About once a month, dear reader, I troop in to Newport, Co. Tipperary, and sit down with Marie, who has been cutting my hair now for about five years. If I’m lucky, I time it just right (Wednesday mornings are usually good) so there’s no queue. The worst time is always Friday morning, when the place is full of young lads all getting the same identical chop to appeal to the young ladies at the teenage disco, or any time after the primary school closes for the day, when various fathers have been tasked with tidying up the children, which I assume is mainly a maternal scheme to get them all out of the house for an hour.
Anyway, I digress: The whole operation is generally over and done with in fewer than twenty minutes, a very reasonable €20 is forked over (including a beard and eyebrow trim) and we’re all done. It is not an unpleasant experience, because Marie is a lovely lady and I generally leave with both a very acceptable haircut and greater knowledge of local goings-on than I had before I went in.
It was with mounting horror, then, that I read the following in the Irish Independent over the weekend:
“Can I get a cut, blow-dry and a crash course in climate please?
That could be the request in salons across the country under a scheme that aims to train hairdressers and barbers to get conversations going about one of the most hair-raising issues facing humanity.
‘A Brush With Climate’ is inspired by a movement that started in Sydney, Australia when a salon owner looked to see how to use their renowned conversational skills to get chats going about solutions to the climate crisis.
Four towns are to be chosen under the pilot scheme with local hairdressers and barbers invited to become involved.
University College Cork is overseeing the project and Dr Maria Kirrane of the university’s office of sustainability said the idea was to tap into places where chat flowed naturally.”
That last line in bold (my emphasis) is the whole point, really, isn’t it? “Where chat flows naturally.”
In most normal conversations between relative strangers – or even casual acquaintances of the kind you form with your barber or hairdresser – “climate change” doesn’t come up. As I said above, I have been going to the same hairdresser for half a decade. My job is to write about politics. And yet I have no idea what Marie thinks about climate change, Donald Trump, immigration, or any other issue. For all I know, she’s a convinced people-before-profiteer. If she was, I would still get my hair cut there, so long as she didn’t decide to use our time together to attempt to recruit me.
Frankly – and I may be alone but I doubt it – I can think of few things more horrifying than having to sit there while she, or anyone else, went through an approved script of questions designed to provoke me into a conversation about climate change. That would be the opposite of “chat flowing naturally”.
Naturally, as with all terrible ideas, this one is being funded by your taxes: €63,000 of them, to be precise, allocated by Research Ireland to train hairdressers to talk to their customers about Climate Change. That is not a lot of money in the context of the national budget, but it’s still money that somebody worked hard to earn and had stripped from them in taxation.
There’s something very insidious about this: It is, after all, Government deliberately trying to recruit hairdressers as ideological agents of the state. One wonders, for example, if it will not be the duty of hairdressers to “report back” to their handlers about what the general sentiment of the public is when asked their views about agricultural methane emissions. One wonders too about the precedent: If the state can recruit hairdressers to talk to people about ideological issues that the state cares about, then why couldn’t it – for example – also recruit parents? “You get an additional 100 monthly on your children’s allowance if you make sure your child has watched Adolescence”. That sort of thing.
And of course – though this goes without saying – it is money that would only ever be spent in one direction. You won’t find the state forking over cash to pay taxi drivers to chat to their customers about immigration and crime in Dublin, that’s for sure.
I will write in personal terms here to make a larger point: As someone who writes about politics for a living, I am about as interested in these topics as any Irish person could be. But I also work from home, and we live in quite a remote area. When I go to my hairdresser, the very most I want is a normal friendly human connection where we discuss the weather (as opposed to the climate) and the local news like normal people. The idea that there’s some nitwit in UCC who wants to insert themselves into that relationship by giving my hairdresser an approved set of talking points feels oppressive by itself – but the idea that the state would actually fund that nitwit in order to make it happen feels somewhat totalitarian. There’s no escape from what Laura calls “the message” – even in the hairdressers. You’re not to be permitted a moment of respite.
Meanwhile, the cost of sending an Irish child to the United States for Scoliosis surgery is about $120,000. We’re going to spend half of that, instead, on telling your hairdresser to lecture you about climate change.
Sums up the country, really.