An Irishman's Diary

READERS of a certain age will remember a poem we did at school called The Listenersby Walter de la Mare. It's the one that begins: " 'Is there anybody there?' said the traveller/Knocking on the moonlit door;/And his horse in the silence champed the grasses/Of the forest's ferny floor." Pleasantly eerie, it continues in this fashion until finally the questioner, giving up on an answer, remounts and gallops away – a sound spookily recorded from within the empty (or is it?) house.

The poem has been in my mind these past three weeks, because it feels as if I’ve had the traveller’s experience in reverse. Not that I own a horse. But the point is that my home has been occupied almost around the clock during that period – if not by me then by other members of the family. And yet, barring shock developments in the few hours that remain, it looks as if yet another general election campaign has passed without a single canvasser knocking on our door.

At first, I wasn’t that bothered by the silence. Then, after the first 10 days or so of nobody calling, it became hard not to take it personally. There are 18 candidates in our constituency, after all. So it began to look as if they were deliberately avoiding us.

By the end of the second week, the absence of what De la Mare called “a voice from the world of men” was almost oppressive. Like the traveller, inverted, I could sense their presence out there somewhere, having a debate on the future of Ireland.

This made the lack of noise on the doorstep even more sinister.

It wasn’t an accessibility issue. True, in past campaigns we’ve received letters referring to difficulty “gaining access to your place of residence”, which implied that the sender, or his computer, thought we lived in a gated community. Whereas, in fact, our cul-de-sac is open to all comers. Indeed, representatives of other professions have had no problem visiting recently. For example, one of my neighbours was burgled in the past three weeks: a figure well above the monthly average.

Nor could potential campaigners claim discouragement as an excuse. Our road has no signs of the “we shoot every third canvasser and the second one just left” variety. Most householders have not imposed a no-flyer zone, either. And although I can’t say that callers would have been welcome in our house at any hour, we certainly wouldn’t have set the dog on them. Not that we have a dog. The worst that might have happened, if the time had been inconvenient, is we would have ignored the doorbell.

Instead, it was the candidates who ignored us. By the last few days, the failure of the bell to ring was unnerving. Again I felt like the traveller who, spooked by the silence within, bangs on the door once more and shouts a message to the phantom listeners before departing. Except that I was the one inside. Even so, I had played my part in the democratic bargain, it seemed, only to be snubbed. To paraphrase De la Mare, I could have called out to the ghostly campaigners: “Tell them I was here, and no one canvassed/That I kept my word”, he said.

SPEAKING OF school-books, poetic and otherwise, we received an interesting letter this week from a 12-year-old student in Cork who has begun what she hopes will be a countrywide campaign to make school-bags lighter. Her name is Melissa O’Sullivan Buckley. And she thinks that the average school-bag, even when it contains only a fraction of the books required by the curriculum, is “far too heavy for a child’s back”.

Her fears are that, if nothing is done, she and her fellow pupils will be keeping physiotherapists and chiropractors busy for decades. To avert which disaster, she has set up a Facebook account – under adult supervision – called “Lighten my load 2011- Campaigning for lighter schoolbags”, wherein people can share ideas on the subject.

As one would hope from the representative of a generation that, when it graduates, may still have to pay for our mistakes, Melissa has some bright ideas of her own. One is that the print in books could be made smaller.

Not so small that we would sacrifice children’s eyesight to save their backs. But, as she puts it, “reducing the size of the font by a notch or two and modifying or eliminating some of the fancy printing, would allow each chapter/section of each book to be shortened by a couple of pages, which in turn would reduce the length of each book, thus reducing the weight.” An admirable suggestion, I’m sure we all agree. Indeed, with her obvious talent for identifying efficiencies in the system, I fear that Melissa may be wasted in secondary education. Given that we have a State emergency, maybe the next government should hire her in a consultancy role.

Beyond the physical problem, however, there’s something else worrying about the idea of students buckling under their schoolbags. Of course one hopes that Ireland’s debt problem will be solved before our current 12-year-olds graduate. But in the meantime, the image of schoolchildren struggling under a burden designed by their elders seems like one of those literary devices the teacher was always talking about in poetry class. What was the term again? Oh yes, a “metaphor”.