Mary Kenny
Vincent Browne When Vincent Browne appeared last Sunday at the end of the Listowel Writers’ Week festival he was greeted like a rock star. The very spacious ballroom of the Listowel Arms Hotel was crammed to bursting point with his fans, and cheers greeted almost his every pronunciamento. Vincent was chairing a meeting called ‘The Absurdity of Irish Politics’ with a panel of commentators – Rachael English, Katie Hannon and Michael O’Regan – but Vincent, in full throttle of denunciatory mode, was undoubtedly the star.
And what a woeful picture of this country the ensemble presented! Everything was wrong with Ireland today. There was general agreement that the politicians were rubbish. They thought of little else but getting elected, and then getting re-elected. Once in the Dáil all they cared about was promotion. There hadn’t been a decent political leader since Seán Lemass.
Like a prophet of the Old Testament, Vincent waxed wroth about the sins of the establishment class. He claimed that 200,000 Irishwomen were unrecognised rape victims. We were one of the richest countries in Europe, but 900,000 people were condemned to abject poverty: “Inequality is built into our society.”
Former Finance Minister Michael Noonan came in for a special lambasting.
He waxed wrother still about the posh boys and girls dominating the legal system and the Supreme Court, emerging from Blackrock College, Belvedere, and other bastions of privilege. How dare judges describe an accused person as “coming from a respectable family”! Sheer class discrimination!
As for the health service… it was a national disgrace. Poor people were dying of cancer because of inequality. Homelessness was a cause of shame. Class injustice was at the basis of so much that is rotten in Irish society. The media, too, was dominated by the privileged middle class.
There were some modifications from the panel, but the overall view was a pretty dismal view of Ireland today.
Inequality
You had to admire Vincent’s energy, and even, in his 70s, the righteous anger that spurs him on. He has a point about inequality but, while it makes for an impressive rant, it doesn’t explore the social complexities which can be related to a wider number of issues, from family breakdown to addiction problems.
It’s not just exclusively the fault of the “privileged middle class” which came in for so much denunciation.
And too much negativity drains the soul. After the sold-out show, there were many conversations on the theme of the effects of excessive negativity around just about everything.
It may be best to say nothing…
As a school-leaver aged 16, I was advised by older members of my family to look ahead to a working life.
Some of the career advice proffered was, while well-intentioned, misdirected. Banks were regarded as a very sure bet as an institution. You had to get at least two character references and be a person of rectitude to work in a bank. Our elders were not to know that bankers would come to be despised as casino capitalists grinding the faces of the poor: and many bank jobs would be replaced by modern technology.
Secretarial work was recommended for young women: our elders were not to know that the computer would largely take over office administration. Neither were they to know that ‘outsourcing’ and ‘the gig economy’ would feature in work practices.
And now we are being told that career advice to students today is likely to be similarly outdated. Dr Des Fitzgerald, President of Limerick University, says that parents today know little or nothing about the way the future will shape up.
Actually, nobody knows what the future may hold. I’m told that one of the steadiest of professions, accountancy, is now vulnerable to takeover by robots, while ‘human touch’ professions – from carer to cleric – are considered less likely to replacement by machine.
The cold, hard ‘reality’ of the way things were
The accepted narrative now about unmarried mothers in Ireland in the past is that they were exploited victims consigned to cruel religious institutions, where their infants were torn from their breasts to be given away (or even virtually sold) as adoptees.
But things weren’t always seen that way. A British social worker and a medical pathologist, writing to The Times of London in 1962, expressed a more judgemental perspective.
Commenting on out-of-wedlock births, they remarked: “There is a considerable minority of stupid, self-neglectful unmarried Irish girls who appear to come to England to obtain maternity care and to have the baby adopted.” (Quoted in the academic Clair Wills’ social history of immigrants to the UK, Lovers and Strangers.)
We look back and see past adoptions as a sadness and a grief to the natural mother (which they surely must have been), but sometimes a more matter-of-fact approach prevailed at the time. These British social professionals evidently thought that some of the young women were exploiting the system rather than the other way about.