Observations On Our Crazy World: Why Do We Listen To The Negative Shit?
If you were to believe the politicians, the moralists and the commentators you’d think Ireland was a horrible place to live. But it isn’t...
The Hot Press Newsdesk, 04 Sep 2012
Like most people, I know a fair few neurotics. But truth to tell, they constitute a minority of my acquaintances. You too? I thought so. But neurosis is probably the best term to use when discussing the perverse and deeply ingrained tendency in Ireland to believe the worst of oneself, one’s neighbours, one’s fellow citizens and one’s homeland.
It’s all-pervasive. “If you thought the bank collapse, the euro crisis and the mortgage arrears were bad, look at how we drink! Wouldjis look at the state of O’Connell Street!? Look at the weather! Whattabout the floods?”… and so it goes, on and on and on. There’s no rest.
Okay, Dublin’s O’Connell Street and its environs really are a mess and yes, it needs urgent attention. But the rest of it is like neurotic skin-scratching. It just increases the itch.
The current moral panic about anti-social behaviour at or around the Swedish House Mafia concert is just that, a moral panic, and takes its place as the latest arrival on the merry-go-round of Irish pessimist-narcissism.
If it was a recent phenomenon one would be more understanding, given recent history. But it isn’t. The capacity to demean oneself and the rest of us has been evident for eight generations at least. In the last issue I referred to letters from Irish emigrants to Australia in the 19th century. David Fitzpatrick, author of a paper on these, comments that many of the stereotypes uttered in these letters were negative: “I got a good dale of gold but like all Irish men spent it to free after that I marrid and settled down”… “though he is an Irishman he has no compassion for rich or poor he must get his money”… and so on.
Fitzpatrick notes that he found only one ethnic self-image that was incontestably positive. It was written in 1887 by Phil Mahoney who had emigrated several decades earlier from a large farm in Cork. He wrote that his children were “growing up well educated with pure Irish blood running in their veins with one of the best Mothers in Victoria to steer them through a virtuous life”…
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