There’s a recession, we’re tearing ourselves apart over women’s bodies, and we’re being told ‘just two will do’ if we want to drink and drive. You’re probably sick of hearing about the first two so let’s think about the drink stuff.
In case you’re too young to remember, ‘just two will do’ was actually a Garda Drink-Drive campaign in the 1980s. Really. The cops just gave up and said ‘ah sure, go ahead, drink a bit, you’ll be fine’. Thankfully society has matured and we all know that drinking impairs anything we do. No more boozy lunches before heading back to work. No more drink driving. It works and it saves lives not just in Ireland but throughout the world.
But we’re Irish. We’re not like the rest of the world. If we live in the country, we’re not even like ‘that lot’ in the city. We duck, we dive, we want ‘characters’ who tell us these things are all ok because we’re not city folk. The same city folk want to ‘civilize’ us and take away all our ‘ways’.
The Healy-Reas live off this image. In their flat caps, they portray themselves as voices of the down-trodden simple folk of South Kerry while simultaneously have their finger in every pie where they live. There is nothing wrong with owning businesses and they have a right to make a living.
Ireland is a country of just over 4 million people. You or I could name a list of cities throughout the world that are larger. These cities all have their own identities and are also part of a single, larger society. Call it civic or national pride. In Ireland, this kind of pride seems to have been twisted. We love to call ourselves Irish but when that means obeying laws, then some of us want to see how we can get around them. We need fixers. We need people to say ‘ah that’s Dublin for ye’. The Healy-Reas, among others, step up and fill this need. Serious questions like how we spend money, how we create a society, how we may have blown the boom, are morphed into a great bit of tarmac road our fixers got for us. Fixers might even start showing concern for real issues like Danny’s concern about rural isolation but the solution suits the fixer rather than addressing the issue.
As we run headlong towards 2016 and all that, wouldn’t it be nice if we grew up a bit and acknowledge that we’ve gained rights but now it’s time to show some responsibility in how we practise these? Let’s debate issues as a single society rather than trying to see it as something that will impinge on our ‘ways’. Then we might be able to hang up our collective tweed cap!
