FROM where I was sitting on a fine sunny day I looked back at a landscape I’d roamed as a child.
Gone for the day and back in the evening to eat fish fresh off the boat. My father would fry it up in a pan. I looked now and saw two restored castles and two derelict churches.
Is that symbolic, I thought? Is that who we are now? Now that we worship money and venerate the wealthy.
When I was a kid I’d been on the roof of one of those derelict castles. Climbed up through the crumbling floors. A stone’s throw from the sea, it nestles in an undulating wooded landscape.
Stunningly beautiful. Now a gate, a Private Property sign, and a steady flow of vehicles comes out of it and it does look impressive in its restored state.
The story is that a member of the family who’d built it had returned from abroad, the US or the UK I can’t be sure, and bought the castle back.
Friends of his, apparently, bought the other one. That one first came to notice when public pathways were boarded up.
Says a lot instantly, doesn’t it?
You’d have to wonder. There is so much resentment stirred up against immigrants and yet the only immigrants in Ireland I know are in workplaces. Unlike, it seems, most of those who protest against them.
Yet there’s no resentment against the excessively wealthy or the inherited wealthy.
Those we celebrate. Strange, isn’t it? We resent those who work and toil alongside us and celebrate those who benefit from our labour.
We lavishly follow those who do nothing but post on social media and deplore those who want to work in our hospitals and shops.
We despise the foreigner working in the Spar and worship the foreigner sitting in the castle. It simply makes no sense. Even by the crude measuring tool of who is most worthy of our resentment.
Of course, any criticism of the wealthy is seen as envy. They can’t believe that we are not all dreaming of life in a castle. They can’t believe that ideas as simple as fairness have any relevance in a modern world.
They don’t understand that we might want an Ireland that is better than that. They only think we want what they’ve got.
The Celtic Tiger still leaves remnants of that philosophy of course. I still walk country lanes and still see new houses and wonder just why they are so big. What for?
Not far from here there is a centuries old ruin that has countless windows, one for every day of the year or something daft like that.
So these vain, grasping, notions have always been around.
The ostentation and the conspicuous consumption. The Celtic Tiger celebrated them, held them as a belief system, but it didn’t usher them in. And as the castle and the new huge houses show its demise didn’t usher them out.
And what of the two derelict churches? I’m not someone who thinks we should bring back the days of Catholicism. I was born and raised in all of that and I think its demise is both substantial and utterly a marker of change in this country.
We might forget just how Catholic we were. We might want to. But not everything that changes changes for the worse. I can’t really mourn the passing of Catholic Ireland. Faith and belief is up to the individual and I’m happy for those who have that comfort.
You don’t have to look far, though, these days do you to see religion as a cover for prejudice and hatred. It’s a shame. But it’s true.
Don’t mind me though. I grew up around dereliction in both England, the ruins of industry, and in Ireland, castles and stone cottages.
Perhaps, I’m overly attached to that landscape. Perhaps, it discolours my view.
Who are the restored castle people? What is it that they think? What are their hopes and plans for this Ireland?
Where are the derelict churches people? What do they think now?
What do they think of this Ireland we have?
See More: Ireland, Joe Horgan
