Ugly election outcome pits young against old
THE Wolfe Tones famously sang A Nation Once Again, but what this election has proved is we have never been a nation as divided; and not so much North vs South, rather young vs old.
This week I was listening to Liveline and I found myself to be furious, upset and disgusted at the amount of hate levelled at the older generation. Their cardinal sin, it seems, is exercising their democratic right to vote.
Callers from an entitled electorate spewed bile at those over the age of 55 who dared to vote for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, with more than an handful saying: ‘It was the older people who voted for that lot,’ and ‘Why should their vote count?’ The common thread was: ‘What about me? What about my children? My house? My health? My benefits? My… My… My…’
There was not a word about ‘my work’ or ‘my contribution’.
A soft-spoken gentleman of 74 years of age was pilloried by an entitled buffoon. The elderly man told host Joe Duffy that he would ‘leave Ireland if Sinn Féin took office’. He very calmly pointed out that, having left school at 13 to begin his working life, he grafted for over six decades to pay for a modest home and rear his family, outlining the many hardships he had lived through. He said when he was young, education was a luxury denied to him and it was his generation that paved the way for free education for all Irish children.
The older people being berated have lived through multiple recessions, not helped by the violence in the North.
They’ve seen and experienced poverty and survived repression from both Church and State. But they managed to build better lives and, in the process, a better Ireland we can ALL call our own.
And yet, some idiot feels free to shout down a pensioner and tell him to leave his country. He scorns him for having a ‘leafy house’ – ignorant to the fact that the pensioner lives in a modest semi in Dublin’s Cabra west. And even if his home was of the leafy kind, it was one he worked hard to pay for.
An ugly, pervasive hatred has emerged in the aftermath of the election from a cohort that thinks elderly people should leave the younger generation to rule this country.
When Mr Irate finally paused, the gentleman explained that for the sake of future generations he had gone Green. This brought forth another barrage of bile, with the elderly man accused of being nothing but a well-to-do, planetpreserving pensioner who should be put out to pasture.
If certain sections of our electorate have their way, any views other than their own will be deemed ‘undemocratic’. That a man in his 70s should be subject to such vitriol on our national airwaves shows that, for now, a United Ireland we will be never be. This country was built on the experience, sweat and intelligence of our elderly members, so respect and gratitude is not only due, it is owed.