We've crashed in the snow, and other economic metaphors

PRESENT TENSE:It seems that contagion has spread from our financial climate to climate itself, writes SHANE HEGARTY

WE MAY ALL have a vision of how the four horsemen of the apocalypse might look, but we probably never thought any of them would come in a blue RTÉ jacket, wield a microphone and pop up at random flyovers and bus stops around the country every night just after 6pm and 9pm.

Step forward RTÉ’s Dublin correspondent, John Kilraine. But step forward very carefully.

In the ongoing war on the weather he could really have gone for it and worn a thick padded coat as a snow-flak jacket. But each night he has bravely reported while hatless, when he would have been well within his rights to have sported a Paul Cunningham Peruvian Smurf affair.

But, informative, serious, unmoved by the urge to throw himself on his back and carve out a snow angel, he has become a key character in this week's chapter in the Irish Book of Revelation. A steady, unimpressed, throw-a-snowball-at-my-head-and-I-won't-flinch voice.

Over a period in which “contagion” has established itself as the word of the year, we’re at a point when it feels as if the contagion has spread from economic climate to climate itself to the general sense that we’ve hit an end point in our State’s existence that we couldn’t possibly have envisaged in those far-off days of the sunlit boom.

It also offers a neat and extended metaphor for the country’s situation that will now be dragged through this column like a kid in a crate sledge.

In a neat relay, the bailout coverage passed the baton to the weather reports, so that we went from being confused, stuck, lost, on a slippery slope, in need of a dig-out and ultimately trapped by the incompetence of those in charge to being literallyin that very situation.

It was as if the universe, having found us unable to really understand the details of the crisis we are in, decided to show us. “Okay, imagine the economy is a snow storm, and you’re stuck in your house when it hits . . .”

If you were to write a novel about the economic mess we’re in, you’d be slated for setting it against the background of a shutdown of the economy, of the country, of people’s inability to escape their properties.

It is not as if the snow has not already brought its own cliches. You could have a drinking game based on snow reports, but you’d be drunk before you turned off the radio alarm clock in the morning.

The big freeze; the big chill; the cold snap; winter tightening its grip; since records began; wintry; conditions that are inevitably treacherous; temperatures that only ever plummet. And it is always, always, “set to get worse”.

The weather has added to this being perhaps the most disconcerting year in the history of the State, and what will certainly be the most exciting episode of Reeling in the Yearsscreened in 2020.

And there has been some novelty. The lightning that came with the snow and lit up even cloudless areas of Dublin was a truly apocalyptic flourish.

There were the queues at Connolly Station on Wednesday night, with hundreds crammed down the rampway in an effort to get home/flee. (Both of these moments, as it happens, echoed scenes in Steven Spielberg's version of War of the Worlds. If Ireland has to echo something from popular culture, it's just typical of our luck that it has to be Spielberg's worst film.)

But here it is: a week-long metaphor storm. The economic climate meets the climate, with both of them gradually shutting parts of the country down and becoming a national fixation.

Meanwhile, we are so focused on what’s happening here, on the problems piling up outside our front door and about how we’re going to navigate our way to safety, that we’re hardly paying attention to the giant iceberg approaching our coast.

Our own storm will soon give way to a thaw, and it will seem as if we’ve reached an end, of sorts, to this unsettling, frightening few weeks in our State.

But in Europe another storm is growing, as confidence in the euro zone plummets to record lows.

And things we thought would only happen once hell froze over may come to pass. If this snow is our economy, then the problems of the euro zone may be the catastrophe of global warming.

When that happens, metaphors may be the only currency we can trade in. In the meantime we wander blindly through the snow, hobbled by our inadequacy in a country in which only John Kilraine seems to know what’s going on. All snow/sleet/hail our new leader.