We drink too much, we are loutish, we've forgotten the joy of delayed gratification and we have abandoned the church. How do we inject our secular society with a value system, asks Emily O'Reilly.
Many of us recoil at the vulgar fest that is much of modern Ireland. The rampant, unrestrained drunkenness, the brutal, random violence that infects the smallest of our townlands and villages, the incontinent use of foul language with no thought to place or company, the obscene parading of obscene wealth, the debasement of our civic life, the growing disdain of the wealthy towards the poor, the fracturing of our community life, the God-like status given to celebrities all too often replaced down the line with a venomous desire to attack and destroy those who were on pedestals the week before, the creation of "reality" TV, more destructive in its cynical filleting of the worth and wonder of the human soul than anything George Orwell could have imagined.
But it wasn't meant to be like this, we will protest. Divorce was meant to be for the deeply unhappy, not the mildly bored; drunkenness was supposed to be practised by the marginalised, not the boys and girls with cars and careers and more prospects than their granny could shake a stick at.
More cars were supposed to help people get around, not force them to sit in line through the full two hours of a drive-time programme at motorway exits - motorways which, incidentally, were also supposed to help people get around. By-passes were supposed to relieve bottlenecks, not shuffle them to the next un-by-passed town. Portlaoise was never meant to be a Dublin suburb.
Sunday shopping was supposed to be a convenience for the harassed worker, not a new religion. We still haven't worked out exactly what we thought 24-hour shopping was supposed to do, but still can't get over that vaguely depressed feeling we experience whenever we think of shops with lights on at 3 a.m. and, more particularly, of the people who have to work there.
And yes, I suppose we did seek to curb the power of the church but that didn't mean we wanted to empty the churches themselves, or reduce seminaries and convents to advertising fodder for the property sections. And while the nuns had their problems, it would be nice if the odd one were still around to lecture our daughters about the evils of the micro mini and the bared and nailed midriff, or to knock the odd hospital consultant into shape with the menacing flutter of a wimple. And while we greatly welcome the challenge of choosing from 179 types of coffee in the morning, we didn't mean for Bewley's to go.
This is not just a middle-aged lament for the good old days. I may well think Dublin's Financial Services Centre is over-endowed on the tall skinny latte front, but it is still a hell of an improvement on what was there before - the poverty-laced slums that were the Sheriff Street tenement buildings.
Irish women's lives have also been transformed immeasurably over the last 20 years; our children have opportunities unimaginable two decades ago; luxuries denied to all but the wealthy are now available to the masses; good political choices have been made that have broken the poverty cycles of many families; the stultifying cosh of the Catholic church has been removed and we at least can see ourselves in our new spiritual nakedness.
What we have become, it seems to me, are participants at what we would have called, in my teenage years, a free house, but this time on a massive scale. Released from the handcuffs of mass religious obedience, we are Dionysian in our revelry, in our testing of what we call freedom. Hence the staggering drink consumption, the child-like showing off of helicopters and four-wheel drives and private cinemas, the fetishising of handbags and high heels, the inability of some to contribute to charity without a photographer on hand to record it, the supplanting of bog-standard childhood ailments such as measles and whooping cough with fat-induced obesity and diabetes.
WHO OR WHAT is the real us? Were we real when we were modest in our habits, and daily communicants, and Mass attendees, and self-effacing contributors to charity, and energetic participants in voluntary work - or are we real now as we either indulge in, or look enviously upon, the phenomena I have described?
Is not the speed at which we have jettisoned so much of our religious practice, in particular, suggestive of a society that was not so much spiritual as spineless, cowed by the power of the church, observing what we observed out of fear rather than faith? The challenge in the short to medium term, I would humbly suggest, is how to accept this newly secular society and inject it with a value system that takes the best of what we have jettisoned and discards the worst.
Money can't buy you happiness: but if that is so patently true, why does this modern Irish society stubbornly refuse to accept that truth? Readers of last week's Sunday Times would have got a flavour of this phenomenon of excess in a front page report in which a Dublin retailer exulted in the fact that her outlet had a waiting list of 500 women in pursuit of a handbag that retails at €5,000-plus. "It's great," opined the retailer, "for the country." Imagine that on your obituary. "Here lies Mrs X, fifth in line for a Birkin bag, and raging she wasn't first."
I had an epiphany when, in the busyness of my work life last month, I failed to notice a piece of paper in the window of my littler daughter's classroom announcing the Junior Infants Halloween hat competition, thus ensuring that she went to school on the appointed day with a piece of newspaper wrapped hastily around her head while the children of the more engaged mothers outdid Philip Treacy with their millinery.
Ella, God bless her, didn't even notice, and she walked around on the hat parade like the late Queen Mother at Ascot, but I had still missed out on the pleasure, that will never be repeated, of getting down on the floor with my Junior Infant child and imagining and attempting to make a wonderful hat. My loss. Lesson learnt.
It would be good if we recognised the new religions of sex and drink and shopping for what they are and tiptoed back to the churches. It may not even be necessary to believe, it may be sufficient just to remind ourselves of some of the universal truths about charity and decency and how to live a good life, all of which are contained in the teachings of the major religions. It would be good to regain our sense of the magic of ritual, of the year marked by rites and rituals, not the seamless, joyless blending of undifferentiated weekdays. It would be nice to get the summer over before the Christmas displays begin.
It would be good to insert ourselves into the lives of our community, reawaken our sense of what we can contribute but also what we can receive - the preciousness of belonging, of being caught up in something stronger than your own individual self.
It would be good to discipline our children by disciplining ourselves, to realise the risks of jaded appetites, of needs too quickly and too elaborately met, of lives made too cynical, too aware through the imposition of distorted adult views of what constitutes happiness, to realise also that the new impoverished are not those without the DVDs and the latest PlayStations and mobiles and the private cinemas and the cut-down Fendi bags but those, perhaps, who have them and who have got them without the slightest personal effort, without that peculiar joy known as delayed gratification.
What we also need to do as a country - in love, as we are, with market forces and consumer products - is to begin again to speak the word that increasingly dare not speak its name in this thrusting, strutting, alpha male society - poverty. It still exists, in the literal sense, in the sense of individuals and families existing on bread and chips strung out on stress and worry, their feelings of isolation and inadequacy made all the worse by the apparently effortless garnering of wealth and decent lifestyle by those around them. Twenty years ago, poverty was just as nasty, but made more bearable perhaps by a cultural acceptance that it was part of what we were. Now the term "loser", commonly used, piles psychic pain on to the literal pain of being poor.
Poverty also exists in the spiritual sense. It exists in our failure to date to imagine a wealthy country that strives for more than the satisfaction of needs we never knew we had until the multinationals created demand. Political debate is too often about personalities, cultural debate revolves around the physical siting of a theatre rather than the role of theatre and music and poetry in breaking down the poverty of spirit I have referred to. Piping Mozart into the sound systems of our junior schools, teaching marginalised adolescents how to play a musical instrument, seeing art as central to our lives and our spirits rather than a luxury extra accessed by the few would do much to improve our civic life. Let's debate that and worry not about the Abbey.
THERE IS MORAL poverty; the staggeringly swift creation of a society in which we are increasingly neutral in our judgments of all sorts of objectively bad behaviour, be it infidelity, the abandonment of families, loutish behaviour on the sports field or under-age sexual behaviour. Those who indulge are, bizarrely, more likely to be feted than condemned. Punch someone's lights out, wreck your head with Class A drugs, and you're more likely to appear on a chat show than a court bench.
A young female pop star comes to Dublin and puts on a graphically sexually explicit show in front of a theatre packed with sub-teens, brought along, incredibly, by their mothers and fathers. One commentator described such displays as the mainstreaming of the pornographic imagination; what was previously top shelf is now at gym-slip level.
I am conscious that little, if any, of this is new. The wealthy are frequently vulgar and prone to showcasing what they have accumulated. The poor really will always be with us, and human greed will triumph, like a dodgy stock option, when the higher virtues are suffering a slump.
So why do we even bother discussing it? Why not sit back and wait for tides to turn, stop banging our heads against the brick walls of smugness, complacency and massive self-satisfaction that are all around us? The answer lies in our humanity, the belief that sometimes people want to do better, be better, and think of people other than themselves. The deeply heartfelt hope that our children will have better lives, and in the context of this shiny new wealthy Ireland, that that better life has to do not with the accumulation of stuff, but with an awareness of the true meaning of a rich life, of a life where the pleasures of love, of companionship, of reading, of art, of sharing one's gifts, of seeking to attain ever higher understanding of the mysteries, beauties and even ugliness that surround us, are really all that matter.
This is an edited extract from the address delivered by Ombudsman and Information Commissioner Emily O'Reilly at last Wednesday's annual conference of Céifin, the Ennis-based research institute which promotes discussion of changing values in society