A review of 2023 in Cork and around the world... wars and all

SO, one more year left in the first quarter of this century. In the last one, by now we had invented flying air machines and had the biggest dust-up known to mankind up until that point (incorporating those air machines, to make war that bit more terrifying - well done us).

We’re still killing each other in big numbers, for land, power, religion, simmering neighbourly hostility and whatever else you’re having. But we still don’t have cars zipping through the air. Wasn’t that promised at some stage? We might be better off, as they’d probably have lasers in their headlights before long.

2024 is a leap year, and I have to ask again, why don’t we just take that extra day off? Add it to the end of some weekend in summer rather than making stupid February longer? Call it ‘funday’ or something. Or we could add two extra hours in bed on the first Monday of every month. Am I the only one with good ideas around here?

But it is my task here to look back, rather than forward, to the 12 months just passed.

So without further ado… an A-Z of 2023:

AI were the letters on everyone’s lips in 2023. ‘The robots are coming to take our jobs’, you should be screaming loudly and regularly. Although there was some levity when farmers piped up wondering if AI meant ‘Artificial Insemination’. We laughed, they laughed, the computers hummed.

But yokels also have plenty to fear from a fully digital future as our technological overlords will not need to consume livestock or grain. They have already taken over some of the city’s trees. It probably won’t be long before we have our first AI baby being born/restarted. Its first words? My money is on “Data. Data.”

Barter Account. The latest version of ‘what’s a tracker mortgage?’ in bewildering financial lingo. Still, no-one is sure what one actually is, but it got former Late, Late presenter Ryan ‘Subsidy’ Tubridy into more trouble than if he had punched the owl on his farewell show. TD Cormac Devlin spoke for us all at a Public Accounts Committee when he said: “The children are wondering why the ‘toy man’ is in the news so much.” What monsters have we become?

The fall-out overtook even the lovable Marty Morrissey in his borrowed car. “There won’t be a Renault filled with diesel in Montrose tonight,” he announced before handing back the keys.

ChatGPT. I know, we’ve had AI already, but this programme, along with Google’s Bard, is the tip of the spear that the droids will eventually plunge into the heart of our primitive civilisation. For now, the technology remains pretty substandard. I asked both programmes to come up with an amusing review of 2023 and their responses proved only slightly more funny than my efforts.

Bard came up with this for H: ‘Hilarious Human Interactions - The human race is never short on oddball behaviour, and 2023 provided plenty of fodder for our amusement. From people getting lost in IKEA’s labyrinthine aisles, to tourists attempting to communicate in broken English, these interactions had us shaking our heads and chuckling.’

ChatGPT gave me these for N and X. ‘Nanobot Invasions: They were everywhere in 2023! Cleaning our homes, fixing our bodies, and occasionally staging tiny rebellions.’ ‘X: Xenobot Breakthrough: Scientists created living robots made from frog cells. They were cute until they started organising rebellions.’

Worryingly, rebellion and human stupidity seems to be at the forefront of their processors, even at this early stage.

Donuts. A man who broke into and stole from a donut store in Cork city confessed to the crime and got a jail term, despite suggestions there were many holes in the evidence.

Everton. The Toffees looked to be in a sticky situation after they had 10 points deducted for the current Premier League season. But they responded by winning four on the bounce and regained 12 points immediately. Considering some of the alleged financial shenanigans of Man City and Chelsea, it almost seems like punishing Everton is cherry-picking. Although if the league was cherry-picking clubs they would presumably also punish Bournemouth.

Flash floods. The town where this A-Z compiler grew up, and where much of his early alphabet learning took place, received a deluge down main street from Storm Babet. It was an awful blow to Midleton. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar turned up as the community gathered for the clean-up but many suspected he was only on the look-out for floating voters.

There was some sympathy for another East Cork town when Fermoy was insulted by a Scottish woman on The Graham Norton Show. Rather than getting all het up, the Chamber of Commerce’s response should have been, “Well, at least we’re not Mallow.”

Global warming. If the robots don’t get us first, we have this waiting in the winds. In recent weeks in Antarctic waters, the world’s biggest iceberg, 400 metres thick and twice the size of Greater London, broke off and is now skulking about in the southern seas. There is forlorn hope that lack of snow in the Alps for winter skiing again might finally get rich people concerned about the situation and inadvertently help stop people drowning in Bangladesh.

Climate change arrived at the Crucible for the first time since the days of the Whirlwind and the Hurricane when a Just Stop Oil protester at the World Snooker Championships leapt on a table, tore open a bag of orange dust, and sprinkled it over the baize. As members of the action group seem to have no issue with getting tickets for major sporting events. I’m thinking of joining up to help get some ‘like-gold-dust’ All-Ireland tickets next summer.

Hasbro, a company with almost a monopoly on the manufacture of board games, reported a significant drop in sales in Europe and 1,100 staff got the boot, while others received a top hat, iron or little dog. Guess Who has become a lot easier as many familiar faces disappear, hippos are expecting food shortages, and the Twister warehouse says some positions may no longer be able to be supported.

Ireland is full of eejits. After a horrific stabbing outside a Dublin school, a violent mob eventually made the streets safe for our children by burning a double decker bus and destroying an electric tram.

Far-right agitators online are responsible for fanning the flames and getting easily-influenced eejits involved. A century ago, big houses in the country (which would have made for fine hotels) were burned down to get people out, and now they are being burned down to stop people getting in. Flagrant racism remains far too acceptable among us. The land of a thousand welcomes, depending on nebulous factors surrounding skin colour and religion and how long you plan to stay for.

There is no room at the inn, so get out; that was the main message from the Bible, right?

JP. Ireland’s greatest philanthropist/tax exile gifted €32m to each county board in the GAA. Could it backfire and see 27 counties donate €9m (Cavan would probably keep theirs) to Cork, Kilkenny and Tipp in a bid to help stop Limerick doing the five-in-a-row?

The donation will probably buy a lot of goodwill from the ordinary PAYE-paying GAA fan, but Mr McManus might have been better advised to have bought a subscription to GAAGO for every supporter if he wanted to win hearts and minds and he would still have a few bob left to give to the DJ Carey health fund.

King Charles. The new big man next door gets to plop on the shiny hat. He is at least quite concerned about the environmental disaster we are unravelling on ourselves, as he told a climate conference: “The Earth does not belong to us,” but in some immediately bad PR, it is revealed that under an antiquated system that dates back to feudal times, in parts of Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire, if anyone dies without a will or relatives, all their money and property goes to him.

For those of us who think royal matters next door have no place in this space, we also saw Kilmacud Crokes win a club All-Ireland with the help of a recent football superstar parachuted in from Galway after they defended the final attack from the Glen in the decider with an extra man. The Derry side decided not to object and look for a replay, cueing celebrations in south Dublin, where all the players were told to enjoy them, but to try not to have one too many.

Loyal friends. Two old dogs hared off towards the pearly gates: Bród, the President’s Bernese mountain dog, was 11. That is 20 years less than it is claimed Bobi, a male purebred Rafeiro do Alentejo who died in October was.

According to reports, Bobi was even lucky to survive a few weeks as his brothers were all “buried alive after birth due to his owner not wanting to take care of more animals”.

That sounds like the exact right family to earn the distinction to have the oldest dog ever. He may even have lived longer if the owner’s son had listened to the proverb and hadn’t tried to teach him to roll over and play dead.

Moscow. To the names Napoleon and Hitler, add Yevgeny Prigozhin, the latest man to attempt a march on the Russian capital. ‘Putin’s chef’ and the leader of the private military, Wagner Group’s coup was called off within 24 hours. In an interesting twist he wasn’t pushed out of a window but instead blown out of the sky a couple of months later.

The Middle East has taken focus off Ukraine, but the British navy chasing a Russian submarine just south of Cork harbour is a reminder we are closer to danger than we think.

National Party. The green “white” and gold party were down some bullion when gardaí seized gold bars worth more than €400,000 after their leader Justin Barrett made a complaint that they had been removed from a vault at their HQ. Perhaps the party standing up for the proud traditions of Eire were visited by a leprechaun who planned to bury it under a rainbow.

Oppenheimer. The man who became Death, the destroyer of worlds, went head to head with Barbie and was far from ‘A Bomb’ at the box office, as they rode each other’s coat-tails to become blockbusters. Douglas lad Cillian Murphy is now even-money favourite to pick up a Best Actor Oscar.

Prime energy drink is the big hit with the kids this year, and having the empty bottles is deemed as important as tasting the drink. It wasn’t like this back in my day, I thought, until I remembered all those flagons of spirits my Dad used to collect in secret places all around our house and in bushes in the garden.

Elsewhere, a Picasso masterpiece was auctioned for €130 million, bringing a huge smile to seller’s elbow.

Quarter of a century? Can you believe it? I can’t believe the Qatar World Cup can’t be included here, on the technicality that it happened in 2022. When did the queen die? You’re kidding me?

Okay, quick quiz… what is the most difficult letter to fill in a review of the year? It’s usually X but a wealthy lunatic made that pretty easy this year.

Thank god these end-of-year A-Zs are monitored more for quantity (“26 letters done? Great?”) rather than quality control.

Rugby country. We didn’t win the World Cup, despite being supposed to win it. Those pesky All Blacks got in the way again. Stephen Kenny pointed out afterwards that he had never lost a match by four.

The highlight of the sports year, however, was during Joe Biden’s visit to our rugby country when he thanked distant cousin Rob Kearney for giving him a tie: “This was given to me by one of these guys, right here. He was a hell of a rugby player. He beat the hell out of the Black and Tans.”

Can we also cast our minds back as far of January 1, when Leinster blared out Wolfe Tones’ Celtic Symphony after beating Connacht at the RDS.

They didn’t get half the stick the ladies’ soccer team got for singing the same tune.

The Sphere. Up-and-coming Irish band U2 opened the next generation, eyeball-like venue in Las Vegas. Meanwhile, everything remains pear-shaped at the Events Centre site here.

Trump. The second season of the reality show that could usher in a dictatorship-led democracy or see the Oval Office working out of a rectangular cell.

The more court cases thrown at him, the more popular he gets in the polls. At this rate it might be worth running Hunter Biden against him.

“I’ve never read Mein Kampf,” Trump said this month, which is a great reassurance. He also mentioned immigrants in the U.S illegally are “destroying the blood of our country”.

If he gets in again and China send over another balloon, would you bet against him blowing it out of the sky with a warhead?

Universal hearth scare. A monster black hole that could eat 30 billion suns, including our own nearby fireplace, has been discovered by scientists. Can’t they just not tell us this stuff? Sure, if there is an asteroid heading in this direction, give us a heads up, but all this other terrifying stuff out there in the cosmos could be kept under wraps. We have enough to deal with back here. Come back to us if you find a planet inhabited by gigantic fluffy dogs.

Meanwhile, Irish scientists launched a satellite into space for the first time and it is now feared the clampdown on dodgy boxes has been set back several years.

Vigil at the gates. There they were, the first person to willingly go to work on their day off. Enoch Burke standing outside the school gates in between pops into prison. There is mention on X (formerly Twitter) that a new Halloween tradition is if you say ‘Enoch’ five times in the mirror, his dad drops him outside your house.

Worms and wine. What is it with Aussie women? One had a live 8cm worm normally found in pythons removed from her brain. Another survived for five days stranded in the outback on wine alone. After being rescued, this woman said she doesn’t normally drink wine, but had bought the bottle that saved her life as a gift for her mother. If there hadn’t been a writers’ strike in Hollywood, we would surely have seen these stories on Netflix by now.

X. Can we just agree to keep calling it Twitter? Like Lansdowne Road instead of ‘the Aviva’. Elon Musk rebranded the social media platform and to battle the ‘woke mind virus’, he is taking it in a direction that makes us pine for the days when Aertel (our teletext shut down for good this year) was our digital info updater.

Yawn. New research reveals less than 5% of people have the attention span to read long-form journalism, so the likelihood anyone is still reading this far down is negligible.

And making up research to jam in whatever you want is nearly expected as almost no-one trusts the ‘lamestream media’ anymore, which means we can get away with putting in any old Y word with no consequences. Yippeee!

Wait. I have one. Youtube ‘Bobby Fingers’. You won’t regret it.

Zoo. Z is always a difficult letter to nail and by now, as we have remembered 25 other news items from the year just gone, we usually settle on Zoo.

In Italy, an escaped elephant was recorded on a smartphone walking down a road towards a supermarket and it went viral. You can’t even pop down the shops these days without someone taking an unflattering picture of you and broadcasting it everywhere. You’d need a thick skin.

A dolphin with thumbs was spotted off Greece this month, so maybe they can have a crack at overthrowing the robots once they destroy us.

However, the wildlife story that rally caught my eye in 2023 was when a zoo in China denied suggestions some of its bears could be people dressed in costumes, after a video of one standing on its hind legs circulated online, with slender legs and folds of fur that made it look like a human. Other Chinese zoos have been accused of trying to pass off dogs dyed to look like wolves or big cats. “The claims are ludicrous and totally without merit,” said one of their giant pandas.