Multicultural Ireland believes in nothing but victim hood and blame

Your Holiness, the last time you were here, you said, “Young people of Ireland, I love you,” to a sea of white faces more or less of the same shape and make.

If you say it this time around, you'll say it to white, olive, brown and black faces of every ethnic background. Ireland has changed immeasurably in the years since you were last here.

"You know, in my son's class in school," we say, although it could be a daughter's or a grandchild's just as easily, "there are kids from 11 different countries of origin."

We're delighted they're here, Your Holiness, and we'll be even more delighted when they stop being noticeable. When, many centuries back, Your Holiness, people of Norman origin came here, they became "More Irish than the Irish themselves." We like that. They might have won the armed conflict, but we won the assimilation and got them to do a cultural surrender. We have the same assumption about this new wave of arrivals.

So we don't do much about attracting people of different ethnic background into our police force, even though we pay lip service to the benefits of community policing.

Similarly, although we know waves of immigration give rise to predictable patterns of industrial development, we haven't really changed our policies to make the most of our own wave. The fast food chains are doing nicely out of them, but thereafter it's not much more sophisticated than giving them permission to work.

While you cannot help but notice, just by looking around you, the population differences that have happened in Ireland over the last 25 years, you will find it less easy, Your Holiness, to spot the essential spiritual difference between Ireland, back then, and Ireland now.

That difference is a faith deficit. Ireland no longer believes. No, not just in Catholicism. In anything. We have lost faith in our police, our healthcare, our churchmen and our politicians.

We have not lost faith in blame. The blame reflex is so embedded in all of us that the minute we hear of a problem, we look for someone to blame. Sometimes, we go blame-laying before rescuing the victims of the problem: someone's got to be punished.

The difficulty is that our faith in blame is undercut by our lack of faith in punishment. Nobody seems to get punished anymore. We have these tribunals, Your Holiness, that have kind of replaced the law. We re-run past episodes of recent Irish history in tribunals. It's like we have three or four extra reality TV channels. It can be business history. Or police history. Or institutional history. We re-run them, mostly in public, and they dominate our newspapers, TV and radio (on radio, we do dramatised imitations of the participants, it's very entertaining).

Our immigrants must be mystified by it, although I suppose it can serve for them as a sustained tutorial in the worst of what we are, so they'll never be able to say they weren't warned.

These tribunals go on for decades. One man has gone to jail, all right, but that's about it. The fact that people are walking around giving cheek a decade or more after they stole money from the public is what has caused us to lose faith in punishment. Except as a short-term measure related mainly to poor people.

It's been replaced by name-and-shame. But, Your Holiness, name-and-shame is satisfying only in cultures where shame has an effect. When the people most shamed are 80-year-old widows in country towns who were advised to put money into a new clever device called an offshore account, it has its limitations. Certainly, the widow may be shamed, although in some families, it's the next generation who are most humiliated. But because none of the people who stimulated the bad behaviour have been shamed or punished in any real way, we're losing our faith in name-and-shame, too.

Just about the only thing we find it easy to believe in is victimhood. If someone can prove to us that, by accident or design, by misfortune or malfeasance, they have suffered victimisation, then we accept that as some form of validation, some brief claim on our attention.

Otherwise, we're living a belief-free, faith-free life. And we don't like it. It makes us depressed.

Your Holiness, you know better than anyone that the need to believe in something is an essential, perhaps THE essential human trait. Baulked of something to believe in, a nation turns poisonous. It may be the lack of anything to believe in that explains the ferocity of our rage against mainly churchmen and politicians.

We have failed to realize that moral and political leadership has fragmented and is now turning up in new and unexpected forms. For example, a man who wrote a book called Fast Food Nation has changed the western world's attitude to obesity more than any officer of the Church (although gluttony is supposed to be a sin) or politician.

Similarly, Your Holiness, if you walk into one of the huge plants operated in Ireland by multinational commercial companies, you'll find more moral direction than you'll find these days in a church. They talk about their founders and the values of their founders in a way Catholics are often too self-conscious to do. They give moral leadership on issues like elder care by changing the workplace to allow workers to take care of their parents. They have rites of passage, a liturgy, ceremonies of feast and celebration. They are more like churches than churches.

Our never-ceasing need to believe, Your Holiness, is taking strange and warped forms in the Ireland of today. The very word 'believe' for example, you'll see in huge posters showing a girl's eyes filthy with running mascara. But what is being sold is alcohol. We believe in alcohol. Our younger people have a profound faith in alcohol. So much of a faith that it sometimes requires a kind of de-programming process called detox to reduce their faith in it.

When a nation loses faith in faith, it drifts in a sea of cynicism. But even worse is that we have lost faith in forgiveness. Of course, it's difficult to forgive people who behave as if it was their right to break the law and are unashamed when tribunals expose their past hypocrisy, and there's a few of them around.

But now and again, an individual will not just acknowledge wrongdoing, but spend a long, long time in exile from their friends, family, familiar surroundings and all the vanity-sustaining systems of their past. Arguably the best example is one of the bishops who was around - very much around - during your last visit to Ireland. That bishop was subsequently revealed to have failed in celibacy. Once he was found out, this man who loved the high life abandoned it and went to live in simple poverty. Having adored being famous, he went into the long dark night of obscurity.

Maybe, when you're here, Your Holiness, you might include Eamon Casey in your entourage.

It would be a brilliant way to remind us of the pivotal importance of forgiveness.