As the new year gets under way, there is a lot of anger out there about the state of the nation, and probably only a tiny percentage of it is reflected in the letters page of this newspaper. Many of our contributors are outraged about where Ireland is heading or going, and some even have different opinions on where it's actually been. Half the nation seems to regard the nation itself as an unruly adolescent with too much pocket money and too little interest in school, entirely at the mercy of its own raging hormones, in urgent need of control, advice, direction and the odd kick in the pants.

P. Kiely, who hails from the Old Golf Course in Donegal Town - which seems an odd place for a golf course, but never mind - is one of the disaffected. In a letter published the other day, he or she, but at any rate P, spoke of a nation "in spiritual and moral decline, going fast down the tubes in an orgy of consumerism, greed, alcohol, substance abuse and whatever you're having yourself."

That was just the first paragraph. There was lots more about television trash, false accents, image over substance, mediocrity, shallowness, stupidity, charade, deception and all the "myriad excesses and addictions" that pass for modern culture. And why, asked P, do we allow this cess pit? (P's description): "Because we are ashamed of our past - that had faults, yes, but was glorious in culture, and spiritual depth, compared with the wasteland of economic boom and human destruction of spirit that is today."

Dear, oh dear. Are things really that bad? I am afraid so. P's language may be emotive but the national picture evoked, while deeply unflattering, is largely accurate. We are a modern amalgam of those ill-fated Biblical cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, rushing (headlong) to our fire-and-brimstone fate, and there is no one to shout stop.

But shure can't we have an oul' laugh at ourselves while we're here, and maybe the odd jar? The foolish cry of the doomed. The answer must be: no, we cannot. Not until we have stemmed the flow of wickedness, pushed back the evil tide of promiscuity, called a halt to the rise of wrongdoing, curbed our animal appetites, given up the false religion of consumerism and ceased the unseemly wrangling over public house closing time.

Is it backwards you and P. Kiely would have us going then? P and I are not in tandem on this issue. Indeed, P harks back nostalgically to this nation's glorious past, yet simultaneously warns that "we are going backwards fast into a mire of mediocrity", giving the unfortunate impression that he may not even be in tandem with himself.

And where do you stand? On the proverbial fence, I suppose? I can think of no proverb in which a fence is referred to, and suspect you are using language sloppily. As to my position on the subject of past and future, my belief is that individually and as a nation, we are intellectually geared to move forward, mentally stalled in present time, and emotionally programmed to look backwards (boats against the current sort of thing, borne back ceaselessly into the past).

The Lord save us, is it that complicated?

I fear it may be.

Tell us something: what the hell is wrong with mediocrity (any- way), for P Kiely to be getting so upset about it? An excellent question. Mediocrity is no more than a mean state or condition, and to be mediocre is to be of middling quality, and most of us are mediocre, or fairly middling, at many things, so why the condition should carry such disparaging connotations is difficult to understand.

Thanks, that's very comforting, I thought I was all alone.

None of us is. And by the way, as Arthur Conan Doyle once observed, mediocrity never knows anything higher than itself, but talent instantly recognises genius.

Right, so where does that leave yourself, P Kiely, today's Ireland, yesterday's and tomorrow's too?

Oh, I don't know, still following Yeats's elemental creatures I suppose, after he red rose-bordered hem - ah, faeries dancing under the moon, a Druid land, a Druid tune.

bglacken@irish-times.ie