Anne Harris: Sacrificial lambs of Covid are undervalued and overpromised

The malice of Omicron has not entirely had its way. The theatres have not gone fully dark. Thanks to the curfew, late matinees take the place of evenings at the theatre.

At the Abbey Theatre, Faith Healer now has a twilight existence. There is a weird symmetry about Brian Friel’s masterpiece retreating into the half- light: its message about the violence consequent on overpromising to those with little left to lose is now almost subversive.

The second-last night-time performance of Faith Healer took place three nights before the curfew and four nights before the winter solstice. The dank air of the Abbey’s hinterland – Talbot Street – suggested that had the light seekers been gathering in the ancestral burial chamber on the morrow they would certainly be disappointed.

Talbot Street is the crossing for most comers from the northside to the Abbey. The faint echo of its “Monto” red-light district past still casts a febrile edge on its proximity to our national theatre. Good public-housing policy and the nearby Penneys lifestyle, however, have had a calming influence.

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That night, it was electric.

They piled out of taxis into the bars, young women in spiky heels, young men in their logo-ed bomber jackets. They had three nights left to feel the very heaven of being young. It was, as Frank Hardy, the Faith Healer says, “The sudden flooding of hopeless hope.”

Desperation is another word, And, like Covid, it knows no class barriers.

A stone’s throw from Talbot Street on summer’s day in Trinity College I witnessed a brave college decision that students should be granted rite of passage – their graduation. Regimented, in small numbers, with military precision and full ceremonial pomp, students got closure. Armed with a parchment, for one shining hour, they could see the future. Would it work?

Sacrificial lambs

Young people have been the sacrificial lambs of Covid 19. If Covid has been about protecting the elderly and the vulnerable, the price has been paid by young adults. For the most part they have shown grace under pressure.

But generous pandemic unemployment payments cannot eliminate the sense of powerlessness brought on by restrictions and lockdowns.

William Glasser, the proponent of cognitive choice therapy, pointed out that basic human needs come under five categories, the first of which is power, the last of which is survival, with love and acceptance, freedom and pleasure in between. Remove any of these and depression awaits.

In 2019 – pre-Covid – a third of Irish 20-year-olds had suffered from depression, according to Growing Up in Ireland, the ESRI tracking of 10,000 young people from age nine. Post-Covid, a Harvard study of young adults found depression soared during lockdown.

Given our national propensity to angst, one might expect young Irish adults to be the same. But political polls and anecdotal evidence suggest a different pathology: a paradoxical pent-up energy in the despondency. Waiting for something to happen? Or waiting to take action?

In October 2013, when the referendum proposing the abolition of the Senate was defeated, the then taoiseach, Enda Kenny, said: “Sometimes in politics, you get a wallop.” There is an overwhelming sense that this generation is biding its time to administer an almighty wallop to our current political system.

Action

Action, according to Glasser, is the great liberator of depression. They have taken action before. And they have known successes.

This is the home-to-vote generation. Flexing their muscles at the ballot box, they made Ireland a beacon of liberalism in the world with successful referendums on marriage equality and abortion legislation.

This success, added to a deep disenchantment with traditional politics, as expressed in the restrictions and, above all, the housing crisis, bestows epoch-making electoral power.

The Government cannot be unaware that it ignores them at its peril. Fine Gael under Leo Varadkar has been savagely punished: support for the party has almost halved over the course of the pandemic.

Perhaps, as in Freud’s good mother/bad mother theory, they loved him too much in the beginning and then in the attrition of lockdown remembered his insensitivity to their housing needs.

It’s easy to see how, with feelings of being undervalued by traditional politics being pandered to, they would be prey to the overpromises – houses, houses everywhere – of the Opposition.

But it is also easy for young people, as the Russian dissident Joseph Brodsky pointed out, to take for granted “this halfway house between nightmare and utopia, which throws fewer obstacles in the way of an individual than its alternatives”. Democracy.

Overpromising is a dangerous business. As the Faith Healer says, “It seals their anguish.”