Our consumerism is unsustainable

Sir — This year’s European elections and the referendum on regulating divorce coincide almost exactly with the anniversary of last year’s vote to delete the right to life of the unborn from our Constitution.

In fact they are all intimately linked. Such has been the calamitous decrease in birth-rates right across the developed world that all 28 EU states are failing to replace themselves.

As Europeans, we are progressing towards selfannihilation. Liberal democracies’ very existence may well be a historical footnote by the time today’s first-time voters hit their projected pension age.

Yet our European candidates and media are silent.

This impending demographic Armageddon has been masked because people are typically living longer and we are ‘outsourcing’ having babies to Africa, south-east Asia and elsewhere in the world.

We speak of climate change, and rightly so, but this socialclimatic change is far more acute. Ethnic Europeans are disappearing. Our model of living to excess (hyperconsumerism) is not only environmentally unsustainable, it is also socio-economically unsustainable. They are two sides of the same coin.

Liberal democracies are underpinned by the social capital of centuries of Judeo-Christian values — virtue, redemption and the dignity of the human being, expressed politically as human rights, solidarity and subsidiary.

We need to urgently change tack. We need to recover and reinstate basic human rights such that they are unambiguously acknowledged, socially respected and vindicated by the State.

We need to rediscover happiness, meaning in life, and the spiritual energy that raises man from looking only to himself — from looking out only for himself. We need to rediscover an intrinsic human worth unconnected to consumerism. Gearoid Duffy, Lee Road, Cork