9th May 2001
There is an energy crisis in California and I have worked out what is causing it. Repeated blackouts mean Silicon Valley shuts down, ice cream melts, traffic accidents occur because there are no traffic lights, dish washers stop mid cycle and even worse.
A couple of days ago I had two charming, intelligent American College graduates to lunch at home. After lunch, before we went back down to the Seanad, I said I had to "hang out the clothes". "To do what?" they asked, then I discovered neither had ever been involved in the ancient ritual of hanging out the clothes, always putting their wet clothes in a clothes drier. When the writer, Frank O'Connor, took his mother on holiday to Switzerland she said the climate would be great for drying clothes. Now any of you who have been to California will realise that the climate there would be even better. Their energy crisis is due to using clothes driers. I said my young friends could help me and we both learnt a lot.
How is that country going to manage to put up this ridiculous Star Wars Shield if its graduates, or certainly its women graduates, try to hang shirts on the clothes line by their collars? I won't go on with the other logistical problems they had with the rest of the wet laundry but I realised there is a niche in the American market which we Irish could fill. Now is the time for the Irish to come to their aid and send in one of our brigades known for coming to the rescue for generations.
We will have to call it a "product" because everything is a "product" nowadays even if it is a service. So we can offer a traditional Irish "product" to the Californian market. We can send over service engineers with decades of experience. Most will be female, in their fifties and sixties, with the energy and enthusiasm that we Irish bring to work abroad. (You know the way people say how lethargic we are on the home territory but work 26 hours a day in the U.S.). They will send home remittances to their rich banker, entrepreneur, go-getting children with the money they will earn from shutting down the spin driers of California. Since, apparently, no one in California hangs out the washing even with all those Pacific breezes and sun it is no wonder President Bush feels he can opt out of the Kyoto Treaty if the people of the second most populous state in America are carrying on like that.
The new "product" could go state wide after a while and if there aren't enough Irish women to become involved in this lucrative venture we will franchise it, training the numerous homeless in San Francisco first.
My college graduate friends did not have to become involved in the even more fascinating Irish ritual of running in and out to the clothes line to bring the clothes in every time there was a shower but there are possibilities for another "product" here. Our weight problems are serious but they are nothing compared to theirs. Instead of driving to the gym, Californians could save money and petrol, sorry gas, by running in and out grabbing clothes off the line every twenty minutes and then out again after folding them up half wet and then realising the rain had gone. Since there would be no rain there a little imagination would be involved.
This is a global village and people keep saying to me President Bush is not as bad as they had expected. Well, after the cancellation of America's pretty weak efforts for the Kyoto Treaty, the expansion of oil exploration everywhere, even in brother Governor Jed Bush's back yard in the Florida end of the Gulf of Mexico and Tim McVeigh's execution on television what more do they want to cheer them up?
The girls, however, were definitely what Charlie McCreevy would call pinko lefties and in America they would be called much worse They are against the death penalty. The 21st amendment to the Constitution to remove the possibility of any future Irish government ever deciding to introduce capital punishment even in time of war was before the Houses of the Oireachtas. They were as delighted as I am about this move by the Government, as I hope all of you are. This country, William Schabas, Professor of Human Rights Law in NUI Galway tells me, is probably the first in the world to put the removal of the death penalty to a public vote. Only one deputy spoke in favour of retaining it in certain circumstances but no senators did. It is to be hoped that the general public, on June 7th, gives as strong a vote.
My Americans are off back home to encourage opposition to the death penalty there and sus out the ground for the demise of the clothes dryer!
Senator Mary Henry, MD
