The Ireland that still works

Irish Post

2 days ago

THIS Ireland might be a small island on the edge of Europe.
An often wet, windy, place facing out into the Atlantic.
It's beautiful and, if you ever leave and come back you realise just how it is very, very green.
It's distinctively itself with a long cultural history.
The world is more different now though than even twenty years ago.
Due to communication advancements and technology what happens in New York happens in Newtownmountkennedy too.
For good or for bad, take your pick, we're interconnected in ways unimaginable even a decade ago.
Loud, noisy, insistent, the modern world is in rural Cork as much as it is in Chicago.
Which is why, in an increasingly tense, unstable world, even apparently slight things can take on a much larger echo.
We are, much to our detriment, becoming increasingly inured to the crass and rash things the President of the United States says.
He has clearly operated along the principle of saying the unsayable so often that it becomes everyday.
He utters the shocking thing so much that we are no longer shocked. With a world teetering on God-only-knows-what one more little cruel aside from a man dedicated to such sayings can appear utterly trivial.
It shows, though, the bar at which we now operate.
Not only that but this casual cruelty leaks everywhere now. It sets the tone.
In response to the shocking shooting dead of two politicians in Minnesota Trump was asked if he would call the Governor there to, presumably, sympathise and offer support.
This was his response. 'I think the Governor of Minnesota is so whacked out. I'm not calling him. Why would I call him? The guy doesn't have a clue. He's a mess. So I could be nice and call him. But why waste time?'
What is most disturbing about this is not that Trump would say such a thing, such an utterly cruel thing, but that we now think so little of it that it doesn't even come anywhere near a headline.
One of the enduringly fine things about Ireland is the way society works. We have problems, of course, prejudice, bigotry, we have unpleasant people, people you just want to avoid. We're not the Hollywood Ireland of smiling leprechauns and rainbows.
Ireland is a just a country like any other country. A place like every other, full of the whole gamut of humanity.
What we do have, though, is a society that works.
Yes, we have enormous housing problems, enormous health inequalities, we do a lot of things in a way that I would disagree with intensely. But on an everyday level society works.
It works because people treat each other with understanding and patience and kindness.
Of course, there are exceptions to this too but the overall impression you get from interactions in Irish society is that people are friendly and considerate.
It might sound trivial but it is the very thing that oils society along, that makes it work, that makes life pleasant. It is not trivial but essential.
In everyday discourse, for instance, people are calm and obliging.
It is not nothing. If, for instance, we conducted ourselves the way people do online, the President of the United States, for instance, who behaves like an online troll, what would that be like?
If we engaged in endless petty resentments and regurgitated vitriol and an inability to display civility even at the most extreme moments, what would that be like? Isn't that the worry?
Our culture is now so influenced by outside, technologically inspired, behaviours it has to be a concern that one of the planet's most influential men is like this.
Not so long ago teachers expressed concern about the influence of online influencers on young Irish men in particular.
What if our culture becomes open to the idea that this casual cruelty and arrogance is the way we should conduct ourselves?
Ireland's smallness and geography has shaped the country and the people.
Technology makes so much of that irrelevant.
It makes us vulnerable to things we wouldn't have imagined.
How ironic that people fear the country will be changed by the immigrant family down the road working hard for a better life but not by the loudmouths yelling awfulness through the devices they always have with them.