Sense of community eclipsed - Bohan

The Notion of community has ceased to exist in a large number of ways in contemporary Irish society, the sociologist and founder of Rural Resource Development Ltd, Father Harry Bohan, said yesterday. He was speaking on the first day of a conference about "Working Towards Balance: Our Society in the New Millennium" in Ennis, Co Clare.

Father Bohan said a serious look had to be taken at what community meant today. If people ware really serious about change, they must be organised to identify their needs and draw up plans to address rapid change.

Describing a new Applied Research Centre, Father Bohan said its guiding objective would be to contribute in a practical way to restoring balance to the economic, social, spiritual and ecological welfare of individuals, communities and corporations.

Speaking on a video link from Utah, Dr Steven Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and one of Time Magazine's 25 most influential people, told delegates: "We are living in a new environment that is more profoundly and rapidly changed than almost any of us can possibly conceive of. It is truly staggering. "

Dr Covey said the profound change was going to require a mature, intentional, carefully-thought-through leadership approach, so people were not victimised by these forces and "end up killing the goose that laid the golden egg".

In an earlier address, the author and Irish Times journalist, Mr Fintan O'Toole, said a new public morality would have to be created in the aftermath of the scandals of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

He told delegates that until the 1960s there were two powerful ethical restraints which largely stopped unethical behaviour: politics, where people were part of a social project contributing towards the building of a young State, and the restraining influence of faith in religion.

"As the old system collapsed, you had a free-for-all, a period in which people felt able to do whatever they wanted to do. What had existed were restraints, rather than a deep and fundamental sense of responsibility."

Mr O'Toole concluded: "An ethics for 21st-century Ireland will have to start at that common root of spirituality and politics, infusing a sense of public obligation into the private world of spirituality, and a sense of private communion and of spiritual grace that belong to each of us in the public world of politics."

The creation of that kind of public ethics was not going to be easy, he said. It could not be accomplished unless every part of society took a role in its creation. "Oddly enough. I am quite optimistic that we can create it," he said.