Time to dream it all up again

Two weeks ago, members of the great and good of this country gathered in Charlottesville in Virginia in the United States. They were there for a four-day conference entitled ‘Reimagining Ireland’, held under the aegis of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Those attending included figures from the arts, politics, education (higher education only, I’d guess) and, of course, journalism, that is to say, the new church. It was a reflective re-envisioning of Ireland, and it included figures from both Ireland and Northern Ireland.

I was not there, nor – I’m guessing here – were you. But the President was. And she delivered a keynote speech in which she reflected on the changes that are happening in Ireland. It was a useful if predictable view – a lot of sentences beginning with “who could have imagined…”

Like, who could have imagined the growth of Gaelscoileanna, even in Northern Ireland, or our recent cultural exuberance and technological sophistication. And her speech was certainly notable in pointing out that many Irish people had been unable to benefit from the success story that other countries wanted to emulate.

However, the bit of her speech that grabbed the headlines was the one in which she launched an attack on the “dark side” of Irish conviviality. By this she meant “the stupid, wasteful abuse of alcohol and its first cousin – abuse of drugs”. In her view, “they chart a course of misery and malaise so utterly unnecessary that we need to re-imagine an Ireland grown intolerant of behaviour which it has benignly overlooked for too long”.

The usual reactionaries and moralists agreed with alacrity, applauding her sentiments and saying it’s about time somebody said it. There was some dissent at the conference itself, with Micheál O Súilleabháin commenting that she was walking a thin line between truth and stereotype, and Roddy Doyle noting the hysteria that attended discussion of alcohol in Irish society.

Whatever about that, the dark side is an interesting proposition, especially given the audience she was addressing. In the arts – in literature, music, the visual arts, in theatre, in poetry – how do you create without darkness and light?

What do you get if you dispense with the dark side? The light side? What does she envisage for the New Ireland? Switzerland? Luxembourg? Saskatchewan? Utah? A place where the craic is blacked?

But back in the real world that the rest of us must live in, things don’t work. Farming is in crisis, the health service is collapsing, housing is out of many people’s range of possibility, and prices are still rising faster here than anywhere else. We have rising unemployment and a strong probability that our low competitiveness will cost us thousands of jobs. Our roads are overcrowded and in many places deliberately impassable and our rail system scarcely functions.

Offered a choice, most of us would prefer to reimagine Ireland as a place where these things function. We don’t want or need über-efficiency. We just want a health service that works, roads that aren’t potholed and are reasonably passable, you know, systems that make sense.

Instead, if you listen to Government spokespersons, and indeed many Opposition politicians too, we are lurching towards a virtual police state. The general view, as articulated by Government politicians, securocrats and public health mullahs, seems to be that we can’t be trusted with money, drink or cars.

The prevailing culture is to get tough on any kind of offending behaviour. Severe restrictions are actively being contemplated on our rights and freedoms (for example to information in the form of advertising). People who are old enough to have first voted five years ago and more may have to carry identity cards in order to get a drink, motorists can be breathalysed at random and there will be cameras everywhere…

But you don’t hear the same people talking about getting tough on themselves, you don’t hear them talking of taking responsibility for the stupid and wasteful decisions they have taken. And I do mean ‘them’ and not us. When politicians want to deflect criticism, they say ‘we’, meaning all of us. When they want to pat their own backs, they say ‘I’. Well, the mess is theirs, not ours. But we’ll have to clean up. And we’ll have to pay.

And things are little better in Northern Ireland. There, we hear appalling accounts of collusion by the intelligence services in murders, we have the peace process in tatters and we have a dinosaur insulting the Foreign Minister of this State on the basis of his lips being thick.

This is not how I re-imagine Ireland. This is not how I see the Ireland of the 21st century, cold and overbearing and governed by pedantic, self-righteous authority figures.

No, I envisage a society, a culture, one characterised by freedom of thought and expression, one that is fundamentally confident, always enquiring and constantly evolving.

I also envisage an Ireland where there is peace, prosperity and adequate affordable housing. And an espresso costs the same as in Madrid.

I could go on, but you get the picture. And in this, drink and drugs are a feature we have to look at. But the answers might not be those envisaged by the great and good.