It is easy to be cynical about some aspects of Christmas. One now-traditional line of attack is to assert that in the absence of any evidence as to when in the calendar year Our Lord was born, the early church simply pandered to popular culture of the day by choosing for this annual commemoration the date on which a pagan winter festival had traditionally taken place.
A quite different line of criticism has been that in recent times we have turned this annual religious festival into a materialistic occasion, and there is certainly truth in that. But, however valid these criticisms may be, they seem to me to miss several important positive points about our modern Christmases.
First, even for those who are no longer believers, this festival is an occasion when we all look outwards, applying our minds to how we can please family members and friends by offering them gifts of things that we judge they might like to receive. And for children in particular, quite apart from the gifts they receive, Christmas is, of course, a magical occasion.
But Christmas is above all a time when dispersed members of families come together to renew the ties of their relationships.
While in some instances this process may create its own tensions, reviving dormant sibling rivalries, for example, more generally it helps to consolidate the nuclear, and indeed the extended, family; the adult members of which, in the much more mobile modern world, frequently become geographically dispersed and in danger of losing contact with each other.
It seems to me that this is particularly important in the Irish case, where over several centuries most families have been disrupted by emigration on a massive scale. The distances, together with the slowness and high cost of travel in the past made unthinkable any renewal by emigrants of personal contact with their families later in life, and, because of the illiteracy of many emigrants, children often lost all touch with their parents, and siblings with each other.
This denaturing of Irish family life by emigration was a huge national tragedy that ran against the deepest instincts of most people.
So, as the second half of the 20th century produced a transport revolution that cut both the time and cost of travel to a small fraction of what had formerly been the case, there was a dramatic Irish response by families to the new opportunities thus created for maintaining contact with each other.
Last year some 1½ million visits were paid by emigrants to their families here. Over half of these returning family members seem to have come from Britain, the remainder being divided more or less equally between continental Europe and overseas. Moreover, more than one million visits were paid by Irish people to their relatives abroad.
For a country with less than four million people a total of 2.5 million international family visits each year demonstrates a remarkable degree of family solidarity. In addition, new statistics have shown that over two million domestic visits involving overnight stays are paid to relations and friends each year, the vast majority of which I am sure are to relations.
I recall that almost 50 years ago as an Aer Lingus official I was able to encourage families to spend Christmas with relations in Britain by offering very cheap fares to fill some of the thousands of otherwise empty outward seats on flights laid on to bring many emigrants back here for Christmas.
Even then, when travel was enormously more expensive than today, a total of close to 50,000 emigrants returned here by sea and air each year for Christmas.
I have the impression that family relationships are closer in Ireland than in some other neighbouring countries.
One striking example of this is the contrast between Irish and English third-level students in their choices of universities. In England it has long been the custom of such students to choose a university distant from their homes: getting away from their families has been part of the rite of passage of English students. In total contrast to this, Irish students show a marked propensity to go to the university nearest to their homes. For example, no less than 87 per cent of university students from Co Cork attend either UCC or the University of Limerick, and there is reason to believe that a very high proportion of these who come from rural areas return home at the weekend.
The English student practice has added greatly to the cost of third-level education there. This is, indeed, one of the reasons why, despite its uniquely high post-second-level dropout rate and correspondingly low third-level entry rate, higher education has been so expensive for the exchequer in England: the money has been spent disproportionately on student maintenance rather than on actual education.
Recent attempts to tackle this by providing less generous maintenance terms to students has led to a shift in student preferences toward local third-level institutions in England, and this in turn has provoked academic protests against students becoming more home-orientated and less committed to their academic institutions.
Whatever the merits of these English academic complaints, it seems clear that Irish student practice reflects a much stronger family orientation by young people here, leading, I believe, to the maintenance of stronger family links in later life.
In this connection it is interesting that intergenerational relations in Ireland appear to have been so little affected by the radical changes of the past couple of decades in the mores of the young relating to premarital sexual relations.
Although these changes in social attitudes among the new generation are clearly problematic for their parents and grandparents who were brought up in a quite different world, it seems evident that in most cases the fundamental strength of Irish family relationships has survived these strains.
Indeed the quality of Irish intergenerational relationships has not merely survived; I believe it has been enhanced by the widespread disappearance of the authoritarian element that in the past marred many relationships between Irish parents and their children. The quality of family life has in many cases been improved by the emergence of a much more relaxed atmosphere in the home.
If there are sociological studies of changing relationships within Irish families, I have not come across them. I think it would be useful to know more about this hugely important aspect of our society.