DURING THE boom years we drank too much from a well that was always going to run dry but now we should look to the well within ourselves, the Céifin conference in Co Clare heard yesterday.
Fr Michael Drumm, chairman of the new Catholic Schools Partnership, said if people drank only from a well of money and possessions, they would always be measuring themselves against others. “And in the end you will die of thirst, for there will never be enough money or enough possessions to measure.”
He said the well within ourselves was bottomless. “Deep within all of us there is a well of life and leadership . . . It has not run dry. The real problem is that it has seldom been tapped.”
He was speaking at the close of the two-day conference, organised by the Clare-based body Céifin, which was founded to encourage debate on social change.
Fr Drumm said one of the greatest tasks we faced was to release teachers with a new energy for the future. “Teachers are the key people in our whole system,” he said, expressing concern over the focus by the profession on the protection of teachers’ interests in the struggle between the private and public sectors.
Paula Downey of Downey Youell consultants said we were in the middle of a systems failure where everything was breaking down, from teaching to politics to journalism. “Most of the institutions of our time have completely lost their way because they have forgotten their founding ethic.
“The minute that the church decided it was in business to protect the institution of the church, it was lost. The minute that a school thinks that its place is to keep teachers in a job, it is lost.”
The lack of leadership from politicians was highlighted by Dearbhail McDonald of the Irish Independent. She said elected politicians, other than the Taoiseach and Minister for Finance, had little control over what happened in this country and she asked why politics was failing to attract young and dynamic leaders.
“Can you imagine a Barack Obama trying to clear the dynastic and territorial hurdles placed in the path of candidates who contemplate selection in many of our constituencies?” she asked. “He wouldn’t get past a turnstile in Tullamore.”
McDonald said politicians were to blame for the decline in respect afforded to them. “They bear primary responsibility for the culture of entitlement that has engulfed them as an institution and has undermined their crucial democratic function.”
Closing the conference, Céifin founder Fr Harry Bohan said three key messages had come from it: the recovery needed was much greater than an economic one; all change in society must begin with the individual and, above all, people must speak the truth about what was going on.