Celebrating community: Everyone wins

AN honest list of the things we take for granted would be sobering but it would probably be even more so if it was comprehensive.

In Ireland, such a list might not be complete for many reasons, one of which would be that we take our priceless sense of community so much for granted we might not even recognise it as such.

We regard it as an unshakeable norm but as anyone who has lived abroad, especially in a big city, knows it is not.

The absence of a sense of community is often one of the defining characteristics of those communities.

Some people can thrive in that environment others do not; Irish gregariousness can struggle to find a toehold.

One of the ways we celebrate our sense of community is the annual Tidy Towns festival of civic uplift.

A record 870 towns and villages took part this year and Tipperary’s Birdhill — what an evocative name — was the overall winner.

Defeated competitors in many events are often fobbed off with the patronising line that “it’s the taking part that’s important”.

In this instance it’s true and everyone gets a prize — a renewed, re-energised sense of real community worth.