Sense of pride must be restored
Sunday May 30 2010
The relentless onslaught of a two-year recession has brought misery to tens of thousands of families and has knocked the confidence from this country, but it need not strip away our pride. Ireland should be proud of what it has achieved over the past 15 years of momentous change.
For most of the economic boom that became known as the Celtic Tiger, Ireland's growth was real, not illusory. The economy was built by entrepreneurial spirit, work ethic, enlightened reductions in income and corporation tax and a new-found sense of purpose and confidence.
The latter years of the boom, which were stoked by excessive property speculation on the back of recklessly loaned money, were a far cry from the innovation and imagination that marked the Nineties and the early Noughties, and they must not be allowed to eradicate from memory all that was good about our economic coming of age.
That same sense of pride needs to be found within our communities and our own individual lives. The boom years coincided with an explosion in the so-called "rights agenda" which championed every citizens "right" to everything imaginable.
The agenda was rooted in good faith -- Ireland's past is littered with horrendous abuse and violations of basic human rights -- but it soon spiralled out of control. Society is now weakened by an obsession with rights and an abrogation of responsibilities. Too many people expect the State or its agencies to sort out problems that they themselves would have taken responsibility for just a generation earlier.
The streets of our cities and the ditches of our rural roads are filled with rubbish, cast carelessly aside by people who expect others to clear up after them or, even worse, deliberately dumped to avoid bin charges. Public order is a phrase that resonates from a different era. At night, and sometimes by day, the streets of our cities are hostile places for people who just want to walk them.
Public drunkenness is commonplace and is accompanied by acts of aggression and indecency: grown men urinate openly in the streets, men and women brawl, violence against strangers increases and Ireland's rate of serious crimes grows year by year. Law-abiding citizens shuffle by, turning the other cheek and hoping that no one notices them. Our descent is not recent.
During the Tiger years it was common to blame Ireland's ills on greed or success or both, to claim that the price of prosperity was Ireland's soul. Yet the years of recession have shown that indifference to others is not a trait exclusive to times of prosperity. The problem is one of balancing rights with responsibilities, not with economic success or failure. Our recovery must start from the ground up, with individual communities determining to retake control of their streets, their neighbourhoods and their lives. We are each responsible for where we live, for what happens around us and for those who live near us. Above all, we have a responsibility to each other. We can expect the State to clear the rubbish from the streets, but if it does not, then we can choose to do something about it (organising locally to clear up an area) or we can sit back and moan about the failure of the State while the rubbish piles higher. We can talk about our rights, or we can meet our responsibilities.
Pride will play an essential part in our national recovery because the effort required from everyone is immense: there will be more sacrifices, more pain, more spending cuts and more tax increases, but we must face them with equanimity. And while we face those challenges, we can start the process of rebuilding our communities and rediscovering our sense of purpose and place.
From all the hardship of recession this country can emerge stronger, prouder and more resilient, retaining all the best qualities that contributed to the first boom while shedding the debilitating effects of the rights-mentality.
Originally published in
