(The Nationalist. This article was published together with Ireland’s Institutions as a single piece on 21 May 1999.)
What is the state of the nation today? What stage are we Irish people at in our national life? It seems to me that we’re moving into an adolescent stage. Nationally, we are pimply teenagers – and that includes all of us, from nine to ninety years of age.
We were childish for a long time in our national life partly because of being a colony, with the psychological consequences of that condition: negative aggression, irresponsibility, an anti-institutional cast of mind, a mistrust of law, and at times a refusal to grow up and behave like adults, seeking excuses rather than finding remedies.
The church didn’t always help. Sometimes religion was reduced to a control system. It was as if the church was afraid to trust people, fearful that if they got an inch, they would take a mile. We were afraid to encourage people to form and to follow their conscience – we reduced it to obeying rules – in case people might go their own way and do their own thing. That’s what many are doing now and without a conscience. We have ended up with the worst of both worlds: the church has not had great influence in the formation of conscience because it was afraid of it as being too risky. And religion as a system of social and personal control is rejected.
As a nation we are showing the traits of irresponsibility and self-centeredness associated with adolescence. For example, drinking and driving, scattering litter where we feel like it, smoking in no smoking areas, using angel dust, switching cattle tags and moving cattle from uncleared to cleared areas, and living by the idea that rules are there to be broken. We’re saying Yes to rights, and No to responsibilities. I want what I want because I want it, and damn the community; is that our national attitude?
I was recently abroad with a group of Irish men and women, most of them in their sixties and seventies. At times their behaviour was embarrassingly like that of children. Instead of self-discipline and responsibility there were petulant demands; there was heedlessness to the needs of people not in the group; there was a public use of four-lettered words which would have made a sailor blush. There was also, it must be said in fairness, a lot of decency, goodness and kindness. But we’ve a long way to go before we grow up and behave like adults.
People live up, or down, to the expectations that others have of them. Treat people like children and they’ll behave like children; treat people like adults and they’ll behave like adults; treat them like gods and they’ll behave like devils.