Crissmuss and the Electrickery

2nd Nov 2010

Crissmuss and the Electrickery

It takes them almost three months to issue a residents parking permit but City Council have are way ahead of the game on Christmas.

The saxophones and trumpets are barely back in their cases after the jazz festival but the council are already banging out the Christmas decorations.

By last Friday, still late October on the calendar, Corkonians on Grand Parade and Shandon Street found themselves peering up at towering pine trees ready to be coated in decorations. On Tuesday Emmet Place began its countdown to Lá na Nollag with the erection of a giant mockyeah Christmas tree outside the Crawford.

The tree on Grand Parade is so high our sophisticated camera equipment couldn't capture it. It is believed to be taller than the Sears Towers in Chicago which is nearly as tall as the County Hall.

With 'the big day' almost sixty days away (16% of the whole year) the local authority has lost no sleep in moving on to the next seasonal festival.

Meanwhile those triangular jazz festival banners that fit into the city's scissor shaped lamp posts have been substituted for the Cork Film Festival's advertisements.

Talk of Santy is a bit premature but it seems someone at City Hall must have Roy Keane's philosophy pinned up on their wall: fail to prepare, prepare to fail. And of all the things that Fianna Fáil's Ireland has failed at over the last few years we won't let Christmas be one of them.

Reactions to early Christmas decorations fall into two camps; those who are happy to see the public service getting the finger out or those who say 'ah sure would they not give us a few weeks break before talking about de crissmuss'.

Shandon Street decked out with a crissmuss tree in late October (c'mere it was raining sidewards - stop whining about the lens haze)

It's not that easy to articulate feelings about the latter, its just a general sense that a time of year that revolves around just a single two day holiday doesn't really need a build up of two months.
Unless you're a business of course and businesses in Cork pay substantial rates to City Council.

The main concern, especially among parents and to a lesser extent teachers, is that once kids latch on to the fact that Christmas is coming it is literally all they can think about. And we all know that once smallies and their fertile imaginations start thinking about anything, the incessant questions, desires and demands follow soon after.

Mam, jah-know Santy's elves like. Well, are they buildin' all the lego now or does they get it made somewhere else?

That's all very fine Christmas week but when smallies haven't even got to the bottom of their trick or treat loot bags it can drive parents mad. Swapping your jazz straw hat for a Santy one so soon seems a bit premature.

Anyway, let's all keep quite about Christmas for another bit yet. The last thing we want is some langer on the internt rabbiting on about it. Cough!

The God dam(n) ESB!

Elec-trickery

So while the state authorities are busy erecting trees in the city centre it seems Cork's flood defences haven't been erected with similar pre-emptive gusto.

The ESB who control the Inniscarra dam, have revealed that their previous calculation regarding last November's floods being a 1-in-800 year occurrence was overly smug. As we approach one of the wettest months on the calendar it seems the chances of another episode of Peoples Republic of Atlantis are higher than they thought. Comfortingly, and in true Irish tell-em-loads-give-away-nothing style, their not publishing the revised figure.

So after a string of recommendations from a high profile committee you'd assume that the ESB and Office of Public Works (OPW) have carried out any changes to their operating procedures to ensure that this now not-so-freakish flood won't flow with abandon through the city again in 2010 or early 2011, right?

Nah! By their own admission the OPW and ESB have done nothing. Not a jot - unless you count a stream of finely crafted PR statements and finger pointing in other directions.

As the county's monthly rainfall figure starts to grow as quickly as Irish bonds' interest rate Corkonians are losing confidence in the institutions of the state that are supposed to protect us.