‘Care’ helps define us as a nation

I CURRENTLY reading Sebastian Barry’s book – Days Without End. It’s a fictional book, a western and the backdrop is America during the Civil War and Indian wars. I say this to give context to the Irish main character’s summation of an Irishman: “He can’t help you enough and he can’t double-cross you deep enough ever either”. Fiction and era notwithstanding, the latter words jarred.

It made me think about what is it to be Irish. It made me think about how we are defined as Irish and, contrary to all our other labels, one word kept coming – “care”. We are a nation of carers. I am not talking politics here nor am I getting into the injustices and hardships endured by ‘formalised’ carers. I am merely talking about the Irish trait of caring.

We have long since lived with the reputation of the ‘drinking Irish’, the ‘fighting Irish’ and ‘the cute hoor’ and these tags are not completely without justification. But as an Irishwoman fortunate enough to be reared on Irish soil and as an Irishwoman fortunate enough to rear my own children on Irish soil, my on-the-ground experience of my countrymen is one of caring, which is invariably translated into action.

Frustrating and deplorable that it has to be this way (but I am not getting into politics) is the walk of a mother from Cork to Dublin in a bid to get Health Minister Simon Harris to allow her daughter who suffers from a rare form of epilepsy access to medicinal cannabis. No greater love, no greater care than a mother for her child.

Great too is the love of a child for a parent. The Marie Keating Foundation was set up by a family who lost their mother too soon to cancer – a cancer that could have been cured on early detection. Yet out of grief, a charity gets born, out of desolation awareness gets built and out of one life lost, many get saved. Care did not die with death.

Cycle Against Suicide and its message, ‘It’s OK not to feel OK and it’s absolutely OK to ask for help’ is another example. This is a movement and a message that travels the length and breadth of the island of Ireland. It is a real reaction to a real problem; it does not sugar-coat or romanticise but rather it affirms and connects. Care, once again, saving lives.

When I got sick a few years ago and when I see people getting sick today, there is a rallying of support that defies the greed and materialism that we as a nation are often accused of. I got sick in the midst of the recession yet I never experienced such generosity. It is so often the case that those who have least give more.

Sebastian Barry is writing a fictional book about a fictional character in a land far away and a time long ago. Still his words jarred. And I just wanted to defend us.