At face value, you wouldn't argue with Cardinal Cahal Daly's recent observation at the launch of his new book, The Making of Planet Earth: "It is puerile to buy symbols such as a four-wheel drive and to think that owning these things can give you status." There is undoubtedly something silly about a culture in which the kind of car you drive has become such a powerful indicator of who or what you are. But the Cardinal's choice of word - "puerile" - suggests that he finds the modern preoccupation with motor vehicles an immature or childish phenomenon. But, in truth, it is much sillier than that, writes John Waters
I was reminded of the late writer and journalist John Healy's rationalisation for buying himself a Rolls Royce for the sole purpose of driving it - just once - into his Mayo town of Charlestown. He, too, recognised the gesture as silly, but, as he put it: "If that is the measurement of achievement in the society, then yes, there it is, I have it."
He sold the car quietly after a short time.
The point is that we do not, as individuals, choose the symbols with which we must declare ourselves, nor can we control the meanings they generate if we cease to pay them proper attention.
There is nothing childish about the symbolism of motor vehicles. The meanings relate completely to the adult world, and there not merely to status, but to personality, sexuality, even identity itself.
You might well argue that this indicates a spiritual collapse - which was the cardinal's point.
But we need to look deeper, to the way Irish society has changed from a social hierarchy in which everyone was accorded a ranking on the basis of respectability and piety, to one in which money is the measure of everything.
As a child, one of the most pathos-saturated scenes I witnessed was the sight of the elderly parents of a successful local blade being dropped at the church gates in the new car. To see a pinched and self-conscious couple scrambling shame-facedly from a dazzling spaceship of a Sunbeam Rapier was to see the effects of the hierarchy bearing down on the generations, withholding permission to step beyond your ranking.
Nowadays the church carpark is a battle of the chariots. There is an interesting moral discussion to be had about which is preferable, or even better, but this is the motoring section and there is enough taxing of the motorist without starting on his brain.
Throughout most of my adulthood, I would have agreed with the cardinal. But then I saw the Alfa Romeo 156 T-spark, and fell in love. My view of four-wheeled life has not been the same since. The idea that, as an Irish Times columnist, I did not necessarily have to drive an ugly car was akin to my first discovery of sex or alcohol.
Oh right, you say, a mid-life crisis - how novel and interesting! But no: I have simply arrived at that point reached by Patrick Kavanagh on the canal-bank: the point of not caring. Except that, this being a half-century on, my indifference is directed against neither the sackcloth-and-ashes of traditional piety, nor the vulgarity of new money in what we call Modern Ireland, but against the high priests of political correctness who mix and match their tyrannies with the time of day.
The cardinal may well have been talking about me. This year, I bought myself an Alfa GT. I couldn't resist it, for it is perhaps the most beautiful car that ever nosed onto a public road. I am not without guilt, but am working on that.
Perhaps Cardinal Daly is right; perhaps it is puerile. But it is a long time since I felt so good with my clothes on.
As a youngster, I adored cars. My father, who had he lived would have been 100 this month, was a mechanic with godlike powers over engines. A man once described to me seeing him fix a broken driveshaft by using the branch of a tree as a splint. (He was also a gifted horticulturist.)
I didn't inherit much of the mechanical bent, but I knew what I liked. In a hazy period in the 1970s, I owned an MG Midget, an MGB GT and a Triumph Spitfire, of which the Midget, Brigid, was the love of my life. This was the era before compulsory vehicle testing, and it was possible to make a big statement without a mortgage.
Then, for more than 20 years, politics took over. My head could no longer be turned by a pair of shapely wing-sections. I declined into what I now describe as my PC Phase, in which the functionality of the car became not just more important than looks, but precisely the statement I wanted my car to make about me. I drove a Fiesta, a Toyota Tercel, two Clios and three different versions of the same yawn-inducing Rover.
I have a sense that this phase coincided with a period in which the motor mainstream succumbed to ugliness of an almost masochistic kind. In the 1980s, aesthetics became not merely secondary but almost irrelevant. I blame the Japanese.
Back in the 60s and 70s, although there were certainly some pig-ugly cars on the road, there were also some beautiful Rovers, Mercs, Wolsleys, as well as classics like the Mini and the VW Beetle. The problem that developed thereafter arose from the mechanical unreliability we had taken for granted.
In those days, you really didn't expect your car to start every day. Two out of three was pretty good, especially in winter, and it was by no means an embarrassment to have to ask for a shove. But then the Japanese arrived with their Datsuns and Toyotas, and put an end to all that.
Their arrival coincided with the fading of the 60s dream, the dropping hemline and 4-4-2 football. After that, your car might be rusting to death, but it would always start.
And with this reliability came a phlegmatic contempt for form, which rapidly spread to the European manufacturers. Thus began the era of the functional Ford, the Cortina, the Corsair, the Fiesta, a range of breezeblock Fiats and the occasional fruity Opel.
Cars then became a kind of anti-statement, an avoidance of beauty, a reflection of the dour, recessionary times. To drive a beautiful car was to reveal yourself as a frivolous person, unaware of the seriousness of the general situation. Even if you'd picked it up for next to nothing at an auction, you had to spend so much time explaining how you'd got it - by way of apologising for having it - that the fun was knocked out of it. To blend in was to drive an invisible car - a Hillman Hunter, perhaps, or an Opel Kadett.
For myself, I drove a Fiesta, and later a Clio, for the same reason I wore woolly jumpers. These, let's face it, were girl's cars. For a woman they represented acquiescence in the concept of the "little woman"; for a man to drive one went far beyond his loudly-professed fondness for something "nippy about town" - it was a safety valve for his existential guilt, a disavowal of the big-mickey motor, an asexual statement of brotherly solidarity in the sisterly cause, an acceptance of the Naomi Wolf idea that beauty is a spurious aesthetic designed to perpetuate the patriarchy. "Trust me, Sisters", it screeched, "I am in touch with my fuel-consumption".
And this is where Cardinal Daly's observation reveals its faultlines. He is mistaken in believing that a new phenomenon has manifested itself as a result of the Celtic Tiger. For the statement made by a Fiesta or a Clio was at least as puerile as that made by a Merc or a BMW. All that has happened is that the symbols have changed because we have gotten more honest, something any cleric must applaud. I can see what the cardinal is getting at. But I don't believe I'll go to hell because I didn't drive a Daewoo.