Call me old fashioned

I am writing this whilst recovering from a major operation last week. Thankfully, the operation appears to have been a success and it will not be long before I am back on my feet again. The last week has been quite a roller coaster. Immediately post the operation I was in probably the weakest state in my life and highly dependent on the expertise and care of the wonderful hospital staff around me. With no visitors allowed because of the pandemic, my need to depend on people who did not know me but whose job was to make sure I stayed well, was stark and a powerful reminder to me of the dependency we have on one another as human beings particularly during a crisis.

Prior to the operation I was speaking with my Dad and we had a brief conversation about what it was like to be a parent in Ireland in the seventies and eighties as I was growing up (and oblivious to the stress and strain he and my mum may have been under). He said that it was difficult. They had decided as parents that my mum would stay at home and that he would be the sole earner into the household. Interest rates went as high as 25% and at one point, almost 70% of my Dads wages were given over in tax. The country was effectively bankrupt and unemployment was at a staggeringly high level (close to 20% I believe). Most young people with any kind of skill or education emigrated.

Despite that, we lived in three houses during my childhood. A 3-bedroom semi-detached house in Cabinteely, a 4-bedroom semi-detached house in Malahide and finally a 5-bedroom detached house in Greystones where I spent the bulk of my youth.

When I was growing up I truly felt I was part of a community. I was always learning new things, doing new activities, exploring with others in a safe environment. I was never alone, surrounded by friends and family and there was this always this powerful energy promising possibility and potential around right up to when I reached my twenties.

My parents paid for me to learn the piano, I went to public schools (as did all my siblings), we paid voluntary contributions to the Scouting association every week (nobody was turned away), we joined Eire Óg (Gaelic sporting organisation) for free and learned to play Gaelic football and Hurling. Each summer we took part in the summer project where we played numerous sports with others from the community for free. We were called into lunch and dinner by listening out for my mum roaring our names down the green in front of our house. We always had wonderful simple and wholesome food. We had bikes, skateboards, tennis rackets, footballs etc. and never really wanted for anything. We built our own racing carts, made swings across rivers, built tree houses and forts. Our family had one holiday every year and we visited various parts of Ireland and on a couple of occasions various parts of Brittany in France.

I only really have positive powerful memories of a fun filled varied childhood and was blissfully unaware of how hard it was for my parents during this time. My parents literally ran the tightest ship you could imagine allowing for all these things to happen.

One of my standout memories of my childhood was my Dad inviting me along to help with work he was doing with the St Vincent De Paul. Most Saturday mornings we installed a new cooker or fixed a roof or a leak for some member of our community who was struggling. My Dad never made a fuss about what we were doing. He just brushed it off and would say that everyone needs help every now and again. That simple, anonymous practice of caring has always stayed with me.

The Ireland of today is unrecognisable to the Ireland I grew up in.

 

Over the last few decades we constantly hear that our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is increasing (essentially the money circulating in our economy), unemployment is coming down, services are improving and so the goal would seem to be to continue on this path.

I am so tired of hearing that GDP growth is a measure of success.

If I am brutally honest, it seems to me that increasing GDP is only really a measure of success for a diminishing number of very wealthy people in any economy that uses it as a measure of success.

There is a long list of differences to the Ireland that young people today are growing up in versus the one I grew up in, that are worth mentioning.

You cannot realistically own a house suitable for a small family without massively putting yourself into debt. House prices are ridiculously inflated when you compare them to the average industrial wage.

You cannot realistically rent a house in an urban area. You have no choice but to share costs. Students and people starting out in their careers are really affected by this. They cannot afford a house and because rents are so high, they cannot save for a house deposit pushing up the demand for rental properties.

In families starting out, both parents must work. Affordable childcare is almost at the levels of a second mortgage.

Every single physical activity a child does is now subject to significant insurance costs.

The public health system is singularly inadequate for the size of our current population and without private health insurance you can get into real trouble if you get ill.

School fees, University fees are all increasing putting more debt on students and families (this is such a bad idea – burdening students with debt when they leave education limits their ability to really find their potential which might involve a period of time where they earn very little).

There is almost no community service that your taxes cover.

You are now taxed on the property you live in despite most people having already paid stamp duty for their home and in an inflated housing market these taxes are always increasing.

Car insurance and registration are one of the highest in the world.

Services like broadband, mobile phone packages TV license fees are sometimes 25% higher than the average in Europe.

Utilities like electricity, gas are higher here than almost anywhere else in Europe (despite us having some of the best renewable resources on the planet)

Our public service wage bill grows every year with what would appear to be guaranteed increments unrelated to performance. Meanwhile in the private sector, many areas have not seen wage increases in a decade. I for one earn substantially less now than I did in 2005.

Suicide (particularly in young men) and homelessness are the worst they have ever been in decades.

Serious crime (particularly related to ‘middle class’ drugs like cocaine and ICE) is a growing and now a significant problem in Ireland.

People literally do not have the time to participate and build social fabric in their communities. Many communities simply become what are known as commuter towns where long commute times mean there is little time for anything else.

So, the question needs to be asked, what are we trying to create?

Does all this growth in GDP and circulating wealth end up being the goal or do we want to create a society that is better than what we had before?

I seriously question that the society we have created over the last few decades is a society that is better than the one I grew up in. I am not trying to glamorise what I had - there were significant problems and issues with Irish Society in the seventies and eighties but I contend that there are significantly more issues with the society we have today.

I want to illustrate the point with two examples.

My core contention in both is that the stress and strain of growing GDP at both a macro and a micro level has made us more selfish (or maybe less outward looking to be more generous in description). This has led us to isolate ourselves from community because we literally do not have the time or resources to do that.

For me, a successful society is founded on an intrinsic sense of collective responsibility. What I mean by this is essentially people looking after one another (not just themselves) when there is a need to do so. Our care for one another really embodies what is beautiful about being human. Our society should be set up to allow this to become manifest in almost every facet of our daily lives.  From the way we raise our children to the way we care for the elderly in the twilight years of their lives. From the way we support our neighbours who get into difficulty to the ways we help those in the developing world. From the way we pull together to champion causes like homelessness and racism to the way we welcome refugees from war torn countries around the globe. The spirit of sharing and caring should embody (and be completely natural and unforced) in everything we do.

Why is this true? It is because it is an absolute guarantee that we all need help in our lives at some point so, in a selfish kind of way, you can think of it as your health protection insurance policy.

There is also a very strong scientific argument around why it is important. If you look at the human brain and how it has evolved over the centuries, we see that the motor cortex (that part of the brain that controls muscles and motor function) has very particular elements to it devoted purely to socialising and face to face communication. Humans have significantly more brain power devoted to things like facial expressions, the use of our tongue and control of our hands compared to other intelligent mammals suggesting that we evolved as social animals working in groups with sophisticated language skills and that these traits define us.

Human beings need to work together to survive. Its built into our biology.

 

I was admitted to hospital last week. At almost the same time my wife’s sister (to whom she is very close) was admitted into an Intensive Care Unit in Nairobi Kenya. She had developed pulmonary Emphysema and Pneumonia and was seriously ill. Right now, public hospitals in Kenya are on strike because of the COVID19 pandemic (healthcare workers can not obtain proper PPE apparently) and so the only option was to put my wife’s sister into an ICU in a private hospital in Nairobi. She has no health care insurance and so the healthcare costs are astronomical by anyone’s standards (about €1000 a day).

Our family has limited funds, but we managed the initial costs. However, it soon became clear that the costs were beyond us. We asked for help. I setup a gofundme campaign and my wife setup a Kenyan based Whatsapp group.

Initially we thought that the gofundme campaign would serve to pay the bulk of the hospital fees and the local based initiative would be for costs like transport, consumables etc.

It has not worked out that way. The response to the local campaign in Kenya from people with a fraction of the income of people in Ireland has been nothing short of extraordinary. Hundreds of people have joined in and are actively drawing others in to help.

Initially this shocked me. Obviously, it is easier to convey the seriousness of the situation to people on the ground in Kenya – its much harder to do that from here in Ireland - but still it has really brought it home to me how hard it is to get people to collectively care about anything in the Ireland of today even when you call out for help. Kenya is approximately ten times less economically successful if you were to use GDP as the measure of success and yet despite that it is a country where people really do look out for one another. Ireland used to be like this but not anymore.

I have amazing friends - caring, compassionate, idealistic and courageous but these days I rely on social networking to keep in contact. There is a terribly false assumption that has people believing that when you post something on social media, everyone you know sees it.  The algorithms that drive what you see have very little to do with what matters to you. They are driven by what matters to the social media platform which is essentially to keep people on the platform as long as possible so the data can reveal how best to sell something to them.

Think about this. We are essentially replacing one of the key safety nets in human behaviour (a close friendship group which is normally cultivated with people meeting up, sharing real experiences, communicating and enjoying one another’s company) with an algorithm driven connection methodology designed to use knowledge about our behaviours to make money.

And the terrible truth is that this insidious effort to undermine our essential communication needs as human beings is going largely un-noticed or challenged in the western world.

Why do I and many others use social media to stay connected to my friends? Its easy, convenient and allows me to convince myself that I am staying in touch with people I care about. The truth is though, that I do it because I do not have the time and energy to do the real social networking. Life has put too many demands on me (and I suspect many others) to engage in the essential activity of building strong social fabric around me.

Interestingly, my wife who is from Kenya actively sustains her real social life. She cannot understand how we (as in Irish Culture) do not put more effort into our communities. Back in Kenya this is just the way it is.

The second example is less personal but probably more contentious. 

Like pretty much everyone in Ireland, the reading of the report into the Mothers and Babies home scandal really upset me. The treatment of the women and children in the homes was utterly appalling and does not reflect any value system I can subscribe too.

The homes were setup to essentially punish unmarried mothers and in a twisted kind of way to provide shelter to unwanted children. State, Church and Society were all complicit and nobody can take the higher ground in this horror story. We all share a collective responsibility to address the grave injustices that occurred in those homes. If there is a redress scheme to be managed that required a tax contribution, it is something I would willingly pay.

These days easy access to abortion sorts the issue out. Abortion has become the global approach to managing the really difficult issue of unwanted pregnancies (80 million abortions a year globally).

Last year Ireland officially recorded 6666 abortions. That is the undergraduate population of Dublin City University in one year. It is highly unlikely those souls will ever have an investigation into their deaths in the near future. Abortion is very much an accepted practice in western society.

Most people know my views on this. This is not the article to go into detail here but it suffices to say that I have never seen, read or heard a credible pro-abortion argument based on science that justifies mainstream abortion. All our understanding of science points in the opposite direction. If we believe it is wrong to kill an innocent human being for the simple reason of being alive then quite simply abortion is gravely wrong.

My personal views on abortion aside, is it beyond us to provide an alternative to unwanted pregnancy? Can we not have State supported facilities (like ‘flying start’ in Wales) where mother and child are supported in numerous ways that make the choice of abortion something truly limited? I am thinking of early learning centres where children are given proper nutrition and health services. Women could safely leave their babies in centres like this and continue studying, working, travelling or whatever activity they felt pregnancy was going to severely impact.

Our adoption facilities are difficult to navigate. Is there work to be done here that can improve that? Could we extend our fostering system to help women through the early challenges of rearing a child so they feel supported in their choice?

An approach like the above would in an odd kind of way provide services that the Mother and Baby centres were supposed to do but never did.

The point is this. I genuinely think the way we have structured our society, which requires inexorable GDP growth, means that our ability to care for one another (especially our children) is severely compromised.

It is ridiculously hard to bring a child into the society we have created and by doing this we open the doors to ‘solutions’ like abortion. The same can be said for assisted suicide. Of course, there are extreme counter examples, but do we really want a society that provides options for euthanasia once you are not a contributor to GDP?

Surely we can put resources into making sure we have the best possible facilities for people nearing the end of their life? Possibly the most stark truth to emerge from the pandemic is just how far away we are from this.

Interestingly communities in Kenya are set up so the elderly are essentially revered as they get older. They become elders in the community that young people can go to for advice. Their life experiences in a sense are treasured and made available to the next generation. It is a beautiful way of supporting your community with everyone participating and is completely at odds with the idea that as you get older you can contribute less.

 If we had the proper systems in place to support children, the elderly the sick and the weak, our society would be a lot fairer and easier to live in.

The simple earlier example of how the community in Kenya rallied to help my sister in law has taught me a few things, the most important being that if the community is strong help is on hand. We really have lost that in Ireland. I am truly sorry to say that because it is something, I assumed was synonymous with being Irish.

So, what do we do? How do we find a way to build a society we can all thrive in and be proud of?

We have a very good tax collection system. I would be happy to pay more tax if policies like the following were being actively pursued:

A policy to dramatically reduce the number of people who are homeless. If homeless figures go up it is a clear alarm signal that our society is not working.

A policy that aims to reduce suicides in Ireland (particularly in young men). We need proper mental health service in Ireland and not be relying on charities. If you see suicides on the rise it is also another clear indicator of something going wrong in society.

Policies that dramatically improve nursing homes and any facility that cares for vulnerable people.

Policies that develop  support facilities and early intervention strategies to help mums and children during the difficult pre school years of child rearing. This could be integrated into a comprehensive pre school support system nationwide.

An option for young people to give one year of their education to serving the most vulnerable in society. This cannot be forced but nothing beats real experience when it comes to developing empathy for people less fortunate than you.

Nationwide initiative where people meet once a week to offer their services to one other in the community in the form of dedicated hours of free time. Service could be anything from plumbing, accountancy, taxis, event organisation, hair dressing etc. In Ireland we used to have something similar called Meitheal.

We need a better functioning health service. The pandemic has really shown up just how unfit for purpose our health system is despite the billions we pour into it. It is simply unacceptable that we have only 250 acute care beds in a country with the population we have. We need a 1000 bed acute care hospital in the middle of the country built by the private sector (the Children’s Hospital debacle has convinced me that there really is nobody competent in the public sector able to decide where and how to build a hospital).

If you are paying a good portion of your salary into the tax system then education and health have to be covered for everyone. Education looks after the young, health looks after the vulnerable and frail.

A policing policy that truly empowers the police to get drugs (particularly hard drugs) out of Ireland. They are the scourge of communities and cause nothing but devastation and despair. I would honestly go so far as to have dedicated prisons for serious drug crime where the regime is extremely difficult and long term (whilst being fair obviously).

And finally a callout for our entrepreneurs in our country. It is incredibly difficult to start a company in Ireland. There is enormous risk aversion and with far too much emphasis on bringing big brand names to Ireland. Yes they provide employment but they are only here as long as the incentives are good. We leave ourselves at their mercy which makes us look foolish when it comes to tax collection and vulnerable to their profit driven whims. Local companies by their very nature build social fabric.

The global pandemic has been hard on just about everyone. We have learned a huge amount about what we need for a functioning society but crucially we have come to understand the importance of human connection. There is a golden, possibly once in a lifetime, opportunity to not rebuild what we had before the pandemic but to build anew based on what we now know.

Were we to think like this, we could start building foundations of a society that is a lot fairer, a lot more compassionate and a lot more sustainable than what we currently have.

Its success would certainly not be measured on how high the GDP growth was in any one year!