IRELAND IS trying to find its way back to a more balanced approach to materialism after becoming “consumed by consumerism”, President Mary McAleese said yesterday during a visit to Phoenix, Arizona.
Speaking to reporters after a presentation at Arizona State University about a joint entrepreneurial project with Dublin City University, Mrs McAleese said Irish people were paying a big price for a radical shift in values.
“I think that everyone of us would have to say with our hands on our hearts that we were all consumed by that same element of consumerism,” she said. “Somewhere along the line, we began to think that we weren’t happy with deferred gratification.
“We had to have it now and in this moment and I think that we have paid a very, very big price for that very radical shift. And now the balance presumably is going to swing back the other way and it will be no harm. We clearly have come from quite unbalanced times and they have not been able to secure for us the kind of peace of mind, peace of heart, contentment that we would have wished for. Now we’re trying to find our way back to a more rooted and possibly more modest time.”
Earlier, the President lamented that some global financial leaders had been “overwhelmed by greed”, misdirecting their brainpower to produce a financial system “with all the stability of a pack of tarot cards”.
Mrs McAleese said she was referring to some in the corporate sector who ignored the consequences of their actions on vast numbers of people of more meagre means.
“In particular, I was talking there about those who made decisions about other people’s lives that had very devastating downstream consequences but may very well have been influenced by the chance for themselves to make [money], whether it was profits or bonuses. That’s the kind of mentality,” she said.
“It’s a wonderful thing to be able to help people have their own homes and to build up community in that way. But if you lose sight of the fact that that’s what you’re doing – that you’re building up community – if what you’re doing is building up your own bonus, it seems to me that somehow we’ve lost sight of what we’re all about here which is about helping one another to grow, to flourish, to benefit as human beings and to benefit widely as community.”
Mrs McAleese said she looked forward to Barack Obama’s inauguration as the next president of the US and suggested that Ireland was not far from being able to choose a member of an ethnic minority as head of state.
“Not far at all, I hope,” she said.
“I’d like to think that we’re building the kind of Ireland where that would be as easy, as normal, as natural as night follows day.
“It would be wonderful if it happened.”