Madam, - Angela Macnamara, in her Christmas wish-list (December 12th), seems to long for an older, happier kind of Irish Christmas. But how much happier were those Irish Christmases of bygone times?
Even in the better-off Irish homes long ago there was only one of the things she lists and nothing at all of some of them - except, of course, children of whom there were usually more than two (often many more, unspoiled or otherwise). Of overwrought parents there were also often two.
As for Santa, like most agents of distribution then as now, he brought more to the children of the well-off and usually little, if anything, to the children of the poor. And often it wasn't only the children who failed to notice.
So what has changed? The notion that the people abandoned a happier time of quiet contentment and emotional stability for a consumerist dystopia merits some consideration.
That the comparison is simplistic itself reflects a very Irish predilection: a propensity to think that answers are necessarily simple. In my lifetime I have watched the Irish in large numbers embrace in turn an unquestioning authoritarian religion, a crude simplistic nationalism, and then the crass materialism of the past dozen years or so. And at each turn Utopia seemed nearer to hand.
The impoverished, largely rural Ireland of simple faith (religious and political) has given way to a poverty of a different kind. How much has changed and yet how much has remained the same! Perhaps things will not really change until we stop looking for simple answers. - Yours, etc,
FRANK FALLS,
Baldham, Bavaria,
Germany.