ONE of our favourite pastimes is asking each other how we stand and before anyone has time to answer, throwing in our own tuppenceworth, with which all right thinking citizens are expected to agree.
The opinion leaders of other countries retreat to, quiet places, or steal away, as the saying goes, to spend more time with their families. They do things differently here.
Our talkers and some of our thinkers descend in summer swarms on familiar venues, not for rest and contemplation but to continue the arguments they'd left unfinished in Dublin, Cork and Belfast. From the MacGill school in Glenties to the Merriman in Ennistymon, with detours to Carnlough for Hewitt, Mayo for Humbert and Avondale for Parnell, the motto is we must be talking to ourselves.
To ourselves, about our selves, often for our ears only. Rarely if ever with clear and unequivocal results.
Benedict Kiely, a masterly storyteller, novelist and singer of ballads, worked for the Irish Independent when newspapers were better written and the Irish Independent was more widely read.
Kiely, who was employed to write leading articles, was given unmistakable instructions. His subjects were the cooperative movement and godless Russia.
He could write more or less as he pleased, bearing in mind, of course, that the co-operative movement was a good thing and godless Russia was not. The one thing he must not do, in any circumstance, was to reach a conclusion.
However they came to hear our present leaders of opinion politicians, journalists, academics, jacks and jills of all trades seem to have taken this old Abbey Street precaution to heart. They can give or take extreme views. Indeed, there's nothing they like better than to watch opponents from opposite camps prove that they are, beyond doubt, irreconcilable.
SOMEONE of the There's Ireland For You school announces nothing in the country works and that we're living in what amounts to the Faulty Towers of western Europe. Everyone immediately rushes off in search of some hothead of the Wake Up-Lads-Or-Yell-Miss-The Insult school. And the two are set at each other's throats.
Names and labels are traded, high horses mounted dollops of umbrage taken and good faith is called into question all round. There are a few cantankerous letters in The Irish Times.
Then, after five days of angry phone calls to RTE, a half dozen attacks on nationalists in the Sunday Independent and a dozen on lefties in the Sunday Business Post, normal service is resumed.
Needless to say, no real damage has been done. No one has said anything for which he or she might be called to account later. No conclusions have been reached.
Without labels, slogans and violent partisanship, controversy is all but impossible. (Someone I knew used to accuse people of being drunk and refusing to fight.)
There was poor Emily O'Reilly on Saturday View last week, doing her best to drum up a programme that would do justice to the cliche's used in advance of the weekend in Derry.
The people assembled in the studio were civilians two women and two men, two Protestants and two Catholics, whose qualifications for participation were that they worked and lived in Derry. They were neither politicians nor paramilitaries, though one of the four was in the Women Coalition and another said he had voted for the coalition in the assembly elections.
None of them justified provocation or sounded as though they would have refused to condemn let alone order the smashing to pulp of some frightened youngster's hands and legs.
They were proud of Derry's achievements without for a moment forgetting its failures. They were highly critical of the media for their contributions to the city's fears for the weekend.
And while they recognised the reasons for Protestants leaving the Foyle's west bank since the 1960s, and for Catholic anger in the aftermath of Drumcree, they were reluctant to apportion blame and flatly refused to be partisan.
THE presenter tried hard to liven things up. The participants refused to be livened up in the way in which politicians or the representatives of paramilitaries might have been. One said he was beginning to think he'd wandered into the wrong studio. All four acknowledged there were issues on which they were unwilling or unable to comment.
Halfway through the programme the thought occurred to me that it was not impossible to tell who was Catholic and who was Protestant. What they had to say, about the remoteness and staleness of politics or the alienation of young people, Protestant or Catholic, was suddenly more important than the tribal labels that might have been stuck on the speakers.
This set me thinking of a television programme about pilgrims of different denominations which I'd watched a few years ago with my favourite aunt in our family home in Clare. I've tried but failed to find out who made it. Memory tells me it was the work of an independent company, Iskra, and the admirable Gerry Gregg, but I can't be sure.
The film followed two groups, one Catholic, one Protestant, on their journeys to church or shrine. As they travelled they sang or listened to hymns and spoke of their lives and beliefs while the camera moved slowly from homely lace to face.
The faces and the country side through which they moved were so familiar that my aunt might have been aboard one of those buses, and the road they travelled might well have been ours.
But I soon forgot which group was which and turned to my aunt for enlightenment. She'd spent the first half of her life praying for godless Russia's conversion and the second half praying for mine. If anyone could tell the difference, she could.
She couldn't. She said that, if I cast my mind back, I would remember that when we went on pilgrimage they left the labels on the buses.
Nowadays I prefer things without labels, which is one of the reasons I've begun to enjoy the report of the Constitution Review Group, headed by T.K. Whitaker. The report covers almost 450 pages, and related papers fill over 200. It sounds heavy and, in one sense, it is you would have to enlist the help of a small pony or a big dog to carry it.
But it's elegantly written and splendidly laid out. It makes its case for a constitution to meet the needs of the new century without throwing cold water on de Valera's document of the 1930s.
For some unexplained reason, the Government issued the report in a hurry in early July. In doing so, the Coalition seems, at first sight, to have failed to do justice to the work of a thoughtful groups which, for the most part, is unafraid of conclusions. {CORRECTION} 9607200008