This article first appeared in the Sunday Tribune on 8 January 2006, on the cover of the Tribune2 section. For the moment I’m just going to post the text; I may add embedded links later to some of the material I drew from to imagine the day in 2016.

Arts
What will we be in 2016?

“Can you see, Pearse?” asked Seamus, settling the six-year on his shoulders in the crowd lining O’Connell Street. Father and son had risen at dawn, taken the lift forty storeys down to the street and strolled through the glass-and-steel canyons of Poolbeg City, crossing the Liffey at the Sean O’Casey Bridge where, on the other side, the early light caught the curvilinear roof of the New Abbey Theatre – years late and twice the initial budget but which would open, finally, later today. Easter, 2016.

Seamus and his wife dreamed of a house like their parents had in Meath and Wicklow, but the average price for a semi-d in Greater Dublin was now €850,000, just slightly more than Sherry FitzGerald had predicted, and anywhere they’d actually want to live was well north of a million.

It was cold, even for March, but then it was hard to tell anymore. Seamus was only 35 but he could remember when people still actually debated climate change. In a quirk of fate, thanks to the changes in the Atlantic Oscillation, Ireland had actually grown wetter and colder, unlike the rest of Europe. Crisp snow crunched underfoot.

He sipped gingerly at a €12 cup of Starbucks, his newly-regrown tooth still a bit tender after his dentist, a Kurd and probably illegal but he was cheap, put in the implant last week. His wife, Aoife, wasn’t impressed when he came back from the hurling match in Ratoath, Co Meath, missing an incisor but he felt he owed it to his old club to keep playing. So few amateurs left now.

His son started whooping along with the crowd as the boy caught sight of his hero, Sean Barry, the highest-paid player in the GAA. They’d tried a salary cap to stop the wild transfers between county-branded teams, but instead imposed a county-of-origin rule for players and had come up with a compensation method based on audience reaction. The more a player caused people on the Google Grid to watch, play interactively or buy linked goods or services (as measured by an algorithm his cousin helped design in Bangalore), the more the player received.

Barry’s near-obsidian skin, courtesy of his Guinean parents, shone in the sun with his white Kildare jersey as the captain of the champion All-Ireland footballing side led a clutch of sporting personalities down the street, walking past the entrance of one of the only Metro stations to get finished before the government abandoned Transport 21.

The smile from Ireland manager Keane (Robbie, that is) looked a bit forced; no surprise, the combined national squad hadn’t qualified for the World Cup in 14 years. People said it was Kerr’s Curse.

And there’s the Eritrean-born marathon runner – what was her name – who took Olympic gold for Ireland in London in 2012 and was expected to repeat in New Delhi this summer, leading Ireland’s first majority foreign-born Olympic squad. At least, that was what the sports bloggers were saying.

He scanned the crowd, the largest the city had ever seen. Bigger even than two years ago, when Eilis McGrath was paraded across the Greater Dublin conurbation from Bray to Carlow to Navan and to the then-under-construction GPO memorial in an open-top bus, after she became the first Irish taikonaut – now the most common word to describe a person in space. (The bus in itself notable for being the first petrol-based motor transport allowed between the canals in four years.)

Her inclusion on the space mission, in preparation for the Chinese moon landing scheduled for next year, came after NASA announced another “temporary” halt in manned spaceflight just before Aidan Murphy of Tallaght was meant to fly.

And on the VIP reviewing stand in front of the GPO stood the man who some said was responsible for McGrath’s triumphant flight, part of the controversial deal that allowed Chinese troop transports to refuel at Shannon before flying to Venezuela, Taoiseach Michael McDowell of Progressive Fine Gael.

His party had only been in existence since just before the last election. McDowell was beaming, joking with the man next to him, the familiar spectacles and beard of Gerry Adams, who’d been elected to the Aras in 2011. He left Sinn Fein a year later, when party leader Mary Lou McDonald pushed through the merger with Fianna Fail over his objections.

The Soliders of Destiny had actually been in talks to join up with Fine Gael, but FF’s backbenchers were won over by Mary Lou’s proposed referendum to take Ireland out of the EU. Anti-European feelings were running high after casualties mounted among the Irish serving with the European Rapid Reaction Force in Belarus, in their failed attempt to secure the Russian gas pipeline. Why should Irish men and women die, she thundered, for those who hadn’t followed Ireland’s example now that oil had peaked?

Even her opponents nodded at that, though the Greens sniffed that she was taking credit for their policies. Having been the kingmakers to form a government in 2007, their price was a crash programme of at-sea windmill farms and biofuels. Green leader, Tanaiste Eamon Ryan, eventually compromised and allow sugar beets with genetically-enhanced sugar content, first trialled in the Ukraine in 2005, to be the main energy crop; that kept more than twice the projected 9,000 farmers in work, which wasn’t a bad stroke politically.

And he had to reverse the party’s position and back construction of the first Irish nuclear plant. Of course the ESB built it on the French coast near Brest and sent the electricity back over an interconnector, which suited everyone. The policy combination managed to provide Ireland a measure of energy security when the rest of the developed world was in dire straits, making it remain attractive to multinationals as a stable, secure place to do business – and also made the Greens an electoral powerhouse.

Ironically, some said, it was McDowell’s speech in defence of immigration that swung the Green Party and led them, the kingmakers, to join him in coalition. Long demanded by the big multinationals as essential for continued economic growth, at the rate of 50,000 a year as the Central Statistics Office predicted in 2005, immigration was increasingly controversial as now roughly 20 percent of the island’s population of nearly 7 million had been born outside of Ireland or Britain.

Seamus looked over the sea of multi-coloured faces, from the Dublin TDs (not one representing an area between the canals born in Ireland) to Ireland’s influential top imam – the first non-Catholic head of CORI’s Justice Committee since it actually became a conference of all religious rather than simply Catholics – and felt mixed emotions. He was proud that the country had become so vibrant with different cultures, but felt uneasy. Rather than Latvians displacing Irish sailors and construction workers, as some people had worried about, immigration had turned out quite differently. Many of those who were allowed into Ireland from outside the EU were top programmers and managers from India and China – often to run Irish branches of those firms.

If there was any displacement of jobs it was at the top, not the bottom, as Seamus knew all too well. He remembered the ad campaign for David McWilliams’ first book, the Pope’s Children, with the tagline, Meet Your New Bosses. Hah. Not unless the Pope had kids in Shanghai and Calcutta. It was another issue that Mary Lou had been banging on about. And she was starting to make sense.

He wished his wife Aoife could be here. She had just Vodafoned (which became slang for mobile, like Hoover for vacuum, some years ago) him to check in from their flat. She was home with their baby daughter, Ciara, who had a fever. She reminded him that he still hadn’t signed her up for secondary school, and most of the places were already gone for her year.

The baptism was last week, a sentimental nod to his parents more than anything else. Father Tadeusz Lewandowski, known outside Poolbeg’s Polishtown as Father Tad thanks to his podcast – popular here and with the Europe-wide, English-speaking Polish diaspora – had looked bemused when Seamus mumbled along with the prayers. He hadn’t been inside a Catholic Church since his own wedding five years ago, and back then he remembered reading that the Dublin diocese was down to less than 200 priests, a third of those, immigrants.

Seamus passed the empty churches on his way this morning, those that hadn’t been sold to Starbucks when 15 of the 26 dioceses of Ireland declared bankruptcy over the last decade, having lost one of the country’s first class-action-style lawsuits, which saw the European Supreme Court overturn Ireland’s indemnity deal over clerical abuse.

Like many he felt vaguely nostalgic about Catholic Ireland, for long-gone certainties, but then he had a lot of time for nostalgia at the moment. When he wasn’t sneaking a read of Cecilia Ahern’s 15th novel from his wife’s bookshelf, he was at a FAS retraining course, since Microsoft made him redundant last year – the price of being on the losing side of the global news war.

Seamus had actually started out as an IT manager with a big consulting firm, thinking it was the one job that was secure for a good while. He kept a blog on the side, which became more than a hobby when its traffic – and his work with the Sandyford European headquarters of social networking company Friendster – got him noticed by Microsoft.

He worked on a product for Microsoft that sorted news content for internet users, hoping to compete with Google, which had made big strides in this area. In fact, by 2014, eerily close to a 2004 prediction by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, Google had merged with Amazon to form Googlezon, the global media giant.

Googlezon and Microsoft squared off in the media wars, challenged only by a lawsuit from a consortium of newspapers led by The New York Times and including The Irish Times, which charged that both companies were illegally using their content. The US Supreme Court declined to hear their case. In response, the newspapers went offline, and now were essentially mere newsletters read only by the elite and the elderly.

Most people got their customised, personalised content – hardly anyone wanted actual news – via the Googlezon Grid, available anywhere, anytime.

Because Microsoft had lost this particular war, Seamus would have to find a new job. The unions, though they had made inroads with technology workers like him, still were at a loss about what, if anything, they could do to cope with the global marketplace of which Ireland was now just a somewhat important node.

His anger didn’t extend to that of the most radical anti-moderns, like the ones who’d begun blowing up fibreoptic trunk cables to try and turn back the clock. Instead he hoped he might get a job with the new Kenny’s Books, which were opening a Dublin branch, now that high street shops were coming back, as niche luxury experiences for the elite who could afford personal service.

But Seamus wanted to be proud to be Irish – the only identity he thought he might be able to be sure of in an increasingly chaotic world – even if he wasn’t sure what that meant anymore. There on the platform in front of the GPO, the delegates had assembled for the highlight of the day’s events. The signing. Not of a treaty for Irish unity, as some had predicted and paid a heavy political price for being wrong about.

Instead, the promise of the only thing that everyone could agree on. The need for a bigger stadium to replace Croke Park.

-ends-