Sir, – Desmond Fennell laments the loss of the idea of the Irish nation as “ancient, Gaelic, Catholic and rural”, which he believes “united and empowered us” (Opinion, January 25th). As an Irish Presbyterian and a public servant with a life-long commitment to educating this nation’s young people, and empowering them linguistically to be citizens who can engage with the wider world, I don’t know whether I should cry or just laugh at this nostalgia for a past that never was. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – Desmond Fennell (Opinion, January 25th) has done the nation a considerable service in raising issues about us, our attitudes and our values. His assessment of the state of the nation is timely and valuable.
Can I urge that The Irish Times take up his theme and provoke us all into thinking about who we are and what we want for our country, in much the same way as was done in your 2010 series on “Renewing the Republic” and in your more recent articles about the penal system.
Such “provocation” should be welcomed: we all need to check our bearings now and again and to make sure that we are on a right course. This is every citizen’s business, duty even. We cannot expect our nation to flourish if we presume that somehow it will run itself. The price of democracy is that the people will take a keen and active interest in their country, and the price of indifference is failure. It is worth remembering, that in the cradle of democracy that was ancient Greece, those who did not take an active interest in civic affairs were called “idiotes” – they were the people who couldn’t be bothered, the idiots.
It seems appropriate now to ask whether, and to what extent, our failure as a people to ask the right questions and demand answers, especially during the boom years, paved the way for the recession that has condemned so many of our people to poverty, misery and the curse of emigration.
What kind of questions should we be asking ourselves at this stage?
Shouldn’t we ask whether we can be bothered, whether we care – about justice, about the elderly, the unemployed and the children – whether we really believe in integrity, whether we believe in ourselves, whether we see a future, what it is like and what we are prepared to do for it.
And we should ask too about that other defining aspect that Dr Fennell mentioned: our culture, how we express ourselves in music, literature and the visual arts, and what those things say for us and about us.
The future really is ours. What do we want it to be? – Yours etc.