There is growing concern in Ireland that "we are becoming cash rich and culturally poor", the ninth Ceifin conference was told in Ennis, Co Clare, yesterday.
In opening remarks Fr Harry Bohan, chairman of the Ceifin Centre for Values-led Change, quoted Vaclav Havel.
"Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble."
The theme of this year's conference is "Freedom, licence or liberty? Engaging with a transforming Ireland." In her address to the conference psychotherapist Janet Murray, director of the Tivoli Institute, said "there is evidence in our culture of a very deep unease." As an illustration she noted that per capita alcohol consumption in Ireland was the highest "of almost any advanced culture". In addition, research abroad had established that Irish emigrant groups had far higher rates of depression, schizophrenia and addiction anxiety disorders than was found in indigenous populations or other emigrant groups in those countries.
"Binge drinking on our scale is not the celebration it appears but has always been a sign of deep unhappiness. Binge drinking on our scale and at our pace is not a party. Quite the contrary, it's more like a wake, and our society is potentially the corpse," she said.
What was most striking about all of this was "our refusal, collectively, to explore the real psychological roots of this long-standing distressed and distressing behaviour," she said. As an example she pointed to coverage last January of a report by the expert group on mental health in Ireland, set up by the Department of Health and Children, and published after two years' work.
It was given "derisory coverage in the newspapers and other media. In The Irish Times it got three column inches on page seven for just one day," she said.
RTÉ's crime correspondent Paul Reynolds told the conference that "the fear of crime in this country today is not justified by the statistics". He said that in New York or South Africa there could be as many as 50 murders in a night, while in Ireland it was likely to be 50 in a year.
But, he noted, that "in Ireland we have a different attitude to serious crime", with media coverage of incidents which would not even be reported were they to happen in other countries. He attributed this to a universal Irish belief that human life was sacred.
He recalled that whereas there was a steady increase in serious crime in Ireland, this was not dramatic. "In 1995 there were 51 homicides [murder and manslaughter]. In 2005 there were 58. In 1999 it was 36," he said. He believed drugs were the greatest contributor to crime in Ireland today, and increasingly the gangs and guns associated.
These gangs, which were young, volatile, dangerous, well-armed and dulled by drugs, "have no compunctions about killing people", he said.