[NYTr] Ireland: What Has Happened to Us?

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

sent by Simon McGuiness, Dublin

[In the space of 150 years Ireland has gone from the famine and destitution
to the heights of economic development. In the last 50 years we have gone
from the poorest country in Europe to one of the richest. This is economic
wealth but what of our social wealth? You can't get treatment in a hospital
if you are sick. Part of me wants the poverty back. The US embraces a value
system of a narrow-minded Christian crusader, we embrace the most vulgar of
market values... Oh! for the value system of a society based on humanity and
collectivism. The value system well established in Cuba.-Simon]

The Irish Times - Nov 6, 2004
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/newsfeatures/2004/1106/1151083613WK06EMILY.html

We drink too much, we are loutish, we've forgotten the joy of delayed
gratification and we have abandoned the church. How do we inject our
secular society with a value system?

What Has Happened to Us?

by Emily O'Reilly

Many of us recoil at the vulgar fest that is much of modern Ireland. The
rampant, unrestrained drunkenness, the brutal, random violence that
infects the smallest of our townlands and villages, the incontinent use
of foul language with no thought to place or company, the obscene
parading of obscene wealth, the debasement of our civic life, the
growing disdain of the wealthy towards the poor, the fracturing of our
community life, the God-like status given to celebrities all too often
replaced down the line with a venomous desire to attack and destroy
those who were on pedestals the week before, the creation of "reality"
TV, more destructive in its cynical filleting of the worth and wonder of
the human soul than anything George Orwell could have imagined.

But it wasn't meant to be like this, we will protest. Divorce was meant
to be for the deeply unhappy, not the mildly bored; drunkenness was
supposed to be practised by the marginalised, not the boys and girls
with cars and careers and more prospects than their granny could shake a
stick at.

More cars were supposed to help people get around, not force them to sit
in line through the full two hours of a drive-time programme at motorway
exits - motorways which, incidentally, were also supposed to help people
get around. By-passes were supposed to relieve bottlenecks, not shuffle
them to the next un-by-passed town. Portlaoise was never meant to be a
Dublin suburb.

Sunday shopping was supposed to be a convenience for the harassed
worker, not a new religion. We still haven't worked out exactly what we
thought 24-hour shopping was supposed to do, but still can't get over
that vaguely depressed feeling we experience whenever we think of shops
with lights on at 3 a.m. and, more particularly, of the people who have
to work there.

And yes, I suppose we did seek to curb the power of the church but that
didn't mean we wanted to empty the churches themselves, or reduce
seminaries and convents to advertising fodder for the property sections.
And while the nuns had their problems, it would be nice if the odd one
were still around to lecture our daughters about the evils of the micro
mini and the bared and nailed midriff, or to knock the odd hospital
consultant into shape with the menacing flutter of a wimple. And while
we greatly welcome the challenge of choosing from 179 types of coffee in
the morning, we didn't mean for Bewley's to go.

This is not just a middle-aged lament for the good old days. I may well
think Dublin's Financial Services Centre is over-endowed on the tall
skinny latte front, but it is still a hell of an improvement on what was
there before - the poverty-laced slums that were the Sheriff Street
tenement buildings.

Irish women's lives have also been transformed immeasurably over the
last 20 years; our children have opportunities unimaginable two decades
ago; luxuries denied to all but the wealthy are now available to the
masses; good political choices have been made that have broken the
poverty cycles of many families; the stultifying cosh of the Catholic
church has been removed and we at least can see ourselves in our new
spiritual nakedness.

What we have become, it seems to me, are participants at what we would
have called, in my teenage years, a free house, but this time on a
massive scale. Released from the handcuffs of mass religious obedience,
we are Dionysian in our revelry, in our testing of what we call freedom.
Hence the staggering drink consumption, the child-like showing off of
helicopters and four-wheel drives and private cinemas, the fetishising
of handbags and high heels, the inability of some to contribute to
charity without a photographer on hand to record it, the supplanting of
bog-standard childhood ailments such as measles and whooping cough with
fat-induced obesity and diabetes.

WHO OR WHAT is the real us? Were we real when we were modest in our
habits, and daily communicants, and Mass attendees, and self-effacing
contributors to charity, and energetic participants in voluntary work -
or are we real now as we either indulge in, or look enviously upon, the
phenomena I have described?

Is not the speed at which we have jettisoned so much of our religious
practice, in particular, suggestive of a society that was not so much
spiritual as spineless, cowed by the power of the church, observing what
we observed out of fear rather than faith? The challenge in the short to
medium term, I would humbly suggest, is how to accept this newly secular
society and inject it with a value system that takes the best of what we
have jettisoned and discards the worst.

Money can't buy you happiness: but if that is so patently true, why does
this modern Irish society stubbornly refuse to accept that truth?
Readers of last week's Sunday Times would have got a flavour of this
phenomenon of excess in a front page report in which a Dublin retailer
exulted in the fact that her outlet had a waiting list of 500 women in
pursuit of a handbag that retails at €5,000-plus. "It's great," opined
the retailer, "for the country." Imagine that on your obituary. "Here
lies Mrs X, fifth in line for a Birkin bag, and raging she wasn't
first."

I had an epiphany when, in the busyness of my work life last month, I
failed to notice a piece of paper in the window of my littler daughter's
classroom announcing the Junior Infants Halloween hat competition, thus
ensuring that she went to school on the appointed day with a piece of
newspaper wrapped hastily around her head while the children of the more
engaged mothers outdid Philip Treacy with their millinery.

Ella, God bless her, didn't even notice, and she walked around on the
hat parade like the late Queen Mother at Ascot, but I had still missed
out on the pleasure, that will never be repeated, of getting down on the
floor with my Junior Infant child and imagining and attempting to make a
wonderful hat. My loss. Lesson learnt.

It would be good if we recognised the new religions of sex and drink and
shopping for what they are and tiptoed back to the churches. It may not
even be necessary to believe, it may be sufficient just to remind
ourselves of some of the universal truths about charity and decency and
how to live a good life, all of which are contained in the teachings of
the major religions. It would be good to regain our sense of the magic
of ritual, of the year marked by rites and rituals, not the seamless,
joyless blending of undifferentiated weekdays. It would be nice to get
the summer over before the Christmas displays begin.

It would be good to insert ourselves into the lives of our community,
reawaken our sense of what we can contribute but also what we can
receive - the preciousness of belonging, of being caught up in something
stronger than your own individual self.

It would be good to discipline our children by disciplining ourselves,
to realise the risks of jaded appetites, of needs too quickly and too
elaborately met, of lives made too cynical, too aware through the
imposition of distorted adult views of what constitutes happiness, to
realise also that the new impoverished are not those without the DVDs
and the latest PlayStations and mobiles and the private cinemas and the
cut-down Fendi bags but those, perhaps, who have them and who have got
them without the slightest personal effort, without that peculiar joy
known as delayed gratification.

What we also need to do as a country - in love, as we are, with market
forces and consumer products - is to begin again to speak the word that
increasingly dare not speak its name in this thrusting, strutting, alpha
male society - poverty. It still exists, in the literal sense, in the
sense of individuals and families existing on bread and chips strung out
on stress and worry, their feelings of isolation and inadequacy made all
the worse by the apparently effortless garnering of wealth and decent
lifestyle by those around them. Twenty years ago, poverty was just as
nasty, but made more bearable perhaps by a cultural acceptance that it
was part of what we were. Now the term "loser", commonly used, piles
psychic pain on to the literal pain of being poor.

Poverty also exists in the spiritual sense. It exists in our failure to
date to imagine a wealthy country that strives for more than the
satisfaction of needs we never knew we had until the multinationals
created demand. Political debate is too often about personalities,
cultural debate revolves around the physical siting of a theatre rather
than the role of theatre and music and poetry in breaking down the
poverty of spirit I have referred to. Piping Mozart into the sound
systems of our junior schools, teaching marginalised adolescents how to
play a musical instrument, seeing art as central to our lives and our
spirits rather than a luxury extra accessed by the few would do much to
improve our civic life. Let's debate that and worry not about the Abbey.

THERE IS MORAL poverty; the staggeringly swift creation of a society in
which we are increasingly neutral in our judgments of all sorts of
objectively bad behaviour, be it infidelity, the abandonment of
families, loutish behaviour on the sports field or under-age sexual
behaviour. Those who indulge are, bizarrely, more likely to be feted
than condemned. Punch someone's lights out, wreck your head with Class A
drugs, and you're more likely to appear on a chat show than a court
bench.

A young female pop star comes to Dublin and puts on a graphically
sexually explicit show in front of a theatre packed with sub-teens,
brought along, incredibly, by their mothers and fathers. One commentator
described such displays as the mainstreaming of the pornographic
imagination; what was previously top shelf is now at gym-slip level.

I am conscious that little, if any, of this is new. The wealthy are
frequently vulgar and prone to showcasing what they have accumulated.
The poor really will always be with us, and human greed will triumph,
like a dodgy stock option, when the higher virtues are suffering a
slump.

So why do we even bother discussing it? Why not sit back and wait for
tides to turn, stop banging our heads against the brick walls of
smugness, complacency and massive self-satisfaction that are all around
us? The answer lies in our humanity, the belief that sometimes people
want to do better, be better, and think of people other than themselves.
The deeply heartfelt hope that our children will have better lives, and
in the context of this shiny new wealthy Ireland, that that better life
has to do not with the accumulation of stuff, but with an awareness of
the true meaning of a rich life, of a life where the pleasures of love,
of companionship, of reading, of art, of sharing one's gifts, of seeking
to attain ever higher understanding of the mysteries, beauties and even
ugliness that surround us, are really all that matter.

[This is an edited extract from the address delivered by Ombudsman and
Information Commissioner Emily O'Reilly at last Wednesday's annual
conference of Céifin, the Ennis-based research institute which promotes
discussion of changing values in society.]

(c) The Irish Times