COLM TOBIN: Slippery battle between presidents as oil Sultan is in a spin over our Mary

IT was another frustrating week in the fight for the future of the planet, with climate leaders flying in from all over the world to take part in the Cop28 in Dubai, a country hardly known for its eco credentials.

Poor old Eamon Ryan got caught between a burning rock and a hard place and thought he’d have to fly home to defend poor old Helen McEntee in the Sinn Féin-led vote of no confidence in the Justice Minister on Tuesday. Thankfully for him, he was offered a Dáil pairing arrangement by Social Democrats TD Jennifer Whitmore, who felt sorry for poor Eamon, and he now gets to hang on until the conference concludes.

While he’s there, he might get to visit the planned site for The Mall of the World, which is, you guessed it, set to become the biggest shopping mall in the world. It even includes a 7km- long promenade that will be covered and air-conditioned in the summer and open in the winter.

So, you know, you can shop till you drop, destroy the planet while you’re at it and all without even breaking a sweat. I’d sooner visit the dentist.

The President of Cop28, Sultan Al Jaber, was left emitting all sorts of noxious gases after his thin skin was pierced by the incisive questioning of our own Mary Robinson during a Zoom call, leaked earlier this week by The Guardian. He was riled by Robinson over his non-commitment to phase out, rather than phase down, fossil fuels, in his role as chief executive of the United Arab Emirates’ State oil company, Adnoc.

Losing his cool faster than a shopping mall lift in the middle of the desert, he retorted that there is ‘no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C’.

More than 100 countries already support a phase-out of ‘unabated’ fossil fuels, and climate scientists who read the transcript described the comments as ‘incredibly concerning’ and ‘verging on climate denial’. The former US vice-president Al Gore said a commitment to phase out fossil fuels would be Cop28’s only measure of success. Mary Robinson was having none of it, and she caused quite a problem for the ceo who was more like the Sultan of Spin in the following days as he attempted to perform damage limitation on a mess of his own making. No better woman than Mary to call him out and be a voice for our children!

Chinese whispers

LIVING on the East Coast, I was particularly concerned by another piece in The Guardian during the week, this time reporting that Sellafield’s IT systems have been compromised by groups linked to Russia and China. Yikes!

I thought I was reading a report from the archives at first, from the bad old days in the 1980s maybe, but nope – this one is right up-to-date. Breaches were first detected at the nuclear plant as far back as 2015 when experts realised sleeper malware had been embedded in the site’s computer networks. Sellafield has the largest store of plutonium on the planet – a huge dumpster for nuclear waste from decades of atomic power generation. And, by the sounds of it, they seem to have barely got around to installing Norton Antivirus.

The problem of the insecure servers was nicknamed Voldemort after the Harry Potter villain by British officials, so serious are the vulnerabilities, and staff first noticed a problem when they could log into the servers while offsite. Staff could even plug memory sticks into the system while unsupervised, something I would not allow my children to do with their PlayStation. Sobering. I think I’ll ‘duck and cover’ going to bed this evening.

A tight fit for Napoleon

IT’S been an exciting couple of weeks in The Historians v The Directors, a battle as old as time, or at least as old as Hollywood. This latest scuffle came about with the release of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon in the cinemas, a film that is being enjoyed by critics and punters but has drawn the ire of academics who have complained about the historical inaccuracies in the movie, which include a scene where Joaquin Phoenix (in tights!) shoots cannons at Egypt’s Pyramids. Which never happened.

Scott defended himself thus: ‘I don’t think it’s a history lesson. I think it’s a character study with violence, with action, with everything you got. I think you got everything in that.’ Sure it’s only a bit of entertainment, I suppose.

One of my favourite historical films is Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins, which I enjoy every Christmas for its often camp portrayal of a torrid time in Irish history. I’m only it for the irony really and the great storytelling. Not to mention a belter of a soundtrack. I am reminded, though, that on its release, my grandfather walked out of the cinema halfway through because of how they were misrepresenting De Valera. I guess one generation’s tongue-in-cheek entertainment can be downright offensive to another, who have a far deeper personal connection with the characters and politics of the era.

Still, it’s been quite a while since Napoleon pranced his way, murderously, across the continent, so perhaps the passing of time allows for a bit more artistic licence. Napoleon still causes controversy in his native France of course, even amongst historians. His detractors say he was a megalomaniac dictator who left a trail of over two million dead across Europe. His defenders say he merely fought wars started by enemies of the revolution, then defended France against coalitions of European enemies.

You could pop a cup of tea in his hand and call him Cromwell, by the sounds of it!

Seeing red over squirrel

AS Joyce once wrote – ‘history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’. This sentiment was still in evidence earlier this week when DUP MP Jim Shannon raised eyebrows in the United Kingdom, as well as in the wider animal kingdom when he called grey squirrels the ‘Hamas of the squirrel world’ during a parliamentary debate. Shannon railed against the presence of grey squirrels, which have almost totally outbred Britain’s native red squirrels since being introduced from North America in the 1800s.

We have the same problem here in Ireland, of course, although the reintroduction of the pine marten here is helping the little red lads. Poor old Jim. Thankfully, there is nothing analogous at all in the red v grey squirrel situation and the history of Northern Ireland.

Native species being usurped by another crowd introduced by the Brits hundreds of years ago, without anybody thinking about the consequences? Nope, nothing to see here, move on.