Why the yacht trip to US will never happen for us

Country Living with Francis Farragher

I’ve only been to America once, and while I might have an interest in making the trip again sometime in the future, I doubt if I’ll have the option of doing so in a zero-emissions high-speed yacht owned by a German multi-millionaire property developer.

Of course, you can’t dare to mention a word of criticism when the name of Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg, is splashed across all the television screens and newspapers of the world, and maybe, I suppose in a spirit of graciousness, we should say: Good luck to her.

It would be nice, without any doubt, to have access to a yacht fitted with solar panels and underwater turbines generating zero-carbon electricity, but gee I just wasn’t born lucky enough to be in any elite little group with access to high speed yachts.

Greta is a worldwide celebrity at 16 and she’s now destined to address houses of parliament and global summits and she seems to have the power to call school strikes all over the world with one wave of her hand.

I wouldn’t even dare suggest that she should be home at school completing her education, as such a banal existence, would be a long way removed from yacht trips across the Atlantic and meeting world leaders.

The media, I might suggest (of which I have to admit I am the tiniest and insignificant part of) will, almost overnight, build someone up into a God or Goddess, but alas just as quickly as that crowning glory takes place, so too will the comeuppance stage arrive over the coming years.

Maybe, just maybe, she’ll be one of the lucky ones who can take it all her stride as she careers at breakneck speed from the world of childhood into the labyrinth of global politics and media attention.

Her sailing yacht, the Malizia II, is owned by a German property developer called Gerhard Senft, a man of some considerable wealth by all accounts, while one of the men at the helm is Pierre Casiraghi, one of the Monacan royals.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.