If we could communicate with those who come after us generations from now what would we say to them? What glimpses of our world today would we choose to send forward 100 years?
This year’s census on April 3rd has included a special entry at the end for a Time Capsule. A space, the census takers say, in which “to leave a message – if you wish – for your descendants/future generations/historians. Your message can be about anything you want, to anyone you want.”
The time capsules will remain confidential, along with the rest of Census 2022, until its forms are released to the public in 2122.
For inspiration, we asked a range of people what message they might leave for future generations.
John Teeling
Chairman of Great Northern Distillery
To my grandchildren, I expect that all seven of you aged between 102 and 115 are alive . . . and well. I have no doubt that pioneering work on longevity done by your mother and aunt, Emma Teeling, and others cured ageing. It is an inflammation to be cured. You are also lucky that many of the illnesses we suffer from in 2022 are long gone. Again, due to pioneering work on mRNA technologies by Katalin Kariko.
Individuals can and do make a difference. I hope that is as true in 2122 as it is in 2022. And I hope and expect that your generations will use their imagination, vision and creativity to create new and wonderful technologies and ventures to better the lives of you all – just as men and women transformed the 20th century with fantastical new creations. It really is a brave new world, and maybe even new worlds. So in the immortal words of Spock in Star Trek: “Live long and prosper”.
Marian Harkin
Independent TD, Sligo-Leitrim
Friend, by 2122, I will be long dead. By 2222, most likely you will too. So why does any of this matter?
Maybe because as we live our lives minute by minute, day by day, we know that every thought we think and action we take, collides and fuses with the thoughts and actions of humankind to shape our world.
You may be a frail human like me, you may be genetically perfect, you may be part-cyborg and your world and way of living may well be beyond my imagining. Still, my ego compels me to offer one piece of advice.
Whatever your form or person, stick your hand in your gut, extract whatever humanity still lurks there and let it work its magic.
I will do the same.
Dr Sarah-Anne Buckley
Head of history, NUI Galway
Our world in 2022 looks very different in many ways to what I imagine 2122 will be. I think and hope, from studying the past, that in other ways we are similar.
In 2022 we still fall in love, some of us get married, we build our own family units, sometimes made up of other imperfect people and animals. We try to exercise and drink less alcohol and eat well – with varying success. We still aim to buy our own homes, much more difficult now than in the past, and we probably consume and produce too much of everything. Religion does not have a place in all our lives. We have phones and devices that are part of our lives whether we like it or not. We have music and art and creative people that help us feel things.
We are, as you will know, in crisis – and we are still living in a patriarchal society, an unequal one, albeit one that has seen big changes. But then maybe you don’t talk about equality as much 100 years from now?
We work – probably too much. We learn, and we stay in education for longer than previous generations. We make mistakes. We are many things. We are complicated. For me, I have more than I ever thought I would, and I know in this I am lucky. Oh, and luck is still a thing.
Manchán Magan
Writer and programme maker
We realise that we here in 2022 are just emerging back into the light after two millennia of darkness and disempowerment, and the hard work of rejuvenating the land and society has barely begun. Our hope is that you’ve continued the work that we’re just beginning to set in motion now, and that you’ve liberated yourselves from the unhealthy paradigm that is currently doing such damage to our health, our landscape and our societies. We honour you all for the progress you’ve made in returning us to who we really want to be.
Valerie Mulvin
Architect, McCullough Mulvin
Facts for the future: census 2122
A sunlit road with trees. An address. Bare list of names. The house a container of works and days, lives and works –1861 to 1911 to 1934 to 1958 to 1992 to 1993 to 2022.
Section like a Paris apartment. Every floor full to the attics, space by space. A microcosm of all of layered Dublin frozen in time, back to Joyce’s kickshaws.
Carved up rooms, random bathrooms, pennyboard partitions. Under the wallpaper pencil graffiti of 1934, God save the king. Space released.
Families with servants, school for radio operators, tiny bedsits, photographic rooms, hatched offices, TV company, families without servants, architects studio, archive, garden flat, hall floor of maps of laid down cities.
Happiness, grief, solace, parties, long tables, books, artworks, papers, scribbling, drawings, cameras, solitary time, celebrations, garden rooms, from full to empty.
An envelope for creative lives.
Open to the next 100 years.
Prof Luke O'Neill
Professor of biochemistry, Trinity College Dublin
Can you imagine there was a time when we treated many cancers with a knife or poisons? Or that we had no way to stop Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease or Motor Neurone Disease? And we had no real idea of how the brain works and as a result couldn’t treat or prevent schizophrenia or severe depression? So well done you people in the future. Science has cracked all these problems. Just like it had cracked many infectious diseases, not least the great pandemic of the 2020s which I’ll bet you’re still talking about.
Maureen Kennelly
Arts Council director
This morning (March 24th) I woke to portents of inflation reaching levels previously hit in 1984, and that sent something of a shudder through me. My memories of growing up in the 1980s are of dark days with constant news of strikes, job losses, the troubles, mass emigration and the shocking, shameful treatment of women.
This feeling makes me all the more grateful for excerpts of literature that help dispel the gloom and remind me of the essential goodness and kindness that is everywhere in evidence.
These lines from Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again hit me every time with a force, filled as they are with wisdom and clarity. “And it came to him then that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect.”
These timeless lines are ones to keep close in perpetuity.
Gary Gannon
Social Democrats TD, Dublin Central
There is a quote on a plaque outside Doyle’s pub on College Street in Dublin that reads, “there’s a good time coming, be it ever so far away”.
I’d send them that in the hope they might be able to verify its accuracy.
Frank O'Connor
Sustainable designer and activist
Dear future generations, A word of caution from the past. It was almost too late when we realised we got carried away. We thought individualism and endless consumption would make us happy and technology was the saviour. What we really needed was quality time together, combined with “public luxury, private sufficiency” and a social contract that worked for everyone, no exceptions. Please remember, whatever you accumulate in life you can’t take with you to the grave, but memories of time spent with loved ones will carry on forever.
Fran McNulty
Presenter, RTÉ Prime Time
I’d start with “I hope someone is reading this”, because in the world today, how can we be sure? We’re still living in a pandemic. An autocrat is bombarding a democratic Ukraine. Climate change threatens all our lives, and ways of life.
I’d probably include Theo Dorgan’s pensive poem, The Question.
When the great ships come back,
and come they will,
when they stand in the sky
all over the world,
candescent suns by day,
radiant cathedrals in the night,
how shall we answer the question:
What have you done
with what was given you,
what have you done with
the blue, beautiful world?
In 100 years, will we have done enough to undo the damage we’ve inflicted on our earth? Those of us now living will never know.
I’d conclude with some hope: the more adversity we face, the more united we become, Ukraine being a case in point. I’d include something to reflect Ireland’s huge social progress, including marriage equality and acceptance. Perhaps a mini-print of Joe Caslin’s same-sex marriage mural from George’s Street, or a line from Anne Enright, or Sally Rooney, Colum McCann or Donal Ryan (surely, by 2122, all greats in the vein of Yeats or Beckett or Joyce?).
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Sarah Moss
Novelist and lecturer in creative writing, University College Dublin
Dear future people, I am sorry. I am sorry that I was an adult with agency and various kinds of capital when we could have reversed climate change, when we could have stopped things getting worse and then when we could have slowed the destruction. Collectively, passively, we chose not to change. I am sorry that thousands of species of plants and animals have disappeared in my lifetime. I am sorry that I, like my parents and almost certainly my children, will leave our world to you more depleted and dirty than we found it. I’m sorry we used up the fossil fuels and then poisoned the land with the weapons we used to fight over the last drops. I’m sorry we killed the seas with plastic. I’m sorry that my sorrow makes no difference to anything. I’m sorry that my sorrow is enough to stop me eating meat and driving a car but not enough to stop me flying even though I know that flying does more damage. It is so hard, you see, to give up travelling our world in its glory.
Katherine O'Donnell
Associate professor, history of ideas, UCD school of philosophy
I am going to write a letter in my census note to the future. I am going to begin in the usual manner by addressing the reader and, as I don’t have children or grandchildren, I will write ‘Hello, dear curious stranger’.
I’ve decided that I am going to write an intimate letter. If anyone is curious about me it would not be difficult even in 100 years to learn who my parents and siblings were, but there may be no way of knowing who my friends were or why I loved them, so I will tell the reader about my friends. I will tell the reader what I am most proud of accomplishing and what I have done that I regret. I will tell them what brings me the deepest joy and worst pain and what I most hope for and what I fear. I will tell them the one (or maybe two) pieces of wisdom of which I think I am certain. I will end with my best wishes – that they are as happy in their lives as I am in my own.
Sonya Kelly
Playwright
Greetings, friends of the future. I am a member of one of the world’s oldest professions: theatre. I can’t imagine how many nuanced and sophisticated leisure experiences good old fashioned theatre has to compete with in 2122, from full sensory immersive cinema, to hyperloops, to lab-grown gourmet hamburgers. Indeed, you may think going to a play is so last century. In fact, it dates back to the 6th century BC. That would make theatre older than democracy. What I have learned from witnessing the world events of 2022 is that it is vital to protect them both. Art and democracy are the lifeblood of humanity. Being a writer and working in the arts has been the greatest privilege of my time on this splendid rock called Earth. It stands as a reminder that I may not live in a perfect world, but it is still a world where I am free to express my creativity without fear of reprisal. Whatever rituals have endured in the 100 years between my life and yours, I do hope theatre is among them.
Christopher O'Sullivan
Fianna Fáil TD, Cork South-West
I’m sorry for the state the planet is in. We should have cared more. Also, Google “Curlew”! It was a stunning wading bird with a long decurved bill.
Sarah Webb
Children's writer
Reading. Imagine a person reading...
That word – reading.
Reading has been the one constant in my life. As a young child my dad loved to read me the Winnie the Pooh tales. Do you still know them now?
When I could read by myself I discovered the wonder of Narnia, the world through the back of a wardrobe, and went on adventures with the Famous Five and the Secret Seven.
Books were my dear, dear friends and companions, and remain so to this day.
My one hope for the future is this – that children and grown-ups still have access to great stories and books. I’d love to think people are still curling up with a good book in 2122. A book written and made with love.
Because I believe that stories and books make the world a better place.
