Build your house on rock:WHO WANTS porridge, when you could have croissants and out-of-season berries for breakfast? With the third-largest national herd in Europe it is strange that we do not have a large tanning industry. We have deepwater ports and more than 7,000km of coastline but not a single deep-sea fishing vessel.
We have three sheep for every person on the island, and most of our jumpers are made of angora or cotton. We have over a million graduates and tradesmen, but always seem to prefer foreign investment. We have the ability to feed, house, clothe, educate and entertain ourselves, but we don’t seem to have the courage or confidence to risk starting things for ourselves.
Instead, we are swamped under a deluge of depression, reaching our hands out for help rather than trying to use them to swim to safety. Surely there are enough people in Limerick with skills in the manufacture, sales and distribution of computers to set up a new company? Has the city of Waterford lost its glassblowers and cutters along with its name? Do people in Carlow still know how to make sugar from beet? You can build greenhouses in Roscommon to grow out-of-season berries.
Thank God we still know how to make our own bread and croissants. Is there a word in Irish for enterprise?
In a world that speaks of quality of life it is commonplace that quality may be confused with short-term gratification. Our public discussion avoids anything philosophical, and it is rare that we will hear anything about a bigger picture unless it is strictly economic. We are more than just consumers: we are alive.
The Gospel choice of building your house on either sand or rock is a good test as to how alive you might be. Life has to be more than a series of tasks and treats. Helping a neighbour has as much a role in a good quality of life as competing against him has. Chatting over a wall with a real neighbour is dismissed as gossip, but how many newspapers and staffrooms are filled with gossip about our neighbours in the soaps? What’s real? I don’t remember Vera Duckworth turning up at any wakes.
Christianity asks us to love our real neighbours. That would mean we would have to trust them, encourage them and believe in them. That’s what you would do for anybody you love. And competing with our neighbour isn’t always good. It can be a source of tension, mistrust and burglaries.
Irish Christianity made a cheeky claim in declaring itself a society of the good and intelligent – they paraphrased it as the Island of Saints and Scholars. We have a religious tradition that always valued the honest endeavours and personal skills of all of our people. We have a faith that affirms the entire person and sees him or her as far more than an employable object.
We want to see a bigger picture but fear – that centuries-old Satan of the psyche – holds us back as much today as in years we consider less-enlightened than our own.
Any economy built on prestige, treat and intoxication, while avoiding faith, is a house built on sand. The alternative is too dreadful for many of us to contemplate. An economy built on believing in another person, their skills and their honesty is harder to copper-fasten. The risk can be very scary. But faith is the ability to face that fear.
There is no verb to begrudge in Irish but the words for enterprise were eachtra, fionntar and guaisbheart.
And your grandmother baked her own bread and ate out-of-season berries too; but she called it jam and didn't charge you for it. – FME