From Bath to Cork with Baby Grace

I’ve just contributed this to the debate there…

Deco [one of the regular commenters there],
Thank you. I’m grateful to you for articulating so clearly an analysis that makes sense to me. I’ve only read it once and it deserves several readings. Most of all I identify with your point “There was no enough dissent…” and “There has been a stifling conformity - and it is still prevalent…”

My experience of coming back to Ireland in 2005 comes flooding back to me as I read your view. I’ve been summarising it as “follow the leader” mentality. I don’t remembering feeling the same in UK.

All the time I’ve been back here, I’ve felt myself to be weird in a weird world (paraphrasing someone).

The most educated generation ever of Irish people…

but the education system seems to have valued conformity with prevailing wisdom.

Fine Gael and Labour seem to have taken such a non-dissenting view of the crisis that neither of them have so much as organised one public demonstration of protest. They both seem locked onto a parliamentary game and waiting for the spoils to fall to them. Even Sinn Fein is equally compliant with the notion of respectable order.

What’s happened? How come the trade unions were so easily bought off by the offer of a seat around the social partners’ table?

In 1601 (or some such date) the tribal leaders of clan society got on a boat and escaped to France, abandonning their people. It’s as if Fine Gael, Labour et all have done the same: “presenteeism”.

Why don’t all the Labour TDs and Senators march together to the GPO and at least symbolically protest against the dreadful leadership of Cowen and Lenihan?

Why don’t they do something to give the people hope? Are they thoroughly corrupted, and too soft for the struggle?

There is no “Left” worthy of the name. No “Opposition” worth a curse.

By the way in which they behave in opposition I get my feeling for how they’ll be in government. So far, I have as much hope for an internal revolution from the grass roots of Fianna Fail as I have from the alternative government - precisely zilch.

But, there are dissenters getting on with the business of living well and thinking well, and making things happen. The trick is to build alliances with people of like mind, and those of opposite mind who are big enough to engage in the forthright exchange of views.

Thank you very much.

Alain de Botton is on radio as I write.

He’s being interviewed about his new book "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work".

This is his last paragraph :

"Our work will at least have distracted us, it will have provided a perfect bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it will have given us a sense of mastery, it will have made us respectably tired, it will have put food on the table.  It will have kept us out of greater trouble. "

Listening to Alain de Botton reminded me of David Whyte.

His "Crossing the unknown sea - work and the shaping of identity"  is the best book I’ve ever read about work.

David Whyte’s last paragraph goes

"In work as in life, we must contemplate the loss of everything in order to know what we have to give;  it is the essence of writing, the essence of working, the essence of living; an essence that we look for by hazarding our best gifts in the world, and in that perspective, all of us are young and have the possibilities of the young until our last breath goes out."

But what is "work"?

Surely it’s not simply another word for paid employment?  Surely it’s inherently challenging?  Demands effort?  Different from sleep?  [Although I feel comfortable with the notion that sleep is a form of work.]

I think of everything I do as a form of work.  I like to think like that.

How do you think of work?