My 2020

The year review is probably the closest thing to a tradition on this site.

Sure, for the week that’s in it, a long read does no harm at all.

Before we dive in, I must thank everyone who supported my efforts over the past twelve months.

You know who ye are.

Míle Buíochas.

As with all the other year-end reviews, the following caveats are in place:

This MY take on MY year and just that.

Inevitably I will have forgotten something, and that is in the nature of any look back.

The act of remembering is, in itself, flawed and subjective.

However, this year is for one profoundly serious reason rather unique.

That is because my year was very much like everyone else’s year.

Covid19 saw to that, and the virus still imposes uniformity on pretty much all of us.

Having said that  2020 started as with any other year.

I have a minor ritual where I  use the pages at the back of my new diary to sketch out some plans and objectives for the 12 months ahead.

Today, they make for particularly pitiful reading!

My professional landscape is the written word, and this year I had lots of new terms to learn.

An entire A-Z of the pandemic lexicon is now part of my daily usage.

A is for Anti-vaxxer and Z is for Zoom Call.

I also discovered that there as such a thing as a “wet pub” and I’m now fixated on the daily R Number.

Moreover, other words took on new significance.

The main one being “vaccine”.

In these islands, the ruling elites showed that they are even more incompetent and self-serving in a pandemic than in normal times.

The Brits had Barnard castle, and we had Golfgate.

Dominic Cummins survived the former.

However, the latter did for Big Phil Hogan.

If the incumbent at Number Ten likes to style himself as Britain’s wartime leader, then Cummins is definitely his Frederick Alexander Lindemann.

That Boris is the Poundland version of Churchill seems to be appropriate for Britain’s inexorable decline on the world stage.

They are becoming the Sevco of Europe in front of our eyes.

A ridiculously misplaced sense of exceptionalism and the home of some dodgy finance.

Of course, if all else fails, they just blame immigrants.

Brexit will undoubtedly impact on the British economy like a slow puncture.

I wrote in 2016 after the Brexit referendum that the entire shitshow would resemble “a slow-moving Suez Crisis”.

The past year has only strengthened my view.

Indeed, it has almost been like the UK’s foreign policy has been guided by the State Aid Looney.

In fairness, the Brits will have blue passports.

Overall 2020 was a good one for Boris Johnson.

He was initially cavalier about the dangers of spreading the virus even boasting that he had shaken hands with COVID-19 infected people in a hospital.

He then benefited from some consequential learning in an ICU.

Boris had a good year on the political front, the Teflon Don of Middle England had started the year with an 80 seat majority.

The General Election of December 2019 had promised to “Get Brexit Done” and millions in previously rock-solid Labour seats believed him.

It was a remarkable victory.

Then came the negotiations with the EU about the future trading relationship.

In the middle of those talks, Perfidious Albion decided to rip up the Withdrawal Agreement on the Northern Ireland Protocol and openly break international law.

Thankfully they walked back from that.

What this means is that the internal market of the United Kingdom has been effectively partitioned.

Anyone in Narne Arne wants to do some cross border smuggling will now need scuba gear!

Sammy Wilson is not happy!

Across the north channel, his Scots kith and kin were looking again at their decision in 2014 to remain inside the United Kingdom.

I find this especially amusing.

Of course, the Redmondite SNP have no idea who to square the magic circle of Westminster sovereignty.

They continue to send MPs there to swear the oath and take the money.

Everything after that is meaningless performance art.

As the year came to an end, Boris got A deal from the European Union.

With a con artist’s skill, he has sold it to the Brits as a wonderful victory over those devious continental and impudent paddies.

However, here is the reality:

 

It could all get very messy at Dover and Holyhead.

Brexit would be bad enough in any year, but it is a Perfect Shambles during a Pandemic.

Here in Ireland, the lack of an all-island strategy for tackling the pandemic made the crisis dramatically worse.

Since the first Coronavirus case was diagnosed in February, there have been 68,762 cases & 1,305 deaths confirmed in Northern Ireland – and 88,439 cases & 2,213 deaths in this state.

Therefore on the island of Ireland:

Total cases since Feb:    157,201

Total deaths since Feb:   3,518

The Six Counties has been a disaster area for the pandemic, and we in Donegal have been part of the worst cluster on the island.

A 32 County approach was needed for the Get-Go.

However, such thinking makes Snarlene cry, and she feels a wee bit less Bradaish.

Coupled with Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol, the future on this island is one without the British imposed border.

As of January 1st, for trade purposes, is effectively partitioned.

I’m smiling…

The good news is that kids in the Six Counties can still avail of the Erasmus programme thanks to the Dublin government.

In February the Irish General election ushered in a new dispensation, and Sinn Féin was the story of the contest.

Had the Shinners fielded more candidates, they would have been the largest party in the 33^rd Dáil.

As it stands, they are now the main opposition.

In the nature of parliamentary politics oppositions in time become governments.

A lot of the Dublin commentariat didn’t take this well.

This listicle comparing Sinn Féin to the Nazis was peak bonkers from Eoghan Harris.

The election also finally confirmed what the rest of us had known for decades:

That there is no ideological difference between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and finally, they are formal coalition partners.

The long-awaited post-Civil War left/right re-alignment of Irish politics in on the way.

2020 was a key year in the decade of centenaries:

Bloody Sunday, Kevin Barry, Kilmichael and the burning of Cork all served to remind us what we Irish have for neighbours.

My grandparents faced down a global superpower.

Oh, how far the Grand Old Dame Britannia has fallen!

To think that the revolutionary generation in Ireland was also coping with a deadly influenza pandemic makes me even more in awe of what they achieved.

Today all I have to do is stay at home.

The cultural changes imposed on all of us by the arrival of Covid19 in our lives will be profoundly irreversible.

The daily commute and the role of the office will be changed, changed utterly by the time this pandemic is vanquished by vaccines.

President Trump was a catastrophic  Commander in Chief at any time.

However, during a pandemic, he amounted to an obese existential threat to the most powerful nation’s people on the planet.

The low point was probably his advocacy of ingesting disinfectant as a method of combating the virus.

It was too bizarre as a skit on Saturday Night Live.

Afterwards, he tried to suggest he was being satirical.

Only his base believed him, and in November there weren’t enough of them to deliver a second term in the White House.

Next month the Secret Service will let him know that he is an ex-President and escort him off the premises.

We should all be grateful to the genius of the Founders of that polity.

The Constitution of the United States was devised to deal with someone just like Donald J Trump.

From the first time I studied that enlightenment document as an undergraduate over 40 years ago, my admiration for those who drafted it has remained undiminished.

However, it remains the land of the Three Fifths Compromise and race is an ever-present problem in the USA.

On May 25^th this year  George Floyd was killed on camera by a member of the Minneapolis Police Department.

For many African Americans, it was the tipping point, and his death provided the spark for the Black Lives Matter uprising.

In some ways, it reminded me of the murder of Samuel Devenney by B Specials in Derry.

The wave of anger around the killing of Mr Floyd even reached Planet Fitba and Sevco player Conor Goldson found out some important things about the Ibrox klanbase.

The Covid pandemic also hit Planet Fitba like a wrecking ball and continues to do so.

At the start of the year, the man who sees billionaires though that Covid was no biggie.

It is little wonder that the main titles in Fair Caledonia are in crisis.

Season 2019-2020 will yield a rich vein of pub quiz questions many years from now.

Celtic completed their fourth consecutive domestic treble this month.

A Scottish Cup Final in December after the season was officially over was just part of the bizarre football landscape.

George Galloway at a Queen of the South match and the subsequent club statement apologising for his presence was probably peak 2020 for Scottish football.

Regular readers of this site will be well aware of my views on the Stenography Corps’ myriad failings.

This year showed us all why a functioning Fourth Estate is a vital part of any society.

At the start of the Covid pandemic, the Bejing regime shut down any mention of the new illness that was sweeping through Wuhan.

It cost the planet vital time to prepare their defences.

That reminds me of how important the craft of journalism is to human well being.

We are all indebted to those who put their lives on the line to hold power to account.

This year several of my friends and colleagues in the Derry Northwest branch of the NUJ were targeted by paramilitary crime gangs.

I’m proud to stand with them and face down these criminal scum.

As with all these year-end pieces, I include something of the personal and familial.

In my little corner of Dún na nGall, it was a year pain and joy.

In January, our fourth baby suddenly stopped having the energy of a puppy.

She just wasn’t herself, and her voracious appetite left her.

The vet put her on some meds, but the malady lingered, and he ordered some tests.

I feared the worst.

When the scan results came back, it showed that her liver was covered in tumours.

She had given us so many happy years, and we hadn’t noticed that she had aged.

Our Rusty was an elderly lady.

It was clear what had to happen.

The medical opinion was that the only thing in front of her was a few more days, and at the end, she would be in severe pain.

The girls travelled up from Dublin to say their goodbyes to a best friend that had been in their lives for 14 years.

So we brought her home from the Veterinary Centre for a final night with us here.

She could only manage to sip a little water.

We cuddled her on blankets.

The next day we took her to her beloved beach one last time.

Driving to the Veterinary centre was heartbreaking.

Her first year of life wasn’t the best start, and the dog that we rescued was fearful and timid.

In the fourteen years that she was with us, it became apparent to her that she resided in a canine hotel.

It was a joy to see her expect VIP treatment without any messing!

In time she redefined my role here as a purveyor of food and general concierge duties.

She haughtily demanded that I decant from the study upstairs and work from the kitchen table.

That way, I was on hand for back door opening duties.

Of course, she got her way.

This is how I want to remember her.

Covid changed everything for everyone, and normal family events were disrupted.

In June mum, dad and the Big Fella watched on this screen as Baby Doctor’s smiling Irish face appeared on the Trinity College live stream.

At the same moment, she was watching in her apartment in Dublin.

It was a lockdown graduation.

We should have been with her at Trinity, but Covid had impacted on all of us.

Since then she’s been in the front line in a Dublin hospital.

Her big sister, a star in the pharma world, makes the bullets for her sibling.

The first lockdown ensnared the Big Fella, and his planned brief visit to the home place lasted the whole summer.

Our government-designated 2km walk became my daily tutorial as I spent time with my seriously smart son.

As we started walking up the back bóithrín, I would have no idea where the chat would take us.

It has been the best of times and the worst of times.

Dear reader, if this awful year has taught us anything, it is how interconnected we all are.

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine. 

I hope that 2021 will be kind to you and yours.