RITE & REASON:What in heaven's name is to be done about our unmannerly pensioners, wonders Patsy McGarry
IS IT just me or has anyone else found this debate about our rude and unmannerly pensioners simply hilarious? Is it not all a bit prissy? Does it not rate being up there with Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake"? Apparently she was not aware cake was a luxury where the poor of Paris were concerned. She too was out of touch.
Is chastising our protesting elderly over their manners not a little like appealing to Titanicpassengers to drown more silently, please? "Less of the screaming. It is so unseemly. Don't you think so Geraldine?"
Yes, Senator Geraldine Feeney was absolutely horrified by the behaviour of some of the over-70s who gathered at St Andrew's Church on Dublin's Westland Row last Tuesday.
She complained about it in the Seanad the next day - particularly considering the fact that Minister of State John Moloney was not allowed speak in St Andrew's.
"I just thought, what example is that sending out? I think it was rude and bad manners, what I saw," she said. Clearly, she had never watched Oireachtas Report.
Meanwhile, somewhat younger people than those in St Andrew's last Tuesday were tearing strips off one another in the Dáil.
In a debate on the final Morris tribunal reports, Labour TD Brendan Howlin was just then accusing Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern of character assassination. He also said the Minister was "spiteful, partisan, petty, unfair, selective, mean-spirited, and self-serving". Rude or what?
This was after Dermot Ahern said the careers of two highly respected Garda assistant commissioners were "ruined or at least damaged" by false allegations brought to the attention of the tribunal by Brendan Howlin and Fine Gael MEP Jim Higgins.
Hardly mannerly of him!
Fine Gael's Alan Shatter then described Dermot Ahern as "a political gurrier unfit to hold Ministerial office". In turn, new Fianna Fáil TD Niall Collins accused Mr Howlin and Jim Higgins of "the most grievous, unwarranted and untruthful allegations about the character of two of Ireland's most senior police officers".
Mr Howlin accused him of telling "a scandalous lie" and Labour's Pat Rabbitte decided that Mr Collins had just read "a slurry pit of allegations" against the two politicians into the record of the House. Ah yes, business as usual.
Now, Ms Feeney, there's how "rude and bad manners" is really done!
Ms Feeney was also troubled by the location of the rude, bad manners of those revolting elderly. "If it was a younger age group the whole country would be up in arms, if that amount of people were allowed into a Catholic Church to behave in such a manner," she said.
One can only be glad for Ms Feeney that she did not meet Jesus in one of his moods. In the temple, for example. Angered too by abuse, hypocrisy and injustice, he "entered the temple of God and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons". He accused them of turning the temple into a den of thieves.
Such a rude young man!
On another occasion he prescribed "woe" for the scribes and Pharisees. "They bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men's shoulders (Hmm . . .?) . . . they do all their deeds to be seen by men . . . they love the place of honour at feasts . . . and salutations in the market places . . . hypocrites! . . . blind guides . . . blind fools . . . serpents, you brood of vipers . . ." In fact, he called them "hypocrites" no less than six times then.
God, how unmannerly!
Precious people such as Ms Feeney might consider what drove our elderly to such rage, rather than a symptom of that rage. She might also consider that this is a different generation of elderly. One not cowed by their would-be betters. They are akin to another generation who had had enough and would not put up with it any more, as written of by Seamus Heaney in his poem From the Canton of Expectation.
For our elderly too, theirs is:
"a grammar of imperatives, the new age of demands.
They would banish the conditional forever
this generation born impervious to
the triumph in our cries of de profundis.
Our faith in winning by enduring most,
they made anathema, intelligences
brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.
What looks the strongest has outlived its term.
The future lies with what's affirmed from under."
• Patsy McGarry is Religious Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times