But if I had been dogged enough, I would have said, last Monday night, that there was something weirdly old-fashioned about sitting around discussing the building of a metro to Dublin airport. We are coming to our infrastructure very late. The metros the Irish are used to are the London underground and the New York subway, and they've been around for more than a hundred years. A hundred years ago, there seemed to be an endless amount of fossil fuel in the world. But it was not endless, and this world, the one the sponsoring minister, Martin Cullen, was talking about on Q&A, is different. There really will be an energy crisis.

In a way, I don't feel that fact particularly keenly, because I have a vague belief that humankind is so ingenious that something like nuclear energy will eventually replace fossil fuel. But it'll replace it where it can, and the proposed Dublin airport metro won't be somewhere it can. I do realise, though, a crisis is coming down the turnpike, and we don't know what speed it is moving at, and I do realise that the metro may replace so many car journeys that there'll be an overall saving of energy. But I'd like to see the options the government is working with. It strikes me as strangely out of touch that the panel harped on the question of how much the thing will cost, and didn't even enquire about supplies of affordable energy.

And isn't there a question about the environmental implications of the metro's purpose? It is there to serve the airport which will soon . . . unless Michael O'Leary, like Samson, manages to pull everything down on top of everybody . . .

be disgorging millions of passengers from thousands of flights.

This expansion is happening at the same time as some individuals are becoming worried and guilty about flying for pleasure, rather than from necessity. It really is the case that the carbon emissions from airplanes make a substantial contribution to global warming. And it really is the case that global warming is changing the planet and threatening its stability. More and more people try to pay for the damage caused by their flights by contributing to, for example, the planting of trees which mop up toxic emissions. This is still very much a minority attitude, but then so was anti-cigarette smoking once a minority attitude. So was anti-hitting children once a minority attitude.

It is always worth bearing in mind that we didn't invite anyone to govern us. They proposed themselves. We are entitled to ask people who spend the state's money to be more far-seeing than the rest of us. It is not that they can come up with answers we can't come up with . . . Martin Cullen doesn't know, any more than I do, whether something on the lines of tidal power will turn up when the oil runs out. But he has advisers and consultants. He's supposed to persuade us that he has some kind of plan B that addresses the fact that the future will be different from the present.

I don't know the age profile of the average Fianna Fail voter, but if the party wants the young to flock on board, it will have to raise its planetary consciousness. It will have to show that it thinks in a wide way about the implications for the planet of what it does . . . for example, the implications of its turning over much of the agricultural land of Ireland, in one decade, to developers and builders. But you'd never guess, listening to Martin Cullen talking about the metro . . . the biggest infrastructural project in the history of the country . . . that we do in fact live on a planet.

Fianna Fail gives the impression of being the political equivalent of a pre-modern man or woman who has never woken up to certain dominant issues of the contemporary world and thinks that anything that begins with an 'e' . . .

environment, ecology, ethical-survival strategies . . . is nonsense spouted by 'hippies'. A pre-modern person with an oldstyle belief in progress through technology.

Look at Bertie and his contempt for us marking our ballot papers with our stupid oul pencils. Oul pencils, as long as they're lead-free, are remarkably environmentally friendly. Not to mention that they work, which electronic voting machines . . . at least, Dick Roche's voting machines . . . do not.

In fact, if I were a Fianna Fail strategist and wanted the party to stay in power for ever, which I presume is what they do want, I'd take my eye off Sinn Fein, which is nearly as old-fashioned as Fianna Fail. On the metro and similar issues, I'd watch what the Greens are saying and try to learn their language. They're the nearest we've got to where the future will be.