Last year at a Christmas gathering, a merry soul grabbed this guest’s arm and wondered why the media are such unmerciful joy killers. Just as he was doing a practice run with the new cocktail blender that day, he protested, he was suddenly confronted with scenes of slaughter in Ukraine or Gaza or Sudan.
Instead of excitement about finding the Triple Sec at the back of a cupboard or dicing Brussels sprouts into an unrecognisable mound of butter, bacon and green bits, the mean old media bristles with warnings about financial, psychological, addiction and gastrointestinal meltdowns. Articles about grasping consumerism, domestic violence and bacteria-ridden turkeys sit alongside advice on how to handle your Christmas-wrecking granny.
What happened to, like, joy to the world, he wailed? I pointed him to pictures of the moving crib in Parnell Square and to angelic little ones singing “Away in a Manger” and suggested he focus on the immediate joys of a lovely clove-scented hot whiskey and ham to dull the pain. But maybe the true answer to the dearth of unbridled joy was too bleak for a Christmas gathering. Maybe it’s just that we know too much.
A kind of innocence vanished a week before Christmas two years ago when Galway county councillor Noel Thomas declared “the inn is full” within sight of the smouldering wreckage of a proposed refugee shelter in Rosscahill. The councillor’s careful defence of the perpetrators’ right to reject foreign arrivals was one issue. The other more surprising one was the knowing reference to the nativity story (in a country that identifies as 75 per cent Christian) while comprehensively upending its central message of generosity, love and hospitality to out-of-luck strangers.
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Meanwhile, as people were planning to burn down the Rosscahill inn, the country was awash with sentimentality over the death of Shane MacGowan, an English-born son of Irish emigrants. And in all the words and wonderful music, we were reminded of how proudly we celebrated our roots, yet how deeply we had managed to bury them. In a 2020 piece, the writer Michael O’Loughlin said MacGowan had “held up a mirror to the worst parts of Irish emigration, the ones we would rather forget… There has often been an element of dismissiveness and distaste when discussing [him]”. That attitude, he said, could be explained “only in terms of an ongoing buried trauma and shame related to Irish emigration over the last century, and its consequences”. Nearly six in 10 respondents to a Sunday Independent survey that week in 2023 said they had migrants among their friends or family.
In Ukraine that year, a short flight from Ireland, Putin’s invaders erected a Christmas tree in front of the once-beautiful Mariupol Drama Theatre, where 600 people had been buried under Russian bomb strikes. They did it again this year, placing the giant tree over the spot where desperate residents once painted the word “children” in enormous letters to warn bombers that little ones were sheltering underneath. In a monstrous inversion of the Christmas story by Russia, said in 2021 to be a 67 per cent Christian country, Putin’s giant Mariupol tree now sends its celebratory sparkles over what is actually a mass grave.
Two years ago in Bethlehem, the site of the original nativity story for Christians worldwide, celebrations were cancelled and the town shrouded in silence as it mourned the dead of Gaza. Tourism, the life blood of the town, had died, leaving “no Christmas, no jobs, no work”, said Mayor Maher Canawati. Numbers in Jewish settlements annexing and surrounding it now rival the number of residents. The oldest Christian community in the world is down to 168,000 Palestinian Christians, the mayor told Pope Leo recently.
It’s reasonable to wonder why we bother calling it Christmas at all. What is the point of the school’s tender enactment of the nativity play if, instead of evoking sorrow, little Dara brings the house down as the heartless innkeeper bellowing “the inn is FULL!”? At least we can reassure ourselves that the language at official level is a little more cautious – for now, maybe.
This year on Americans’ Thanksgiving Day, Donald Trump’s department of homeland security posted the message: “This Thanksgiving, there is no room at the table for invaders”. The brutality of the language and the historical ignorance were profound.
While the Irish Government wrestles with the complexities of international obligations while controlling its borders and defence capabilities, its first duty is to consider the language in the messages it sends. We can see with our own eyes how unmitigated ignorance, hatred and dehumanisation can turn a democratic country into a polarised hellscape in just a few years.
The good news this Christmas is that Ireland ranks second in the recent 2025 Global Peace Index. It also wins a place in the top 10 for societal safety and security, with low perceptions of crime and violence. That’s the story I’ll tell the merry arm-grabber when we meet this evening.
A very happy Christmas to all the kind ones. May all the lonely ones find a hand to hold tonight.
