Editorial /Winter 2007

A determination not to be deceived by appearances is essential for understanding contemporary Ireland and for remembering how much our past remains present in our lives. Current commentary portrays us as fast moving and centered only on the present. We are said to be heedless of religious values, which we are replacing with ecological concerns, so our Christian tradition is seen as mutating into Green issues, with which it is, in fact, quite compatible.

Interpreting the Irish past solely in economic terms omits two of the most fundamental aspects of the daily life of our ancestors: abiding religious faith and a constant fear of disease and death. The religious beliefs of our forebears are commonly treated as an addendum in history, but they were an essential part of life. The inevitability of disease and death shaped the thinking of previous generations to an incalculable degree, but we tend to think that all illness can be cured in a society that is happier ignoring death, whilst encouraging self-indulgence.

The Green viewpoint is a very helpful corrective to some of current thinking and asks us, for example, to explain how we could encourage extensive building of new housing estates in towns where there is an inadequate water supply or how the prospect of a few decades of local employment could facilitate the giving of drilling licences that permit foreign companies to repatriate a very high percentage of their profits.

The business model is impoverishing when applied to health care or to university education. ‘Centres of Excellence’ is a term that emerged in formulating British university reform in the 1980s and is now used for health care reform. In health care, the result can be impersonal facilities, lacking local roots. No amount of talk about ‘excellence’ in the universities can mask the declining standards amongst undergraduates, a decline which is not limited to any one institution or field.

Lack of a sense of the past and an appreciation of it can produce some bizarre viewpoints, as when some staff members in a third-level institution expressed a wish that the role of a religious order, which helped to found it, should be omitted from its history.

The decline in church attendance and in the prominence of clergy as nationally recognised figures is treated as proof of modernity, but little is said about the decline of the Left in Irish life. Some of us are old enough to remember the promise that “The Seventies will be Socialist”, but they were, in fact, one more step in the continued triumph of middle class values in the Republic, which was reinforced by a determination not to be affected by events in the North. An impressive statue of James Connolly does indeed face Liberty Hall in Dublin, but it is placed on one of the busiest street corners in the city, so thousands of people pass it every hour, but few have time to notice it; thus an outstanding and original figure in Irish history is honoured – and ignored.

Irish self-definition is a project that began at least five centuries ago and never ceases. There are plenty of incongruities, such as declaring a love for the Irish language, whilst rarely speaking it. We would, however, be very unwise if our planning ignored old traditions and local memory. The sudden reappearance of “industrial action” in Irish news bulletins is a sign of how our past continues to be present.