The ancient Irish feast of Samhain marked the end of autumn and the beginning of winter. It was a celebration of the harvest at a time when fruits didn’t traverse the world and communities had to squirrel food away to take them through the lean months. It’s a pagan feast, one of a sequence that marked off the different seasons from the winter solstice when the days began to lengthen, through spring, midsummer, high summer and autumn.

Well, that was the pastoral past. This is the suburban present and it’s different. Few of us dip for apples anymore. Even fewer tell ghost stories around the fire. It’s mostly bonfires, bangers – and smash!
How did an ancient harvest celebration turned into a post-modern exercise in argy-bargy and arson? Sociologists and culturologists will no doubt have their views. The decline of tradition is part of it. Fewer and fewer Irish have any real understanding of what a harvest actually is. Nowadays your beans are as likely to come from Kenya as Kinnegad.
And over the last generation our perception of Halloween has been increasingly colonised by American representations which drape the old feast with sinister connotations.
Were they there before? Of course they were, but different. Irish folk tales are a rich source of scary stories and no doubt old kitchens and flickering candlelight offered many an opportunity to frighten the wits out of children and adults alike. Indeed, some psychologists say that we need to be scared every now and then, that this feeds into fundamental capacities for survival… Not for nothing is All Hallows Day the day of the dead.
But this doesn’t explain the violence and destruction with which it is increasingly associated.
It has become the autumnal St Patrick’s Day. Vastly more alcohol is consumed at Halloween than would have been the case historically. And there was no cocaine in yer granny’s time.
Also, fashions come and go – burning an unoccupied building seems to be the new happy slapping, with extra points if captured on a camera phone and posted on the web.
But this year there’s an extra edge, a generalised anger. It’s a by-product of the economic crisis and the consequent budget with old and young alike taking to the streets to show their rage at cuts in services.
Perhaps there was also an undercurrent of disappointment that the swaggery good times have so catastrophically closed, and with such short notice. Overblown bragging should just now be yielding to maturity; thus, folks feel robbed of the cooler future that was taking shape.
The floor fell out of it before the Irish had sorted their heads out on certain things like, for example, whether it is possible to have universal entitlements in a low-tax economy or not.
When there were rivers of revenue flowing into the State’s coffers it did not seem a matter of urgency. But it would have been nice to have had a bit more time to debate the pros and cons. Now decisions are being taken above our heads and a lot of people are very pissed off. But are they always right to be?
To take an example, perhaps it’s right that higher education should be free to all. But someone has to pay. Who?
And was the introduction of free fees for higher education necessarily a good thing? Do more people from disadvantaged backgrounds go to university than before? The answer is no. The effect has been negligible. And many education researchers argue that, in fact, it exacerbated social reproduction in education by enabling well-to-do parents to invest more in their children’s secondary schooling, thereby giving them even more advantages.
Perhaps it would have been better to invest in tackling disadvantage earlier – and also to have set about changing the social and academic culture of higher education institutions before introducing free fees.
It’s a fraught and very political debate and multiple views are held with great passion. But at the end of the day the question remains – who foots the bill?
Those still in employment know damn well that it is they who will pay, whether through direct taxation, excise duties (on cars, fuel and alcohol) or indirect taxation.
They would like to think that a fairer system might be found, so they’re getting fed up too. And they’ll be even more so when the new charges kick in.
To paraphrase an old Bob Dylan song, when the levy bites the anger gonna overflow. It now seems that not enough has been squirreled away for the long hard winter and cold, cold spring.
Halloween may already be a smouldering memory but believe me sparks will continue to fly for the foreseeable future. It would be a good thing for us all to remember that while there may not be ghosts prowling, there are dark and malign forces beyond the circle of light. At the end of the day we’ll have to save our own bacon.
The going will be tough, but… can we do it? Sparks will fly, but yes we can!
On which note our attention now turns west. What does the US hold in store for us, with a new President about to be installed?