SocietyThe Patrick MacGill Summer School is held every year in Glenties, Co Donegal, one of the most beautiful villages in this country.
It has become a high profile event, attracting major players from the worlds of politics, the arts, the churches and civil society. It is named after an important writer who was born in the region circa 1890. MacGill was hired out at 12 and lived the hard life of a potato-picker and navvy in Scotland and England. He wrote of the oppressive work done, the people he worked with and the experience of exile.
This glossy, clearly expensively-produced compendium constitutes the proceedings of this year's school. It contains 38 short contributions from figures representing influential social and cultural institutions such as political parties, unions, churches, the GAA, the Arts Council, the Combat Poverty Agency and the ESRI, among others.
Presumably, this design was conceived in the spirit of inclusiveness, but it ultimately detracts from the overall impact of the work. It would have been improved if contributions were solicited only from those with a solid record of research and/or activism, rather than including establishment figures who already enjoy dominant positions in Irish public life. We can correctly predict that Government figures such as Brian Cowen and Michael McDowell are going to use this as a forum for self-congratulation, the former telling the reader that "the soul of Ireland is in good shape" and the latter that "we have coped well with immigration". Not all of us agree with either glib statement.
Other contributors, such as Sr Stanislaus Kennedy, Helen Johnston (of the Combat Poverty Agency) and John Lonergan, whose work takes them to the coalface of the worst social problems, have a much more realistic perspective. Sr Stan speaks of our "excessive individualism and consumerism" and Johnston reminds us that 9.9 per cent of all Irish children live in consistent poverty. Lonergan highlights this same topic, concluding that "talking the talk is useless unless we walk the walk as well". John Monaghan, representing the St Vincent de Paul, says that many government statements (on poverty) "are only aspirations with no real commitment to deliver".
Conversations like the one chronicled here are badly needed in this country, but the confines of a forum such as this summer school may not be the most productive place for them to occur. The important themes of sectarianism, cultural identities, wealth and poverty, secularisation and community development are all referred to here but they need to be addressed in a much more sustained and considered manner.
It is very questionable how useful polite discussions such as this are in the face of the massive socio-economic problems that are plaguing Celtic Tiger Ireland. We need to see real political will to tackle such issues as the obscene level of dependency on one or two economic sectors (with just three giant micro-electronics companies accounting for a huge chunk of our GDP); the "new" poverty associated with crippling property prices; the peskily persistent "old" type of poverty where children go to school hungry; the uncontrolled urban sprawl that is gobbling up our precious countryside and its attendant car dependency, pollution and community decline; the appalling state of our public transport and health systems . . . need I go on? These problems are far too serious to be left to the usual suspects in the Dáil. After all, most of these politicians endorse the abuse of Shannon Airport by the US military and the heavy-handed tactics of some gardaí at Rossport. They apparently are not to be trusted, then, with the serious matter of shaping a society of which we can all be proud.
Some creative thinking is needed to get more people involved in decision-making in their own localities, to compensate for the democratic deficit at local level.
One interesting first step is the establishment of the Task Force of Active Citizenship, with Mary Davis at the helm. The ideal of public consultation has been taken seriously here and we await the results of its deliberations.
This book is a "catch-all" production in which MacGill's spirit has only a latent presence. It is useful as a vignette of mainstream Irish public discourse, but most of the pieces are too brief and/or superficial to advance our understanding of "the soul of Ireland" very far.
Ethel Crowley is a lecturer in sociology at University College Cork. She is the author of Land Matters: Power Struggles in Rural Ireland, published by Lilliput Press last year
The Soul of Ireland: Issues of Society, Culture and Identity Edited by Joe Mulholland The Liffey Press, 252pp. €18.95