Mary Kenny
Isn’t Mullinalaghta wonderful? This small village in Co Longford raised a national cheer – and a hooray among the diaspora too – when its GAA football team beat Kilmacud Crokes to win the Leinster Football Club final last weekend.
Mullinalaghta has a population of only 447 and the GAA club’s membership there is just 155 (as against Kilmacud’s 4,800). I thought it a lovely part of the country when I stayed in the nearby area of Lough Gowna, on the Cavan border.
The area has had its economic ups and downs over the years, and during the recession many of the young men, in particular, emigrated to Australia and New Zealand, where there was a demand for electricians, carpenters and builders after the New Zealand earthquake of 2011.
Spirit
But the GAA football has kept the community spirit, and more recently, I’m told that some young people there have chosen not to emigrate so as to support the sporting spirit at home.
And Peter McGivney, the father of the team’s centre-forward, James, has another theory of why the Mullinalaghta team is such a success: it’s all down to a baby-boom in the 1990s, he says. There was a spike in babies, and specially in boys, during that decade, and since any of the kids could walk, they’ve been virtually in training for Gaelic football.
It’s a salutary reminder that natalism is the lifeblood of any community: no society survives, let alone thrives, unless babies are born. Any society, be it small village or large nation, perishes unless it has a positive attitude to bringing new life into the world – and into its community.
Just as Mullinalaghta was winning through, La Repubblica newspaper in Italy was issuing another warning about the dire prospects for the future of Europe if fertility isn’t increased.
The EU needs a fertility base of 2.1 children per woman, writes Alessandro Rosina – himself an outstanding Italian footballer – in the leading Italian newspaper. (At present, the EU figure is just reaching 1.6 babies per woman. It simply isn’t enough to sustain a balanced society in the future.) By the middle of this century, 50% of EU citizens will be senior citizens – and the services, and the economic structure, to support the population just cannot be sustained unless there are more babies.
It seems that Mullinalaghta can give a lesson to Europe in this matter: babies mean more than football success – they mean the continuity of life itself, and of a society in which the common good is achieved in a just balance.
*****
I’d recommend mental gymnastics!
Does doing crosswords or other mental exercises and word-games help to keep the brain active in the senior years? A new study carried out at Aberdeen University, involving 500 adults, and published in the medical journal the BMJ, concludes that there is no evidence that such hobbies prevent mental decline in old age.
This outcome is discouraging. I started doing crosswords rather late in life in the hope that the exercise would “take my mind to the gym”. And, contrary to the Aberdonian study, I find the daily mental exercise a stimulus to thinking, and a good prompt to vocabulary training.
And I’ve learned quite a bit about how the brain works. If I start doing the crossword with my morning coffee, at around 11am, I usually get about a third or a half of it done.
There’ll always be clues that stump me – questions about the Old Testament have revealed how under-informed I am about some of the books in the Hebrew Bible – but when I return to the puzzle later in the day the unconscious mind has done the work and the answers usually pop into my head.
But if I start the crossword late in the day, the brain operates much more slowly, and I probably won’t be able to complete the puzzle correctly. The old grey matter tires as the day wears on, and the synapses haven’t had time to get into gear.
But crosswords have taught me a lot and I’ve found that they’re very enjoyable too. So despite the latest study by the boffins, I recommend the mental gym.
*****
Henry Kelly, the Dublin-born broadcaster (and Old Belvederian) is in his retirement years, but he made a witty appearance on a BBC radio quiz show recently, Quote Unquote, telling the following anecdote:
A man was asked to explain the difference between ignorance and apathy. “I neither know nor care,” he replied.
Droll!