I hate those awful new ‘words’ which are now being coined almost by the day, it seems. They usually start with one of the tabloids and, before long, the alleged words become part of the normal everyday language in common use.

For instance, what demented sub-editor on speed came up with the word ‘Crimbo’ for Christmas? Now I know that very often sub-editors need a shortened version of a word like Christmas so that it will fit into a newspaper heading . . . but there was a very old ‘Xmas’ in existence.

The same guys invented ‘Corrie’ for Coronation Street . . . and I know I’m not alone in these ‘pet hates’ because a long-time friend of mine in the newspaper business has always verged on violence when he encounters the word ‘Xmas’ for the first time in any given year. Consequently, I always tried to get it into my copy not later than the month of October and waited for the torrent of abuse!

Reason I begin like this on a totally unrelated topic is that I decided this year that – being patriotic – I would take my holidays at home. Thus, it appears, I became one of the ‘Staycation’ crowd who spent time around the country in relatively decent weather, as distinct from ducking under a giant umbrella to avoid slowly cooking on a beach somewhere abroad.

And, as I drove through the new tunnel under the Shannon, it occurred to me that, when many other memories of The Celtic Tiger years have died away, the so-called ‘prosperous years’ will be remembered for probably two things – banks which beggared whole generations with dicey loans to developers, and a system of roads and motorways that may yet be part of our economic salvation.

There are any number of other memorials to ‘the good years’ dotted all around the country. Many of them, however, are doleful affairs that seem like they were caught in a time warp and have stood there as a sort of mute testimony to a collective loss of commonsense fuelled by rocketing property values.

For instance, there is hardly a town worth the name that does not have what I call a ’glass and chrome cathedral’ to the automobile, built in the years when new cars sold in their tens of thousands.
These ‘cathedrals’ are now empty mementos of the days when you were no one if you didn’t have a new car . . . or better still, two of the darn things!

Other sad memorials also dot the skyline in cities and out-of-the-way distinctly rural areas which can be hundreds of metres, or indeed a few kilometres, away from the nearest town. They are the completed, or half-completed, housing estates which make up just some of the 300,000 unoccupied homes built in the boom, and now exposed to the weather.

They say that there are two things which deteriorate without human contact – people and houses! And what a sad sight these abandoned estates make . . . many of them without roads, sewerage systems, lighting, and, most importantly, without families in the houses. Maybe the sadder ones are the half-completed estates with families living in some of the houses.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.