The original latin word was baculus and it meant a stick. Because the first little animalculae under the microscope resembled small sticks, so they were named after the diminutive, bacillus, and so what was an innocent term for a bit of wood became a sinister one, full of lethal implications. Hitherto, sticks were good, The infirm used them for walking with; and dams were made with them.
But remove the stick from the disabled, and you disable him further. The resulting word, imbecillus, is the root of the word which now means witless, stupid, cretinous. Imbecile. And when you remove the stick from the dam, it becomes de-sticked, disbacillus, from which, through the French, we get the word, debacle: the effect of an onrush of desticked water. Made idiotic by the disease of money, we seem unable to prevent a tidal wave of prosperity sweeping away so much that is precious and which decades of economic failure have enabled us to save.
Living in terror
All over Ireland, small, tightly knit communities, with their own particular culture, ways and habits, are living in terror of the consequences of the economic boom causing Californian-type suburbs to be plonked on their doorsteps. And it is not just suburbs and it is not just Leinster, but it is all sorts of crude and disfiguring development everywhere: every corner of the land seems ripe for development, for the creation of strings of huge bungalows built like golf clubhouses.
And the remarkable feature of this is that this environmental debacle has occurred when many of us thought the conservation battle had been won. The Irish Georgian Society, An Taisce, Crann, the Tree Council and countless other private or state-sponsored bodies mushroomed through the 1980s in response to the desecration which had occurred from the 1960s onwards. The tide was going our way, we were sure; but it was a neap tide, and was battered into oblivion by the subsequent debacle of prosperity across the country.
In small places like Trim, Dunleer, Louisburgh, Sneem, people have little or no faith in the ability of existing institutions to protect them from an epidemic of virulent tastelessness. Cultural values throughout the country have been revolutionised. I saw two countrymen looking admiringly at some fields recently. One turned to the other and said, "Ah, fine sites there."
That's it. Land no longer consists of fields. John B Keane today would write a play called The Site. There is no bog or mountainside, no callow or glen, no woodland or orchard, which cannot be turned into "a site." For the bacillus of imbecilic development is everywhere; we are not inoculated against it, and we are creating an environmental debacle for which we will not lightly be forgiven.
Haciendas blooming
What does one do in the middle of this explosion of wealth? Only the most patronising, the most arrogant, the most dirigiste would demand that the state create a design agency which vets proposals for houses. But on the other hand, all existing institutions seem unable to protect us. There seems to be nothing between us and a Burbank across every county and adjoining every hamlet in the entire country. Haciendas are blooming everywhere like malignant funguses. Bogus arches, phony concrete balustrades, pseudo-porticoes flourish at every turn. There has been a total good-taste amputation across the land.
Across the land indeed: for the first time in the history of Ireland, prosperity seems to be geographically spread. No area is blessed with the very economic backwardness which might save it from complete redevelopment. Yet this explosion of wealth is, as we know, by no means reaching all people. Some 20,000 people a year are still leaving the Republic - the majority of them the poor, the unlucky, the stupid and the vast army of under-educated whom the state system has failed and who, once again, we are dumping in other economies and in other cultures.
Exporting problems
How did we go so wrong that, once again, uniquely in Europe, we are still exporting our problems and our failures? We have the success-bug, prosperity walks the land, and in addition we are spared the normal duties within any rising economy towards our problem-children, functionally illiterate and economically almost useless, because they are heading off to England. Oh to be sure, this is not without the odd advantage. Not merely does it spare us the moral and financial duty of minding these people, and their offspring too, but it also places us in a wonderful position to claim anti-Irishness if they are discriminated against by the English.
Meanwhile, we'll be ignoring the inconvenient truth that the first place they were discriminated against was in the thirdrate Irish school they entered at the age of five, which did not have working lavatories, was not properly heated and where success of any kind was a social debacle, where educational imbecility was applauded, and where the children were vaccinated against the bacillus of achievement of any kind. Now, once again, they can fail in reliable olde Englande.
We are at a most serious crossroads in our history. Behind us lie the ruins of Catholic authority and the stroke-politics of Haughey's Fianna Fail. Finally, we are the masters of our own destiny - but are we? The stick has been pulled out of the dam upstream of us and, our brains made idiotic by money, we wait for the plague to strike. A fine word, bacillus. It tells us more things about ourselves than you can shake a stick at.