Stories began to circulate like oil spills on the filthy floodwater. People disappearing. Not coming home. Old people. Pensioners. Grand parents. Long-loved relatives. Anyone now officially ‘excluded.’

At first these disappearances were happening elsewhere but when the wife of his old friend (and fellow Fellow) Professor Giollaiosa Ó Ruairc phoned to tell him that Gilly, as he was known, had been missing for three days Mac really began to worry.

What could Mac say? He knew where this was all going but what could he do?

Emergency Order CBI341 excluded him from taking part and this was what alarmed him the most. Overnight the country became divided between those involved and everyone else. Mac was now part of the ‘everyone else.’

Mac received a letter in the post, confirming the fact that as ‘a reward for all you have already done for your country a grateful nation now exempts you from having to take part in Operation TurnBack.’

The letter made everything sound so plausible but Mac knew the true purpose of Operation TurnBack.

‘This is how civilizations are loosed from their footings’, he said to himself. ‘Raze the past and reset.’

Everyone begin from the beginning again.

Forever more.

Amen.

Bureaucracy can be both banal and baleful at once and so the simple issuing of something as official-sounding as an Emergency Order helped lull once more an already docile nation.

As the world has learned since lessons began the trick is to convince a nation to rewrite history together. Collectively. Only personal histories are rewritten with a single pen.

And so being the nostalgic nation that it is, the country readily adopted Operation TurnBack as a charming idea.

‘We’ve been through such a lot as a nation in recent times.’

‘It is time we brought the old times back.’

‘Everyone has spent years only thinking about themselves.’

‘It is high time we thought about the country again.’

‘If only everyone could stop and think about how things used to be.’

‘If only now could be more like then.’

It was Emergency Order CBI341 that required everyone in the country aged between 16 and 60 to report to their local Polling Station and register for what the television adverts called ‘Operation TurnBack.’

According to the Order, anyone not prepared to do so would have their citizenship immediately ‘suspended’ and all income and property ‘pertaining to the individual and their family or families’ held ‘in permanent trust.’

Every hour on the hour groups of ‘ordinary’ men and women wearing blue overalls with #TurnBack stencilled on the breast pocket appeared on all available screens and enormous animated billboards that had been specially erected on every street corner.

‘It is time to take a stand,’ declared the theme tune. ‘Time to turn back Time.’

‘Operation TurnBack – Your TURN Now.’

It was while sloshing home through the flood waters that Mac heard the news.

Apparently, following an all-night session in the Dáil Éireann the government had ‘temporarily loaned’ control of the country to Crowley-Baird Inc. Mac raced back to his rooms in time for the televised address.

‘We are just not equipped as a country,’ continued the Taoiseach, ‘to confront the tasks that now face us as a nation without specialist support.’ The Taoiseach paused.

‘But let me assure you all,’ he said firmly, ‘this is only a temporary measure. I know we all know the price of freedom and its being lost.’

Unsurprisingly, everyone was convinced, everyone that was apart from Mac.