That was not a banana Dougal

Test the nation was on last night^[1] See RTE have been running a series of shows over the past week marking how Ireland has changed since 1986. Obviously the reason they chose ’86 was that is when B#4 was born, I mean what else could the reason be? Pretty random date if you ask me.

Anyways, I didn’t watch many of them, although the economics one was fun^[2] If you like predictions of doom and gloom. After all, according to all those economists the housing market is about to go bust any second now, and pretty soon we’ll all be unemployed and on the dole. A return to the dark old 80’s. Every other country that had a boom like ours has collapsed, and with personal debt averaging 130% of income^[3] it is going to be fun if, as promised, the Irish economy goes belly up.

Course, very few, if any of those economic types predicted the boom, so I don’t know if I’d trust them at all.

Anyways, I did it online and got 44 out of 70. Not too great, but sure I didn’t really pay too much attention the news and current affairs when I was 7.

But one of the “judging the mood” of the people questions they asked was “Were you on Mick McCarthy’s side or on Roy Keane’s”. In studio, 41% of people were on Mick’s side, so a majority on Roy’s. But this rose to over 80% when just the football’s fans were asked. And 60% of the Revenue people were on Mick’s. I wonder what that says? And at home, 65% were up for Roy.

Anyways, isn’t nostalgia fucking great. But at the same time, scary. Homosexuality was illegal till 1993.

And did you know that although in the 80s there were only 1,500 mobiles in Ireland, but today there are more mobiles than people, andover 9 million texts are sent every day. Every day! There are what 4 million people in Ireland? And that the ha’penny piece was legal tender till 86! Can I possibly have more sentences with exclamation marks? Maybe, just maybe.
Afterall, Roscommon did come out top! And that deserves an exclamation mark, because what else have Roscommon ever won?

But I do think that they should just do a random test the nation on trivia rather than Ireland over the past 20 years.

And while I’m talking about RTE I’ll mention the radio^[4] because last night I heard the new road safety ad. And they are really going for the shivers and emotion factor. They’ve gotten a person who has been affected personally by a road death to tell what happened. The one I heard was a fella talking about when he was home one day and there came a knock at the door and a friend and two gardaí were there. His younger brother had just been killed, but his parents were away so he had to go id the body. It took three days for his parents to make it back, by which time he had had to pick out coffins and start the whole funeral thing.

But while it is a very good ad, in that it really makes you aware of the consequences, I don’t think it’ll stop anything, because part of the problem is that no one ever thinks it’ll happen to them. Otherwise you’d never get in a car, would you?