The protest generation of the 1950s and 1960s is now over-70 and doing it again -- teaching us how to rock
Washington, USA, 1963. Martin Luther King leads 300,000 people towards the Lincoln Memorial to change the spirit of America.
Let's do it! Joan Baez, young, beautiful, takes a breath before she soars into a song that became Ireland's anthem this week. "Deep in my heart, I do believe/We shall overcome, some day."
What spirit shifted in St Andrew's Church on Westland Row when a white-haired man prayed it from the altar? Some 1,800 people joined in, men and women sick and tired of being preached at about patriotism by corporate politicians who couldn't spell self-sacrifice without lisping.
Leadership at last, thank Zeus, for the older generation.
Some day soon, a "where were you when . . . ?" will be asked of that moment. An Ireland struggling to know who and what she is found the start of an answer in the generation almost left behind.
Did they first hear it when Baez sang? Or when The Troubles in Northern Ireland erupted after Burntollet Bridge? Think back 40 years to Ireland 1968, when a gentle revolution stirred the air. Some 70-year-olds who sang at St Andrew's were turning 30, finding their way into adulthood precisely between the 1916 anniversary celebrations and Dana's 1970 Eurovision win.
Lemass's economic plan was growing, TK Whitaker was driving a sleepy civil service towards real goals. Joe Dolan and Eileen Reed were the sexiest people in the country, O Riada was transforming traditional music -- and kids were wondering how to get the figs out of fig rolls while searching for a moustachioed icon called Jim Figgerty.
A newspaper editorial found by Diarmaid Ferriter (in his RTE radio series 'What If?') castigated UCD students for trying to ventilate its musty halls. Pampered brats with rowdy antics -- how dare they challenge the status quo?
It's a sign of time passing that until Wednesday's fee protests, the big student news was when CIE halted night-time bus services after a driver was assaulted on the Belfield line.
Back then, you had men and women such as Marian Finucane, Una Claffey, Ruairi Quinn, Gerald Barry, Donal McCarthy, the late John Feeney and more, insisting the young had a right to question the wider society and engage it. Now, the biggest issues breaking through are about whether your student card gets you a discount in designer stores or if you've an automatic entitlement to park in TCD's front square.
Other brats then were joining housing action committees or working in youth clubs where shiny new music made everyone rock. The age of vinyl was far from plastic. They got involved, not in Chantelle from Big Brother's way but in spaces of truth and commitment.
This amazing generation is doing it again, teaching us to rock. With the weird serendipity of these times, they're operating in a framework Bertie Ahern claimed he was encouraging when he invited Robert Putnam to speak to political and economic leaders about "social capital".
"Community connectedness is not just about warm fuzzy tales of civic triumph," Putnam writes in Bowling Alone. "In measurable and well-documented ways, social capital makes an enormous difference to our lives.
"Social capital refers to the institutions, relationships, and norms that shape the quality and quantity of a society's social interactions... social capital is not just the sum of the institutions which underpin a society -- it is the glue that holds them together," says the World Bank. A society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich, Putnam thinks -- and it takes longer to get things done.
The World Bank sees three key factors that enable social capital knit otherwise random economic and social threads.
Firstly, making it easier to resolve problems co-operatively so that each citizen does her or his share (people tending to either give too much or nothing, otherwise). Secondly, it greases the wheels that help communities advance smoothly and, thirdly, it grows our awareness of the many ways in which our fates are linked so that we work and trade better together.
Putnam's quote says the more people co-operate, the less costly it is to manage everyday business and social transactions. Evidence backs him up. The question, then, is how institutions take on board the message this Fifties and Sixties generation are sending. The easiest response is denial and insult.
One commentator used the word "hobble" to characterise how people walked into St Andrew's Church. In the wider cuts not being talked about, there's a blunting of agencies with the potential to question and dissent -- the Human Rights Commission, Equality Agency and Crisis Pregnancy Agency are hardly the most expensive "quangos" in the land.
You can't call that white-haired man in St Andrew's a running dog, lickspittle socialist lackey or a subject demented by Alzheimer's. He was doing his own driving, with 1,799-plus new friends including Eamon Timmons of Age Action and the fabulous Sylvia Meehan.
Hope, vision, community urged as a different version of the plastic patriotism in that Budget speech. For now, this piece is in memory of my father, Tom Ruane, Dublin and Mayo, died of old age (with MRSA) on 22 October, 2003. He'd be there.
mruane@independent.ie
