vans, fridges, houses, apartment blocks.

But, for this writer, the images from Japan that will survive in the mind’s eye when many others will have faded, will be those from the past week of the snow-covered wreckage of one of the most sophisticated and wealthiest countries in the world as it struggled to cope with a huge natural disaster in which it appears impossible to even count its dead.

The other thing from which it is hard to escape is the fact that the engineers are probably enduring fatal doses of radiation for us in that power station as well . . . for, even as they take on those massive doses of radiation in attempting to save the reactors from exploding and meltdown, they are saving the rest of the world as well.

When it comes to nuclear accidents in Japan, it isn’t just those living within a few hundred kilometres who are in danger. Many will remember that when Chernobyl happened all those years ago, there were distinctive traces of its nuclear signature picked up as far away from the epicentre of crisis as here in the west of Ireland. Yes, the mountains of Connemara also registered the distinctive signature of Chernobyl.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.