IRELAND NEEDS “a renewed sense of national purpose” based on solidarity, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin said yesterday.
Speaking at a graduation Mass in Dublin’s Mater Dei Institute, he said that “politics is not just about winning elections; it is not just about beating an opponent or an opposing party”.
And, whereas “we must be lucid about the mistakes of the past and the uncertainties of the path forward, a political climate of anger about the past and anxiety of the future could also lead to a negative politics which is only ‘against’.
“If we want to move towards a different future we also and perhaps above all need a politics ‘for’.”
There was “solidarity in purpose. This is the opposite of a situation in which everyone seems pitched against the other.
“The opponent is deemed to have nothing good to say.
“People are left angry and alone in the shifting sands of uncertainty when certainty and purpose are what are called for,” he said.
There was “no doubt that today our society needs insight . . . not just into the mysteries of a complex global economy, where the hidden hand of legitimate market mechanisms seems replaced by many hidden and unscrupulous hands whose power is uncontrollable and unaccountable.
“We also need insight into what is required in political leadership,” he said.