There is a failure by those in power to at least acknowledge the necessity for self-examination, writes Elaine Byrne
TODAY IS the Epiphany, the Christian feast day which celebrates the revelation of Christ's divinity to the Three Wise Men or Magi.
An epiphany is a flash of insight, which Irish public life needs urgently. Ireland would appreciate an abrupt intuitive understanding of the essence and meaning of something she can believe in again.
But this is part of the problem. Traditionally, we have had the luxury of believing in what we were told by authority, without ever fully exercising our responsibility to constructively challenge those orthodoxies.
James Joyce recognised this Irish mindset when he sat down for the traditional Feast of the Epiphany Christmas goose with his family at 15 Usher's Island on the south Liffey quays at the turn of the 20th Century.
Only in his mid-20s, Joyce recreated this family dinner scene in The Dead, the last short story in his timeless novel, Dubliners. This collection of 15 short stories portrayed Dublin and its citizens in an unflattering lifelike portrait.
Explaining his motivation for writing this remarkably perceptive book, Joyce wrote to his London publisher in 1906: "My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life."
Thus, the first three stories of Dublinersrepresented childhood, the next four donated adolescence, followed by four stories on maturity. The last four accounts represented public life.
Has our state of mind changed since then?
The Deadepitomises the inner thoughts of Gabriel Conroy as he awkwardly attends his aunt's party at Morkan House to celebrate the Epiphany. Joyce was preoccupied by epiphanies and its implications on his characters. He enjoyed challenging their outlook on the world. In his posthumously-published autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero, Joyce defined as an epiphany "its whatness . . . The soul of the commonest object."
In The Dead, politics is exhausted by the narrow-minded nationalism of Miss Ivors. Religion and creativity are emaciated by monks lying in their coffins and the empty virtuosity of Mary Jane's piano recital. Politics, religion and creativity are trapped by an inability to recognise the barren poverty of insularity.
Molly Ivors loudly disapproves of Gabriel's desire to discover Europe and implores him to retreat to the isolationist mentality that Ireland's geography embodies.
All aspects of public life represent the passionless living dead. For Joyce, Dublin is hypnotised by a superficial veneer of values, her people characterised by a spiritual paralysis.
The Deadends with Gabriel's epiphany. His wife reveals that as a young girl, another boy, Michael Furey, loved her passionately. Gabriel's assumption of his wife's absolute love for him is undermined.
He becomes conscious for the first time of a need to understand himself and reconciling the past with the future. Gabriel is Ireland, an Ireland damaged by the morally corrupted institutions of the church, politics, professions, banks and media. Our own indifference provided a willing accomplice.
Joyce's 15 short stories climax with Gabriel's epiphany. The genius of Joyce was his literary skills in revealing each painful self-truth by not directly telling us what they were, but instead helping us to come to our conclusions. Although utterly frustrated with Ireland's lethargy, he believed we had a responsibility to think for ourselves.
Public life has become contaminated by compliancy, James. We are feeling our way through the dark, too frightened to turn on the light of imagination because we are afraid to attract attention. We are content to reside in the refuge of victimhood and scapegoating and distrust in our own ability to govern. Hope is explained away as naivete.
But what happens when those in positions of power do not see themselves as the source of the problem but rather blame events outside of themselves? When there is a failure to at least acknowledge the necessity for self- examination?
The last census recorded that 2.8 million Irish citizens were less than 44 years. Two thirds of the Irish population will pay a heavy price, well into their future, for the sins of those now in authority.
There has been no apology from many of our institutions, those role models of irresponsibility that lecture my generation on responsibility.
Beverley Flynn told Mayo station Midwest Radio last Friday that she was entitled to the €40,000 extra tax-free allowance because she was elected as an Independent TD for Mayo in 2007 and only rejoined Fianna Fáil in 2008.
What was Tracey Fay, an 18-year-old mother of two, entitled to? Found dead in a disused coal bunker from a drug overdose, Tracey was entrusted to the State's care. Reporting on the unpublished findings of the Health Service Executive inquiry, Carl O'Brien noted in this newspaper yesterday that "inevitably, she slipped further and further into a street culture of crime, prostitution and drugs".
This is the legacy we have now inherited, one where the abdication of responsibility is intellectually accepted as one without consequences. Where we accept that the death of an 18-year-old mother of two is inevitable.
Happy Epiphany day?