Both of our kids were born in the Rotunda, a few years apart, and on both occasions my wife and the baby were looked after with an unflustered care, all of it on the public system without money changing hands.

So I’ll admit a small bit of satisfaction watching the hospital’s board cave this week after a fortnight of digging in.

The row centred on consultants who’d signed public-only contracts quietly seeing private patients on the same wards, and the Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill threatening to turn off the money tap until they stopped.

The truth is, there is very little of this private activity going on, and most of it focused on one consultant’s work.

However, the higher-uppers were loath to concede in principle, fearing it would undermine their cosy two-tiered system. On Monday evening the board folded and agreed to fall in. It was a serious victory for the Minister.

Re-turn faces rejection

Every couple of weeks I perform the new modern Irish sacrament of hauling the bag of empties down to the supermarket and feeding them into the machine one at a time, like a man posting his own rubbish back to himself.

Half won’t scan because they’re dented, you get the inevitable dregs of coke or beer spilling on your hands from the ones you forgot to wash, and there’s always a fella ahead of you with a wheelie bin’s worth.

And then there are the days the machine’s full and you carry the lot home again like a sad, rejected Santa. I can’t overstate how much I hate this stupid system.

The good news, and I use the term loosely, is that researchers at UCC found nothing inside these machines that’ll kill you.

The bad news is that they did find a colony of yeasts and bacteria fermenting on the dribbles in unrinsed cans, producing the exact smell you’d expect. The science has confirmed it’s disgusting while reassuring us it’s safe.

Whatever about the physical effects, it’s the mental health effects that concern me. Having already spent a half day deciphering what does or does not go in the black, green or grey bins, this is another bloody bit of household admin to do and if anybody remembers Michael Douglas’ turn in Falling Down, it’s the small things that push a man over the edge.

It better be making a difference to the environment.

Airbnb bird watching

We were in Kerry for the weekend, staying near Beaufort. On Saturday night, a pine marten turned up at the bins outside the Airbnb and spent a happy half hour knocking the lids off like he owned the place. It was exciting, I’d never seen a pine marten in the flesh.

Although I was a little bit anxious about the mess.

I mention it because the Sunday before I’d watched Eoin Warner spend the guts of a year, with night cameras and patience, trying to get a few seconds of pine marten for Wild Conamara, the amazing two-part documentary he made with the Westport company Crossing the Line for RTÉ.

The creature that stayed with me was the freshwater pearl mussel, which the programme called one of the oldest living things in the country, able to sit in a riverbed for over a century and only where the water is clean.

Our populations of it are collapsing, and that’s the whole story in one shell. This sort of television is getting dearer and harder to fund every year and I’m so glad it’s being made. Hats off to all involved.

Now if I could only train the pine martens to bring my cans down to those cursed machines, we’ll be laughing.

Data centres drain grid

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the thing needling me all week.

The IMF’s own Finance and Development magazine ran a piece on the global scramble for the energy behind artificial intelligence, and there in the middle of it, held up as the cautionary tale to everyone else, was little old us.

Data centres in Ireland already use more than a fifth of all the electricity we generate, the highest share of any developed country.

It got so bad the Dublin grid stopped taking new connections back in 2022 unless the centre could power itself.

So here we are. We make gorgeous television about the freshwater mussel dying in our rivers, put it on the national broadcaster, all agree we have to do more to protect the natural world around us, and then concrete over another few fields for windowless sheds full of humming servers so somebody in California can ask a chatbot to write a limerick. I bloody hope we have a plan.

Not only should the owners of these data centres be obliged to fund their own green energy, they should be charged an energy tax to further boost our domestic energy grid.

As the Health Minister proved, sometimes our governments need to stand up for us and demand results.