Cormac McConnell: How much change could we handle this year?
An element in that advert intrigues me, and frightens me a bit too.
The young lady is looking into the camera perched in the passenger’s seat beside her far more often than at the traffic ahead.
She also won’t be getting too much change back out of €30,000, when she goes to pay for her new wheels, assuming she survives that long.
Another long-running advert which often comes after that one is on behalf of a firm which says it has techniques to make you feel better about yourself, by banishing your bald spot, with what I gather is some form of hair transplant.
There is a weakness in this one too, because we get a brief glimpse of one of the hair surgeons in action, and he himself, beyond any doubt, is palpably thin on top, as well as being significantly silvered by the years.
The pure truth, once more.
But getting back to the young lady’s suggestion that change is good, I have to say that, whilst I agree with much of what she says, there is also a point where the national identity can be shocked by too much change.
We can be flabbergasted by a tidal wave of change, and this year, though yet in its infancy, has begun to strike us with more than a few dramatic ones, as far as I am concerned.
Take this very week, in the Galway town of Glennamaddy, the town with the famous four roads of the country song.
In a change which must have had the old parish priests of Saint Patrick’s chapel turning in their graves, the priests and people of 2017 staged a drive-through ceremony on Ash Wednesday, for the benefit of those driving to work, and not having time to go into the chapel itself, to have the ritual black cross of penitence implanted on their foreheads, as of yore.
The people just drove to the chapel front door, were black ashed in their cars at once, and then drove away, out the back gate.
Back in the day, you could spend the better part of an hour praying in your chapel before the cross was inscribed. That’s a big change, for sure.
There’s more than that happening, on the religious front alone. If you live in Shannon, and have a few sins resting atop your soul ( and which of us hasn’t?), there is no need any more to drive yourself into one of the dreaded confessional boxes of the past.
Not at all.
In another radical change, you can avail of the absolutions dispensed in the mall of the town’s shopping centre by the local priests.
You just sit down at a table in the mall, as the shoppers pass by, and tell your scéal to the priest, and away you go, fully shriven, in less time than it takes to drink a cup of coffee in one of the nearby cafes.
I’m told these shopping centre confessions are going a bomb.
It’s a different Ireland for sure, at many levels.
Furthermore, the bosses of the GAA above in Dublin must have been listening to the young lady in her new car.
Who would ever dream, even a couple of years ago, that we are now facing Septembers without the All-Ireland Hurling Final on the first Sunday, and the football All Ireland on the ritual third Sunday?
That was the Congress decision last weekend.
They say that it is for a three-year trial period they are transplanting the finals back into August but, knowing the way they operate, we can take it for granted that Septembers will never again stage the two largest sporting events of the whole year.
That golden month will never ever be the same again for all of us and that, yet again, is the pure truth.
Finally, on our troubled but energised political front, it is possible, maybe even probable, that the Fine Gael party will shortly be led by a proudly openly gay new leader.
The stirring of the graves in Glennamaddy on Ash Wednesday will be as nothing compared to the earthquake created by all those conservative old founders and supporters of the party, turning in their old graves.
And, if the expected general election rapidly follows, it is quite on the cards of fate that we could face into 2018 led by a different kind of Taoiseach altogether to those who have gone before.
Change is good?
