Let’s ditch or dún an béal bocht for 2025

Happy new year, dear readers. This column isn’t about to load you with recommended new year’s resolutions; but can we instead suggest that rather than seeking out all the perceived faults to our country, we all just appreciate the jug that is more than half full?

Compared to what is happening to real people like you and me around the world – in fact, compared to anything, would it not be better to dwell on our multiple blessings in this marvelous country we live in?

For a start, nobody goes hungry in Ireland – or at least, nobody needs to go hungry. Our health service is keeping more people alive than ever before. Ireland has the second highest life expectancy in the world – just behind Japan. Quality of life is second to none and despite climate change, the temperate weather enjoyed here is the envy of four-fifths of the world’s population.

During the recent elections, a series of derogatory slogans made waves with regard to how this country has been managed over the last 100 years. Have these people not seriously looked at where we have come from since a century ago? Ireland is an extraordinary story of success among the modern nations of the earth. Today we are the third wealthiest country in the world. We enjoy full employment for those who are willing or able to work. Compare the now to when a majority of children left school at 14 or 15 with hardly a job out there for any of us. We wrote here recently that four out of every seven Irish children born between 1930 and 1960 had to emigrate. That figure was inaccurate; it was five out of seven!

I have a great fear of the term ‘time for change’. It is a lazy, meaningless and dangerous plunge into the dark. Don’t anyone tell us about ‘change’ without spelling out what that change might be. Unfortunately, there may be change trust upon us; but we shall come back to that one in a moment.

Of course there are problems. This is how life is, and while we expect our government to assist the weakest in society and help those who need it the most, we cannot become reliant on a nanny state to do everything for us. Individual responsibility is rarely mentioned these days.

Yes, the state needs to make it easier for young couples to own their own homes, a longing that is inherent in us, going back to the Famine. In America or Germany, people are content to live their lives in rented accommodation – but we aren’t like that. One obvious solution to ease the problem is for the government to find a way (and a way can be found) to refurbish the hundreds of thousands of unoccupied houses around the country.

Restrictions could be eased to give sensible people a choice. If they can ease restrictions on truck drivers to lift the backlog of freight over Christmas, surely a family could be allowed to live where another family had just been reared? And not left living with parents because the accommodation doesn’t tick some box on an inspector’s form?

Sorry, I digress from our main topic… one more thing on the housing – it was never easy for somebody buying their first house; but the problem now is more to do with supply and demand and that can be fixed. Another little plus here is that my generation, the golden generation, don’t have as many children to go round on as when I was a young adult. Assets left after parents die will be divided on fewer children and that will help the next generation.

Coming back to the béal bocht; could there be any element in there of a need to feel persecuted or hard done by, due to our history? Stop it! We never had it as good as we do now. Why can’t we all just admit that fact? Forget about who has what, or what should be given to this or that; we live in a marvelous country at a wonderful time. Things are great at the moment, which again, doesn’t mean that it cannot be improved for those needing a leg up.

The greatest danger is that the change will come, and believe me, when it does come, it won’t be for the better. We are an isolated island economy, exposed to the whims of authoritarian minded politicians in powerful countries. I hope that the million of our own who inexplicably voted for change in America won’t be kept awake at night over what they did to their brothers, sisters and cousins ‘back in the old sod’.

In the meantime, forget about just having a happy new year: decide to be happy full stop… here in the best country in the world!

Don’t Forget

In the end it isn’t the words of our enemies we will remember, but the silence of our friends. (Martin Luther King)