WRITER PAT McCabe has called for a “new kind of family” in Ireland which “has not been infected by subjugation and poverty”.
Mr McCabe, who was keynote speaker at an NUI Galway (NUIG) conference on family support last week, said the past decade of rapid economic growth may have been sent to us as a “kind of caution”.
Progress did not have to be at the “expense of social cohesion” in a country where “familiarity was almost written into the DNA”, he said, and it was time to “break down” the “invisible social barriers manned in suburban areas by gardaí”.
The Monaghan-born author of The Butcher Boyand The Holy City,among other works, was speaking on the conference theme of "reflecting on contemporary challenges".
During the early years of the new independent Republic, the concept of nation state was one which ignited the populace, he said.
Yet behind the “hubris” lay a deep unease, reflected in serious conversations about whether the Irish as a race was destined to endure, he noted.
Poet Seamus Heaney had written of a “tunnel”, which was where many people in post-independence Ireland lived for years, he believed.
It seemed as if the “person and nation were one”, in a confused state, always aware that “someone was looking on, someone was monitoring progress” at a personal and national level.
In the 1930s writer George Orwell had forecast that we would all “find ourselves living the same lives”.
So it had come to pass in a “post-God landscape”, where the vision of a “Big Rock Candy mountain” that Eamon de Valera had shared with Archbishop John Charles McQuaid was now a country where authority was openly flouted, and where “crazes . . . jostled for attention”.
The land of the “internet, nip and tuck and a profusion of gods” was a “noisy place”, and yet the sovereign independent republic had never been able to banish its “anxiety that we would never last”, Mr McCabe said.
Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher may have said that there was “no such thing as society”, but the social communion at the core of Irish identity had been tested many times – such as in the development of unplanned suburbia and the closure of rural post offices, he said.
Now that the “gombeen man” had been tested for what it was, we had an opportunity to embrace a “new, radical and exciting parish”, a “new kind of family not infected by subjugation and poverty”, according to Mr McCabe.
This time, there would be “no one to blame . . . not the church, not the British”, nor the banks. The alternative was to vote for “the end of authentic civil life” and for an “agglomeration of shopping malls . . . the edge city”, he said.
The NUIG conference was hosted by the university’s child and family research centre.
Other participants included Fr Aidan Troy, who served as priest in Holy Cross, Belfast, and Dr John Davis, head of University of Edinburgh’s educational studies department.
