IRISH VIEWPOINT
Let’s get our act together and put the
smile back on our Sad Tiger
IT would appear that, as a nation, we are unhappy.
“Yes,” I hear you say, “We know. We’ve seen Rip Off Republic.”
But I am talking about something more than the
irritation you feel when you pay €3 for a cappuccino - a deeper, more
existential kind of unhappiness.
The kind the experts refer to as ‘social malaise.’
We’ve been getting hints of it for some time now. ‘Are
We Forgetting Something?’ was a conference organised by Fr Harry Bohan
and others some years ago to reflect on the drift in Irish life and the
fracturing of the old sense of community. Then the ombudsman, Emily
O’Reilly lamented a culture where Gucci shoes and Prada handbags had
come to be seen as the be-all and end-all. She dared to wonder if it was
time to “tip-toe back to church.” Lately we’ve had Fianna Fáil’s
think-in in Cavan, with the Robert Putnam address about social capital
in an affluent society.
As if to emphasise our unhappy state of affairs, last
Friday saw a candlelit vigil in Dublin’s College Green to mark World
Suicide Prevention Day. GAA president Sean Kelly talked of the “danger
of losing our values... People can be forgotten too easily,” he said.
People can be forgotten. Ireland has the
second-highest rate of youth suicide in the world. In rural areas male
suicides are approximately four times higher than female suicides,
whereas in urban areas they are twice as high. To our suicide statistics
we might add the list of those who ruin or destroy their lives through
activity which is self-destructive and which may also be rooted in
psychological angst - speeding, drink driving and drug-taking.
“We may have more money, but we’re not happy,” the
Sunday Tribune told us in an editorial last weekend. “While the majority
of people have a much higher standard of living than ever before, many
clearly feel that their quality of life has deteriorated.” The newspaper
went on to list some of the more practical problems facing people -
longer working hours, longer commutes, less time with family and the
“sheer stress of the modern world.”
Only the last of those comes close to the problem.
There is a certain kind of unhappiness which more money, shorter working
days and fewer traffic bottlenecks will do little to solve. Not
everybody is affected. Many would describe themselves as content. But
this Sad Tiger story should not be treated as a silly season soundbite.
Our suicide rates alone suggest that something big needs to be put
right.
Let me suggest three or four notions that have taken
hold in our culture and which may be contributing to our unhappiness.
The first is the idea that faith is of diminishing
relevance to life.
Ireland has been through a process where the Catholic
Church and everything it stood for came to be hated or resented by
people who went on to be very influential.
The idea that faith is irrelevant is infectious. If
you don’t think it through you might come to perceive church-going as
somehow outdated and irrelevant to your needs. And there is little to
support people through the necessary thought processes. Rarely is there
any public acknowledgement that the big questions about life and human
existence, as addressed by faith, remain unanswered by science.
Nietzsche wrote that the man who has a ‘why’ to live
can cope with almost any ‘how,’ but there is no public focus on the
personal and public benefits that attach to worshipping as a community.
The animus towards the church was at least
comprehensible in that certain ecclesiastical persons had overplayed
their political and cultural hand at a certain stage of our history. But
the rejection of the associated ‘baggage’ of the Church, ie, its vision
for community living and family life, is less easy to understand because
much of it makes practical sense and doesn’t need particular faith to
justify it. Yet the notion that the family is some kind of artificial
social construct, with no one form of it better than another, is now
widespread.
This is the second negative idea. We now view certain
lifestyle patterns as inevitable. No wonder we’re depressed, if we think
that children are forever doomed to be deprived of a full-time parent in
the home, or put into childcare of varying degrees of quality, and
perhaps even pampered by guilt-ridden parents (who lack the time and the
energy to socialise their infants fully) as a result.
The search for positive ideas about family and faith
will demand a lot from the church, and from universities and research
institutes. Archbishop Diarmuid Martin recently took the lead by
appointing Dr Marie Murray, director of psychology at St Vincent’s
Hospital, Fairview, to examine how the church can support families and
what new structures are needed.
The third negative notion is that it is legitimate to
put your short-term needs ahead of other people’s basic welfare. When
this idea becomes current in society, you also find it reflected at
state level. A good example is the Government’s decision to renege on
its original promise to give 0.7 % of our annual gross domestic product
to international aid by 2007. Has anyone heard a good reason why the
Government cannot meet this commitment? Have you heard what essential
services we won’t be able to afford for ourselves? The fourth idea comes
from the therapeutic culture. It has to do with not facing up to the
tougher realities of life. For example, we may not say that a person
‘committed’ suicide because the word ‘commit’ might give offence.
College chaplain David Keating recently wrote how
Irish suicide funerals used to be quiet and guilt-ridden affairs, but
today they are large and well-attended. You have “huge outpourings of
grief, emotion and tactile affection,” he wrote. Certainly, we should be
glad that recent years have brought more awareness both of God’s mercy
and a bereaved family’s needs.
Keating’s question, however, is whether the positive
vibes now to be felt at a suicide funeral could motivate others to
commit a ‘copycat’ suicide. There is another question - does all this
cosseting make us feel any better or does it encourage a flight from
personal responsibility and mature membership of the human community?
The last contributor to our unhappiness is the idea
that we are not in control of events around us. Take the issue of rising
house prices, or internet pornography. We are led to believe that
greater external forces prevent us from taking action. Rising house
prices have put extraordinary pressure on couples. Yet the needs of the
economy - at least as seen by the likes of IBEC and the building
industry - have prevented the necessary correctives.
Internet pornography is an enormous industry, which
exploits women, undermines the relationship between men and women and
sends a dysfunctional message to young people. But some vague notion
that ‘censorship is bad,’ or that you can’t police the internet, is
allowed to dictate our inaction.
The answer involves recognising that these issues are
not beyond our control, and it is not only the fault of our political
leadership that nothing is done about them. Good citizenship is required
of everyone. Only if more of us become ready to think in a moral and
principled way will we find solutions to the problems that trouble our
minds and our times.
Rónán Mullen
14 September 2005
http://www.examiner.ie/pport/web/opinion/Full_Story/did-sgzbUOn-o0AhUsglO-LCk0lQvU.asp
