Review of the Year – the heroes and villains of 2022
ew Year’s Day brought a radio documentary about The Saw Doctors, I Want My Old Job Back, marking the 30th anniversary of their first album, and bringing a new insight – the Docs are our version of Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Some of us have no idea why this never occurred to us before, which naturally brings us to the price of drink. Minimum Unit Pricing meant a “slab of cans” that used to cost €20 now costs about €45.
It was noted that in AA rooms nobody has ever heard an alcoholic saying he gave up the drink for a while because it had got too dear.
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Donie O’Sullivan was celebrated in the TV documentary ‘Capitol Man’
But we raised a can of something anyway to CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, celebrated in the TV documentary Capitol Man. Donie left Cahersiveen and went to America where he rubs shoulders with Trump-supporters in MAGA-land. He comes back to Ireland sometimes to relax in a relatively progressive environment.
Meanwhile back in the States, Neil Young put it up to Spotify to make a choice between his music and Joe Rogan’s podcast, regarded by Young as a superspreader of vaccine misinformation. Faced with making a call between Rogan and one of the artistic giants of the age, naturally Spotify went with Joe.
With Oxfam declaring “billionaires had a terrific pandemic”, it was quaint when someone won €19m in the Lotto and it seemed like everyone in Mayo was vox-popped about it – yes, money is for other people.
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Donald Trump had a tough year. Photo: Jonathan Drake
February
Of the 18,000 Trump scandals this month, one of the best was the report of his habit of flushing documents down the White House toilet, routinely tearing them up and scattering them on the floor, and sometimes eating them.
But this compulsive evidence destruction was considered a distraction from the bigger scandal of him “improperly” taking many boxes of documents with him to Mar-a-Lago, marked Top Secret. He was still favourite to be the next president.
His buddies the Saudis were trying to destroy golf as we know it with the LIV Tour – Phil Mickelson rightly described them as “scary motherf**kers… we know they killed Khashoggi”, and then took their money in vast quantities.
This hydra-headed attack on liberal western values went almost literally nuclear with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We recalled the writings of the Russian propagandist Aleksandr Dugin, who years ago had advocated the separation of the UK from the EU; the creation of division and instability in the US; and the annexation of Ukraine. Three out of three ain’t bad.
The only thing more predictable was the New York Times reporting the first few weeks of online gambling in their part of the world had seen some “astronomical” numbers being spent.
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Volodymyr Zelensky emerged to lead the Ukrainian resistance
March
Nobody was talking about Covid any more, though future historians will doubtless see a clear connection between the end of the pandemic and the start of Putin’s war. And historians of eejitry will note the bitter protests about vaccines and the wearing of masks, and how strange this seemed when an actual war started.
Volodymyr Zelensky emerged somehow to lead the Ukrainian resistance, driving the Russians away from Kyiv, and pushing back against the critical mass of global badness represented in recent years by Trump, Johnson, Orbán, Erdogan, Bolsonaro and Modi. Symbolically, the wreck of Shackleton’s Endurance was found preserved in the Antarctic.
But we continued to focus on the overriding importance of free money, with Newstalk running the Cash Machine – if you didn’t remember the magic number or didn’t answer the phone call from the presenter, you were out of luck. Nobody knows how many people in the dentist’s chair never answered that call, how many doctors had to pause while giving the bad news to their patient, to win the money.
Disturbingly for them, the British government was now in such a state of Brexit-induced degeneracy they kept pretending that Britain was “world class” and “second to none”. Irish people hearing this knew they were in deep trouble, because “second to none” used to be our game.
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Xi Jinping meets with Joe Biden. Photo: Saul Loeb
April
In Trump news, he had a hole-in-one. Or rather he described having a hole-in-one, which was unreliable in three ways: we saw a short film of the ball in the cup, but not the shot that allegedly put it there; his playing partners included four-time major winner Ernie Els, yet no other ball was on the green; but most powerfully, Trump was saying it.
The actual president Joe Biden was putting his mind to other great issues, declaring after meeting Chinese president Xi Jinping that “we are at an inflection point in history… a genuine struggle between autocracies and democracies”.
Russia was thinking that too, except they wouldn’t regard it as a bad thing if the autocracies end up winning – you turn on Today with Claire Byrne and hear the question: “was Roman Abramovich poisoned?”
This was the new world they were creating, one in which the man last seen living it large in his executive box at Chelsea had “poison-like symptoms” after he and two Ukrainians had negotiated with Russia.
But it’s hard to believe anything these days – a Rolling Stone writer described how Grian of Fontaines DC, an Irishman living in London, has to deal with being called “Paddy”, and jokes about the IRA, and leering men asking him to say “top o’ the morning”.
As Paddy would say: “Oi’d believe ya, thousands wouldn’t!”
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Txiki Begiristain, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, Ferran Soriano and Pep Guardiola of Manchester City. Photo Michael Regan/Getty
May
Manchester City, owned by Abu Dhabi, won the Premier League again – football like most other things is now owned by the super rich, determined to sanitise their wicked, wicked ways.
And the authoritarians were also celebrating in the US, with the leaked Supreme Court judgment overturning Roe v Wade. A lot of people didn’t think an extremist minority would actually take away women’s rights which had been settled for 50 years, but they did. Because they could.
Poor Paddy now found himself on the front line in the war of the worlds, with a Russian state TV claim that massive weapons could destroy the UK and Ireland for eternity. They even had diagrams of this radioactive tsunami.
Neale Richmond TD told Pat Kenny he wanted the Russian ambassador thrown out of Ireland, though Pat felt the ambassador would be getting away lightly – he should be kept here, to drown with the rest of us.
On the upside, only that nuclear tsunami will bring an end to Ireland’s losing streak in Eurovision – and poor Marty Whelan on RTÉ forever hoping against hope we’ll make it through the semi-final, when once we were a superpower.
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Queues caused chaos at Dublin Airport. Photo: Frank McGrath.
June
It is one of the most dreaded sights known to humanity, the airport queue that seems to go on for ever. Dublin airport had a few of them, with very unhappy people on the radio complaining, turning almost every programme into Liveline – including Liveline itself.
The chaos was caused by issues such as staff shortages going back to the Covid lay-offs, but any such “reasoning” only seemed to make it all the more infuriating.
Perhaps this soaked up all the outrage that might have been directed at ads for a comedy festival at the Iveagh Gardens, sponsored by Paddy Power. Most of Ireland’s finest stand-ups added their precious credibility to this, at a time when even the Tories were pretending to be concerned about the dangers of online gambling. Funnyman David O’Doherty was one of the few big names not involved, which is perhaps not unrelated to his 2018 tweet: “F**K OFF GAMBLING ADS YOU MISERY INDUCING S**THEAD F**KS.”
“Our own” Mick Lynch of the British rail workers union was taking on the Tories and becoming a media sensation due to the tremendous clarity with which he articulated the basic problems of western society – such as calling for “pay restraint” for people on £600,000 a year.
For a few hours at Glastonbury, noted public transport user Paul McCartney worked it all out.
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Boris Johnson reads a statement outside 10 Downing Street, London, formally resigning. Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire
July
All-Ireland football and hurling finals in July, won by Kerry and Limerick respectively, seemed to echo the global disruption of our ancient patterns, akin to the World Cup in December. Except the latter could be explained simply by corruption, whereas the GAA have their own reasons that can be mysterious even to themselves.
We were still relying for much of our political entertainment on Brexit Britain, where they finally found a way to get rid of Boris Johnson, but of course not for the right reasons. He went eventually for a sex and drunkenness scandal which oddly enough was caused by someone else. But he stayed on the job for an unconscionable amount of time while the Tories set about finding someone who was slightly worse.
In Liz Truss they had the perfect candidate.
Penny Mordaunt got us going for a while with her family connections to Wexford, but the fact she had allegedly been a supporter of homeopathy clearly doomed her with this electorate.
Watching this psychodrama, we became familiar with the weird practice of the Sky News correspondent Sam Coates outside Number 10, breaking off in the middle of an interview to roar at an approaching minister: “Is this a sad day, Mr Cleverly?”
Again it was left to a rock and roll legend to raise our spirits, with Joni Mitchell at the Newport Folk Festival performing an incredible ‘Both Sides Now’.
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Denise O’Sullivan of Ireland celebrates after the Women’s World Cup Play-off match against Scotland. Photo: Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile
August
As Boris would attest, so many stories are ultimately stories of drink. In RTÉ’s Cold Case Collins, David McCullagh mentioned that drink had been taken by The Big Fellow on the day he was assassinated, which may have contributed to some “bad judgment and impetuosity”.
But no drink was required to turn a Wolfe Tones gig at Féile an Phobail in Belfast into a “hate fest”. Later in the year this renewed enthusiasm for raw, untreated nationalism would see the Ireland women’s football team diminishing their great achievement in qualifying for the World Cup with a rousing chorus of “Ooh, ah, up the ‘RA”.
There was trouble too for the never-ending hate-fest run by Trump-loving conspiracist Alex Jones. In words that defined some of the vital phenomena of our time, Judge Maya Guerra Gamble explained to Jones how this thing call “the truth” works.
“You must tell the truth while you testify, this is not your show,” she instructed the man who would be ordered to pay hundreds of millions in damages for claiming the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.
When Jones countered that “I believe what I said was true”, Gamble went on: “You believe everything you say is true but it isn’t… that is what we’re doing here.”
No further questions m’lud.
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English former football player David Beckham leaves Westminster Hall. Photo by Louisa Gouliamaki
September
After the death of Mikhail Gorbachev, the journalist Edward Luce recalled the one time he took LSD, at Glastonbury 1989. The tabs were printed with Gorbachev’s face, and were called Gorbys.
This seems all the more amazing in the light of many of today’s leaders, whose qualities were described in this Tweet about Trump by Anthony Citrano: “It’s almost impossible to believe he exists. It’s as if we took everything that was bad about the country, scraped it off the floor, wrapped it in an old hot dog skin, and then taught it to make noises with its face.”
Jedward entered the geo-political sphere by responding strongly to the death of Queen Elizabeth. “Defund the monarchy. Taxpayer funds should be allocated to more crucial sectors to ease the cost of living and inflation,” Jedward declared.
But it was David Beckham who made the strongest impression during the 10-day period of mourning, being “discovered” queueing just like a normal person to see her majesty lying in state at Westminster Hall. This put some popularity in the bank for Becks which would be much-needed due to the millions he was putting in the bank to shill for the Qatar World Cup.
Alas for Holly Willoughby and Philip Schofield, they were accused of queue-jumping, and will probably never live it down, despite not taking money from any authoritarian regime.
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Liz Truss speaks to the media at the Empire State building in New York. Photo Toby Melville
October
A culture of cheating in Irish dancing convulsed the nation. We heard of “feis fixing”, along with criticisms of a degraded culture of fake tans, overly exotic costumes, and the taping of feet “to emphasise the length of the leg”.
It seemed to some that the fix was in when RTÉ had a kind of journalistic panic attack over Shane Ross’s book about Mary Lou McDonald. They wanted the interview with Claire Byrne to be pre-recorded, they wanted Sinn Féin to have a right of reply before broadcast, and no mention of how McDonald paid for her house extension. Having drained the life out of it, they then didn’t broadcast it at all.
From Italy came the less than reassuring news that the fascist Giorgia Meloni would be the next prime minister. Just thank God that kind of ultra-nationalist eruption could never happen here.
Oh, by the way, remember that mention of Liz Truss succeeding Johnson as British prime minister? After an utterly catastrophic budget, she was gone in seven weeks.
Which probably seems like a lot, but the queen’s funeral stretched it out a bit.
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Elon Musk had a tough start to his Twitter reign
November
Quinn Country on RTÉ One over three nights told the story of a powerful man who came up against a culture which did not understand his way of doing things – but enough about Alan Dukes, who somehow became “the story” the following morning due to his remarks about Border people having violence in their blood.
Looking at Seán Quinn’s apparently sumptuous lifestyle, the layman would also be baffled by the eternal question of how rich people can lose astounding amounts of money and still live more or less like rich people?
Along came Elon Musk, who paid $44bn for Twitter, and in the first few weeks alone seemed determined to do everything in his power to take all the good out of it, and to bring back all the bad.
This would naturally include Trump, whose own experience on the site may ultimately be driving the diabolical energies of Musk. The fact Twitter was the only institution to put Trump “in jail”, as such, meant it had broken the one sacred law of the universe recognised by billionaires: it had stopped a rich guy doing what he wanted.
Sure enough, the US electorate thwarted Trump and his terrible candidates in the “mid-terms”, to which he responded by announcing he’s running again anyway, in 2024.
December
Still trying to get our heads around a World Cup final in December, perhaps an equitable solution would be to have a Winter World Cup and a Summer World Cup? Maybe, like… every year?
Our general sense of dislocation was straightened out somewhat by the fact the weather got very cold. In recent times we are not used to the weather doing what it’s supposed to do – it was a disturbingly warm November.
So in the deep mid-winter, when it gets cold, let us rejoice.
https://www.independent.ie/life/review-of-the-year-the-heroes-and-villains-of-2022-42241164.html Review of the Year – the heroes and villains of 2022