Kathriona Devereux: Covid, saunas, Cork cable cars - hot topics of my Echo years

This will be my last column for The Echo. It has been a privilege to share my thoughts, opinions, and passions with you for the past six years.

Flicking through old columns, reflecting on the topics and issues I’ve covered in that time, my main reaction was, “My goodness we’ve been through a lot.”

Looking back, January, 2020, seems like a more innocent time. My column writing career started off benignly reporting on gobsmacked Cork duo Alan O’Sullivan and Cormac Harris’ triumph at the Young Scientist exhibition - yet another Cork win!

But it was only a few weeks before the country was in a surreal lockdown and I was writing about early covid-19 vaccine trials and how the molecular make-up of soap acts like a crowbar busting viruses open.

That was when we all became armchair epidemiologists, sterilising anything that may have touched another human, drinking more wine with our friends than ever before - but just on Zoom.

Those pandemic days were before Donald Trump’s second election, before Russia invaded Ukraine, before Gaza was flattened. Those massive geopolitical shocks would nearly make you wistful for lockdown days.

Over the years, I wrote a lot about climate change and climate chaos. I truly believe it is the biggest problem we face, but my motto is ‘the antidote to despair is action’ so I regularly explored the positive things we can do to reduce our impact on the planet.

Like falling in love with a new cargo bike, saving money by installing solar panels, or hitting the second-hand clothes jackpot with a bargain Dolce & Gabbana suit.

Dodging climate despair, I also shone a light on exciting climate solutions that are available to us such as hydrogen power, but it was hard to avoid the fact that we are agonisingly slow in deploying the renewable energy we so desperately need. Scandalously, Ireland has built no new offshore wind farms since 2004.

Beginning my column writing days, I did not anticipate that AI models like ChatGPT or Claude would threaten our very job of putting words on a page in a convincing, and hopefully, coherent way.

But, with its launch in November, 2022, ChatGPT and other large language models threaten to usurp many aspects of human creativity. If we let them.

It was clear from the start that AI would cause a seismic shift in how the world worked and would unleash as many problems as it promised to solve. And almost four years later it’s still not obvious if the benefits will outweigh the costs.

Recognition of the damage the pervasiveness of phones in our lives causes, especially in children, has grown hugely.

A welcome societal development is the ongoing backlash against social media companies’ influence on young people.

There are still plenty of reasons to delay giving a child a smartphone, but increasingly governments are realising that greater intervention to protect children from predatory tech companies is needed.

Meta agreed to pay up to $17 billion to settle a U.S court case recently, and the EU’s proposed Kids Act aims to ban social media for children under 13 and restrict access to social media until children turn 15.

It hasn’t been all gloom. There were some good surprises.

The explosion in grá and appreciation for Gaeilge, spurred by international successes like the film An Cailín Ciúin and the band Kneecap is very welcome. I’m still far from líofa, though I definitely sprinkle more Irish in my day than I used to. But the fact that more and more people are even willing to try is heartening.

The steady spread of saunas is a trend that we couldn’t have predicted six years ago. That young people would forgo a night on the tiles for a sweat session with pals is still hard for me to wrap my head around sometimes. But understanding the science behind the health benefits of sauna makes me think the youth of today are a smarter bunch than the generations before them.

Some things have stayed the same. Cork traffic is as mad as ever. The desperation to crack the Cork traffic conundrum even had me proposing cable cars as a solution! (I still want a station named after me if it ever takes off!)

The summer céilí at The Lough is as wholesome as ever, and the Cork hurling team still haven’t won the All-Ireland (I highly recommend supporting the Cork camogie team for a refreshing taste of All-Ireland winning glory!)

Any consideration of the last six years demonstrates that change is inevitable, but predicting the pace of that change is tricky.

One constant has been The Echo, which has been part of Cork since 1892. I hope it remains that way. Local media is a crucial part of strong local communities.

We need to know what’s happening in our neighbourhoods, city council, cultural scene, and sporting arenas. Who better than local reporters to tell us?

Even at a time when you can, if you so wish, create your own fake but convincing-looking front page with a bit of AI, people still get a small thrill seeing their picture, or a loved one’s, printed in “Da Paper”. I often text friends to say I’ve spotted a member of their family, and the response is always the same: “I must pick up a copy.”

But constants don’t survive on goodwill alone. If you want to keep the things you love, you need to support them.

I am honoured to have made a small contribution to reflecting life in Cork, and the world we live in, over the past six years.

Go raibh míle maith agaibh for reading.

And as a parting request - please continue to pick up a copy.