We lost Shane and we lost Sinéad. I think we lost our humanity too.

The things that have been happening in Palestine are sickening. No matter how bad the conflict ever got here, it never ever plummeted to those depths.

And that’s where we are as we enter 2024 – a world at so much war, it’s not far from World War 3.

But for all that, maybe we should try and end things positively. There was also a lot of good stuff about 2023.

In some ways, it hasn’t been the worst of them, in a decade that started off horribly.

There is still some humanity in the world.

I mean, back in those half-forgotten pandemic days, who’d have ever thought that Fermanagh would go viral because of its social scene?

And that’s what has happened thanks to the brilliant advert created by Charlie’s in the heart of Enniskillen, the heart of Fermanagh, the heart of the borderlands.

Now just imagine what it would or will be like on the night that the Fermanagh GAA team finally win the Ulster Championship.

But 2023 wasn’t that year – just like every year of my entire lifetime hasn’t quite been that year.

We just always seem to hit the wrong moments at the right time. We are the Mayo of Ulster.

Being a Lakeland county, we would of course automatically win an All-Ireland when it came to boats.

And if there is anything that has dominated the news headlines across the water in 2023, it is boats.

Endless boats, apparently – lots of nasty, unscrupulous people coming to take over England, according to Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman.

I am a fiction writer in my spare time (though maybe as bad at that as Suella is at politics), but I really couldn’t make up such nonsense as this.

Nobody wants to be a refugee. Nobody wants to be a Daily Mail headline.

But thankfully, refugee boats weren’t the only headlines. We also saw the rise of Intelligent AI, which seems to be a dangerous thing in the hands of such a silly species.

At this point, may I also thank CHAT GPT for writing the article!

Meanwhile, back in the serious world, we had the continuance of the Ukrainian conflict. And as the United States are continually reminding us, it is a terrible thing to see a despotic nation causing such wanton destruction.

Totally agree. But if only such standards were applied universally. If dear old CHAT GPT spoke about Ukraine and Palestine in the same way as the Americans do, we would think the software was seriously malfunctioning because it is contradicting itself with every sentence and every utterance.

Then again, 2023 seems to be the year of contradiction, because in politics as a whole, so many people and parties seem to be making it up as they go along.

For that, I lay the blame largely at the claws of social media. Everybody says what they think will be most popular thing in the moment, but then the moment passes, and the digital footprint remains.

Then again, haven’t we all been there on a Saturday night out in the likes of Charlie’s, as mentioned at the start?

I suppose though, going back to local reference points, that for me has been what this year has been all about.

Although I live mostly in London, I bought a house in Fermanagh because of wanting that option of having a base back home in a time when England, to my mind, is drifting to the Right.

Unfortunately, Ireland seems to be drifting towards the Right as well – but not in Fermanagh, where an impressive emphasis on social justice is happening.

That’s really exemplified by the work that institutions such as The Impartial Reporter are doing around facing the challenges of addressing everyday poverty.

I don’t think 2023 offered any quick-fix solutions to this. Indeed, I don’t think that in the grand scheme of things, 2023 will stand out as an amazing year.

Maybe it will be one that just added to existing problems, but it had a lot to compete with in the 2020s, thanks to Covid-19 opening the decade.

I have no idea where 2024 will take us. I just know that unless there’s political change in both Britain and the Republic of Ireland in the coming year, these islands are going to hit a breaking point.

Maybe to some extent they are already approaching that with the amount of public sector strikes that we are seeing in recent times, even in the buses running to Belfast.

But to end on a positive note, I think 2023 has also been a year when people are beginning to expect a better deal not just for themselves, but for the world.

Everybody’s getting tired of poverty and inequity, and the rampant capitalism that bizarrely unifies Ireland in the grip of a society for the few, not the many.

People want change, and I think 2024 will bring that change – a Labour government in the UK, and a Sinn Féin-led coalition in the Republic.

Whether or not either option finds solutions to the big issues remains to be seen.

Maybe a year from now, we will have a better sense of the answers. In 2025!

2025? Not so long ago we were planning to party like it was 1999.

Paul Breen is @CharltonMen on Twitter/X.