‘Sorry for the inconvenience, Cyprus’ just isn’t enough

If apologies generated electricity, Cyprus would have had no difficulty keeping the lights on this summer. When power cuts spread across the island recently, people were trapped in lifts, businesses were disrupted and the electricity authority’s website crashed just as everyone tried to find out what was happening. The technical problem had not been fully resolved, but alternative arrangements were found and the authority apologised “for the inconvenience caused”. Of course it did. “We apologise for any inconvenience caused” has become the universal response to everything from a temporarily closed chapel to a system failure during a wildfire. I read apologies for a living. Not officially. Officially, I cover business, finance and technology. But spend enough time reading company announcements and government statements and you begin to recognise the choreography. Something “occurs”. Nobody appears to have done it. An “unexpected technical issue” is discovered, lessons will be learned and procedures will be reviewed. The wording is usually immaculate. Responsibility is rather harder to locate. This summer offered an unusually generous selection. During the Kalo Chorio wildfire, the CyAlert emergency system failed to deliver some warnings on time, while residents in Ayia Anna said messages arrived late or not at all. The contractor blamed an “unexpected technical error” during the system’s first real emergency and apologised for the inconvenience. Asked why simulations had not identified the problem before the system was needed, the company declined to comment. “Inconvenience” is doing heroic work there. A delayed coffee is inconvenient. An evacuation warning that fails while flames approach a village belongs in a different category. The National Guard and Defence Minister Vasilis Palmas also apologised after a military exercise sparked a fire that burned 1.2 square kilometres and forced evacuations. Residents were promised compensation and tighter operating procedures. Whether those measures are delivered will decide whether the apology meant anything. A few days earlier, the Customs Department had its own unfortunate encounter with the word sorry. Its official Facebook account accidentally republished a political post featuring Archbishop Makarios and the words “the ultimate betrayal”. The post was removed and the department expressed “sincere regret” over the accidental repost, which it said may have happened while an administrator was uploading information about seized tobacco. Anyone who has accidentally liked a photograph from 2017 while investigating someone’s Instagram profile may feel a flicker of sympathy. Most of us, however, are not operating the official social media account of a government department. British television then demonstrated how a few casual words can carry decades of political baggage. An episode of Coronation Street broadcast on August 6 referred to the “Turkish” and “Greek” sides of Cyprus. Following a complaint from the National Federation of Cypriots in the UK, ITV Studios apologised because the language was “imprecise” and had upset the Cypriot community. The company said it had not intended to imply equivalence between the internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus and the territory claimed by Turkey. It also promised to alert the programme’s editorial team and avoid similar inaccuracies. The problem went beyond viewers feeling upset. Referring casually to two national “sides” turns an internationally recognised state and an entity recognised only by Turkey into apparently equal halves. For viewers with no connection to Cyprus, one line in a soap opera may become their entire understanding of the island. The words carried additional weight for a community that includes many of the 200,000 people forced from their homes in 1974 and their descendants. ITV could not remove the broadcast from every viewer’s memory, but it acknowledged the error and promised to correct its approach. Then came EXIT, the Serbian festival company that planned to participate in an event near Kyrenia castle. After criticism over the location’s political and emotional significance, it admitted that it had failed to understand how deeply the consequences of Cyprus’ division remain felt. More importantly, EXIT withdrew despite serious legal and financial consequences. It listened, admitted the mistake and accepted a cost to correct it. Good intentions are often the emergency exit of a bad apology. EXIT did not use them as one. Technology executives have also spent part of the year revisiting their more dramatic predictions. After warnings about AI wiping out entry-level office work, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman admitted in May that he had been “pretty wrong” about its short-term economic impact and was “delighted” to have been wrong about the expected jobs apocalypse. It was refreshingly direct. Silicon Valley may move quickly from predictions of mass unemployment to promises of extraordinary prosperity, but saying “I was wrong” remains considerably clearer than blaming changing market conditions. Some apologies carry a weight that sarcasm cannot touch. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer apologised in July to the mothers and children harmed by the forced adoption of an estimated 185,000 babies born to unmarried women during the decades after the Second World War. His state apology did not describe lifelong trauma as inconvenience. It placed the shame on the state and the institutions responsible, where it belonged. I am not particularly good at apologising either. My first instinct is often to explain, because explanations make mistakes feel reasonable. Usually, they are simply the part that makes the apology worse. Cyprus does not need a committee to design better apologies. We would predictably appoint its members, extend its deadline and eventually apologise for the delay. I would settle for four short sentences saying we got it wrong, this is what happened, this is what it cost, and this is what changes now.