THIS IS IRELAND

There’s nothing like our national holiday to bring on some navel-gazing — and the making of self-celebratory videos, writes Brendan O’Connor

AT this time of year, when we gaze deep into our navels and ponder what it is to be Irish, this great, unique, state of being, we like to make a video, to puff ourselves up a bit to the rest of the world, and tell them how special we are. These videos are what used to be called ads. Ads were about 30 seconds tops and they were an inconvenience that broke up TV shows. Now they are three, four, five minutes long and they are what’s called content, and people actually choose to watch them. And the people making them love making them. Especially when they are making them about Ireland, because it means they can go all epic and deep and evocative.

Last year the video for St Patrick’s Day was all about how creative we are, how “this is a seabed of imagination where ideas are born and flourish”, how we are “free in spirit, wild at heart”. They didn’t mention how most of us went through an education system that did its damnedest to beat any hint of creativity out of us by teaching us there is a right and wrong answer to everything and by stressing us out with exams where we regurgitated useless information. They didn’t mention that most creative people in Ireland are creative despite the State. They didn’t mention either that most creative people in Ireland find it hard to make a living out of it. And, of course, they focused on tech as well. Coding is creative too, they told us.

They claimed in the video that our Irish language gave us wit. They didn’t mention how it was beaten into generations of us who never speak it again.

And then they give us a load of sub-Oprah waffle about how we ‘‘reach out to the world with optimism and belief in the power of creativity’’, how ‘‘our struggles gave us strength, our history taught us resilience’’.

This year’s one is a more general depiction of how great we are. It’s called Here We Live and, according to Miriam Lord last week, most people seeing it out in America at the St Patrick’s Day jollies hadn’t a clue what was going on. It’s not that we don’t all love Father Ted, Tommy Tiernan, rugby, the O’Donovan brothers and The Late Late Toy Show. But it didn’t seem to mean as much to people in the US, the people at whom it’s aimed, the people who we want to give us money to make more videos by investing, working, studying or holidaying here.

Irish people might take issue with some of the claims made in the new video too. Sure, as the video says: “We love life and we know life is for living.” But tell that to men between 40 and 59 who still suffer a “stubbornly high” suicide rate here according to research released last week. Maybe what they should have said in the video is: “We’re great at talking about how we’re great at talking about mental health, and how men are learning to open up, but a man in Ireland is still four times more likely to kill himself than a woman, and God forbid you’d be a young person trying to access mental health services because you’ll be waiting, while your situation gets worse and worse. In Ireland we find it’s cheaper and easier to medicate and label children than to let them actually talk their problems through with someone.”

We also, according to the video, “stand for the weak, giving of ourselves, our time and beyond”. You could rephrase that to: “We rely largely on charities and volunteers to deal with the weak. The State gives them a certain amount of money, which we are increasingly finding out is being misspent. Meanwhile 30,000 people are waiting for speech and language therapy at the last count, 1,500 of them for more than a year, hundreds of them for more than two years.”

Meanwhile, more than 15,000 children are waiting for some kind of initial intervention in occupational therapy that might help them learn to cope at school, to play with other kids, and to perform basic tasks for themselves, with 5,681 of them waiting for more than a year, which is an eternity in the small window we have for early intervention. These are not people looking for hand-outs, just people who want to learn self reliance in the Republic of Opportunity, to be good, independent citizens.

Meanwhile, Finian McGrath, our Minister for Disability, writes a fine piece in Friday’s Irish Independent, with the headline ‘At long last, we are ready to care for the disabled from cradle to grave’, and everyone with a disability and their families allows themselves a hollow laugh.

“Here, we are open, every day of the year”, the video tells us. Unless of course there is snow, in which case we will all be warned to stay in our homes and half of us will find out afterwards we aren’t going to be paid.

The video also tells us: “We love our people doing well wherever they travel”, which is true in fairness, because if they come back they’ll put even more pressure on the housing shortage.

But look, let’s not be cynical. Of course it’s important to sell ourselves to the world. And let’s face it, people will always object to someone else’s description of them.

But look around Ireland this week and gaze into your navel and ponder who we are. Right now you would say that we seem to be a country sponsored by Paddy Power, run on drink, currently enjoying a brief breather before we tear ourselves apart over abortion. We are a pragmatic country that has cobbled together a vaguely functioning government where the opposition is in the government, but where no one is going to rock the boat right now because you’d never know what people might do in an election. We are a country that has been telling ourselves a big lie that we barely understand about how the impossible is going to happen after Brexit and the North will be like Schroedinger’s cat, both in and out of the EU.

We are a country that is tentatively enjoying a bit of prosperity again but mindful not to lose the run of ourselves. We are a country where half the people are secretly enjoying property prices going through the roof, while the other half despair. We are a country that loves nothing better than to down tools and turn a day off into a quasi week off as we sit at our desks in holiday mode waiting for the rugby and St Patrick’s Day. We are a country that is delighted with how liberal and inclusive we have all become, while we silence and ridicule the conservative views of a huge chunk of the population. We are a country that spends an inordinate amount of time poring over and inquiring into the mistakes and corruption of the past — and even the mistakes made in inquiries into the mistakes of the past. We are a country just waiting for anyone to slip up so we can have a good old hop on. We are a country with a meme for a president, woven out of our good intentions, but don’t make us listen to his interminable speeches.

And indeed, like the video says, we are a country where “we speak, and the words mostly matter” — or to rephrase that, sometimes, just sometimes, we mean what we say.

‘We are a country that has been telling ourselves a big lie’