Sir, - Michael O'Loughlin's observations on the new "feel-good Ireland" (Features, January 26th), struck a chord with many others who, like myself, have recently returned to Ireland after several years away. There is undoubtedly a degree of crassness and vulgarity in the newly moneyed Ireland which was absent before.
But if Michael O'Loughlin's view of Ireland after 20 years abroad makes interesting reading, it is truly astounding to re-read Pope John Paul II's homily in Galway which, viewed 20 years on, is unnervingly prophetic. Perhaps the time has come for that generation, then addressed by the Pope as the future "technicians or teachers, nurses or secretaries, farmers or tradesmen, doctors or engineers, priests or religious", to take stock of the kind of new Ireland they are building. The warnings then voiced by the Pope are not of interest to Catholics alone, but to all those disturbed to see that Ireland is becoming a place where, as Michael O'Loughlin succinctly put it, "money is the morality, the spirituality, the Mecca".
In 1979 the Pope observed that "the prospect of growing economic progress . . . will appear to you as an opportunity to achieve greater freedom. The more you possess - you may be tempted to think - the more you will feel liberated from every type of confinement. In order to make more money and to possess more, in order to eliminate effort and worry, you may be tempted to take moral shortcuts . . . Mass media, entertainment and literature will present a model for living where all too often it is every man for himself, and where the unrestrained affirmation of self leaves no room for concern for others".
Michael O'Loughlin pointed to the symptoms of a deepening moral disorder in Ireland, a "moral vacuum at the centre of Irish society". This must be a source of unease to any Irishman or woman who has any feelings of love for the country. For, as the Pope pointed out in Galway, "a society that . . . has lost its higher religious and moral principles will become an easy prey for manipulation and for domination by the forces, which, under the pretext of greater freedom, will enslave it even more". - Yours, etc., Fr Gavan Jennings,
Richmond Avenue South, Dartry, Dublin 6.