WAITING for a train in of Dublin's southside DART stations some months ago, I watched some work men renewing those yellow lines to warn people to keep away from the edge of the platform. The notice had contracted by 20 per cent since the last time they'd painted it. You could still make out the faint trace of the old message on the concrete: "Please keep behind this line". The new notice read, "Keep behind this line". The "please" had been abolished.
There are several possible explanations. One is that the "please" was a casualty of cuts in public spending. A more prosaic explanation might be that the old message was proving ineffective. Maybe it was felt that the "please" rendered the message more like a request than a regulation. "Please keep behind this line" almost invited the response, "Thank you for the advice, but I think I'll stand here anyway". "Keep behind this line" does not allow any space for argument.
From my observations, most of us appear to regard the yellow line and the polite request to stay behind it as an invitation to leave the rest of the platform completely clear and stand right on the edge. I suppose most of regard the line as just another piece of Brussels inspired nannyeaucracy, to be acquiesced to in the letter but flouted in the spirit.
I have some sympathy with this attitude. Before these lines and injunctions were introduced, members of the public did not, as a rule, inadvertently throw themselves under the wheels of oncoming trains as a consequence of standing too close to the edge of the platform. It seems unlikely that anyone who did come to grief under the wheels of a locomotive would have been saved by the presence of a yellow line and a warning.
There could be a very simple explanation. The workmen may simply have lost or damaged the stencil for the word "please". But I suspect it's a little more metaphysical than that. Perhaps the reason the incident stuck in my mind at all was that I saw the scene in pretty stark symbolic terms. When you come to think about it, the elimination of the "please" from public warnings and notices in Ireland seems pretty appropriate round about now.
Actually, the really strange thing is that such niceties have survived until now. Someone told me recently about a German tourist who was amused to see signposts along the road to Dublin airport apologising for the inconvenience resulting from road works. It seems that such courtesies are unheard of on the mainland.
VERY soon, they will be unheard of here. Lately, I've noticed, we've even begun to become a little self conscious about such remaining idiosyncrasies. Whenever an outsider reveals to us that our personality traits are attractive, we start to worry about them. And as soon as we become conscious about something that marks us apart, it's a sure bet that if it can't be boxed and sold by the unit, it'll be attacked and eliminated before long.
It's a very subtle thing, but gradually and inexorably, some delicate and under appreciated quality has been eroding in Irish life. And this, I believe, is the root of the missing "please". I'm not talking about "good manners", politeness, or even what we call "niceness". For too long we Irish were far too nice, tugging our forelocks and smiling till our hair fell out and our faces cracked. But this is something both more and less than mere courtesy.
You can notice it most in the cities and larger towns. There is an indifference to people that was not noticeable even five or 10 years ago. There is a coldness, a detachment, that - we are led to believe - is part of the package of modern living. Perhaps it follows inevitably upon the increasing crudity of political and media discourse, or is a reaction to the crass hypocrisy that infects so many Irish institutions.
It hasn't yet infected everybody, which is perhaps what makes it so noticeable. Walking around Dublin can be confusing, because sometimes if you smile at or speak to people they look at you like you're an escaped mental patient, and sometimes if you don't they speak to you and make you feel bad. This syndrome is causing the disease to spread even to those most disposed towards resisting it.
People in public offices can't wait to get you off the line. People in shops don't respond any more to smiles or friendly words. Some people remain warm and friendly in spite of all but these are rapidly becoming a minority.
I thought it was just me, until I got a letter from a journalistic colleague who works with a newspaper in one of the larger US cities, who had just returned home after a visit to Ireland. Her most recent trip was the latest of several visits, totalling many months spent in this country. This time around, she too had noticed the missing "please".
"As a reporter," she wrote, "I've travelled all over the world and I've found the Irish have always possessed something few other nationalities have: it's a hard thing to describe but it's a type of warm glitter, an inner fascination with people, a love of taking time to see and care about people". This, she says, is what attracts her and her fellow Americans to Ireland. But now, she feels, this "warm glitter" is being sucked out of us, maybe because of increased consumerism or the influence of EU thinking.
SHE went on: "It shows up especially in Dublin, which at this point feels to me more and more like a big, fat, unfriendly city. I used to love Dublin - I have a dog named Dublin! - but every American I spoke to on this trip simply cancelled their time in Dublin and fled to the country or left Ireland early altogether with a sour taste. People in Dublin have little time for much, let alone this people thing, and they're running somewhere and it seems slightly backwards to me.
"It even gets down to the taxi drivers. I used to take taxis just to talk to the drivers who were, each one, full of light, charm, intelligence and fun. This last round, out of perhaps 70 cabs, three or four drivers were barely friendly. The rest could get jobs in the Bronx."
What she has identified is, I believe, the consequence of a slow brutalisation and the wholesale denial of who and what we are. It is the result both of the pummelling of our collective consciousness by men in grey suits talking forever about things like "development" and "growth" and the refusal to engage with our history in any truthful way. The great irony is that in pursuing material goals in our present manner, we are not merely killing off our own true spirit but also limiting our own potential for future growth at the economic as well as the spiritual or cultural levels.
You don't read much in ESRI reports about soul or warm glitter. But if we develop so fast that we lose our warm glitter, isn't this likely to make us less attractive to the foreign bearers of bounty that we are currently so shamelessly pursuing? I believe it's called the Law of Diminishing Returns.