Ice bucket challenge – an even bigger water scandal

Now that the year is well behind us, it’s safe to admit that the most annoying, infuriating and downright exasperating aspect of 2014 wasn’t the economy, water charges or even, God help us, Garth Brooks doing a Mayo at Croke Park – as in, failing to perform on the big day.

No, it was the Ice Bucket Challenge.

Yes, it was for the Irish Motor Neurone Disease Association – an excellent cause, richly deserving of all of the support we can afford to give it – and it resulted in an unplanned bonanza for a worthy charity.

But the downside was that you couldn’t open Facebook or YouTube without some other clown dousing themselves in buckets of what was supposed to be icy water and then challenging three others to repeat the dose.

I have to say that – to the best of my knowledge – I wasn’t nominated and if I was, I wouldn’t have done it anyway.

Because ice is something you put into drinks or avoid on the roads in winter time – it’s not something you lorry down your back from a bucket.

This isn’t meanness – I’ve given money to the IMNDA on many occasions and I know they provided wonderful support to two people I know who lost their lives to MND, RTE’s Colm Murray and Westmeath TD Nicky McFadden.

But it was this never-ending spectacle of people standing in their old clothes waiting for someone to give them a semblance of what Guantanamo detainees experience with water-boarding.

One after another they stood there, as though they were Padraig Pearse in Kilmainham Jail waiting to be shot. Behind them one or more of the kids got up on the garden bench and lifted the biggest saucepan of water into the air to rain down on daddy like a tsunami.

Strangely – for something called the Ice Bucket Challenge – there seemed, for the most part, to be an inexplicable absence of ice.

Most of the water looked lukewarm at worst and while pouring water over your head in anything other than a shower carries with it a certain degree of discomfort, this often seemed to be little more than a quick wash with your old clothes on.

And yet you had these volunteers bleating on about their experience as though they had fallen through a crevice on the polar ice cap, when in reality most of them had seen more ice in their last gin and tonic.

It’s been a tough year for charities on many fronts of course, so the fact that the IMNDA made somewhere north of €400,000 out of this is the upside of it all.

After the damage that the Central Remedial Clinic and Rehab did for fundraisers generally, you’d find it hard to begrudge any of these worthy organisations a few quid – but as we’re on it, I’ve no time for chuggers either.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.