How we view the state of the nation depends on our personal experience

A FRIEND of mine who has been in London since we left college told me how, at a recent dinner party with his English friends, Tony Blair was one of the main topics of conversation.

Of course, that is not surprising — Blair is British Prime Minister after all. However, my friend said what was most striking was the intensity of the anger towards Blair and the sense of disappointment about him which is apparent among the British middle classes.

Much of my friend’s circle voted enthusiastically for Blair and for his New Labour government when they were first elected in 1997.

They speak nostalgically, he says, about how a new dawn literally rose over the Thames as Blair entered his party victory celebrations the morning after the 1997 election to the accompaniment of the D:Ream hit, Things Can Only Get Better. Those at the dinner party, he said, had been in their mid to late 20s in 1997 when they were starry-eyed about Blair and invested so much hope in their new prime minister and his New Labour government.

Now, however, 10 years later and touching on their 40s, this group of English people are totally disillusioned with Blair and all that he has failed to achieve.

Not only do they have a sense that he misled them over the Iraq war, they also feel he has failed to achieve greater reforms and improvements in public services and that British society is worse off now than it was when Blair was first elected.

My friend voted for New Labour 1997. However, perhaps because he is Irish he was then, and is now, more detached about Blair than his English friends.

Being in a provocative mood he offered the view to his dinner guests that some of their disillusionment with Blair might actually be deflected.

Maybe, he argued, their disappointment wasn’t with Blair’s lack of achievement but with their own.

His point was that now as they themselves were rapidly approaching 40, they were disillusioned about what they had achieved against the exaggerated expectations they had set themselves in their 20s as much as they were disappointed with the exaggerated expectations they had for Blair 10 years ago. Their own disappointment, he argued, was being deflected onto their government. Interestingly, he relates that after this negative discussion of Blair the dinner conversation then turned to the new hope of British politics — David Cameron, who was elected leader of the Conservative party last autumn.

He said the only thing that irritated them about Cameron was that he was the same age as most of them, and even younger than some.

I was reminded of my friend’s dinner party analysis of British middle class opinion this week in the context of RTÉ’s series of television and radio programmes, The Best Days of our Lives, which has focused on how much Ireland has changed over the last 20 years.

In a similar way, the perception which many of us have as to whether society or life generally is better now than it was at some other point in the past is shaped by the stage we are at in our own lives.

Just like that London dinner party’s perception of how Britain has or has not improved over the last 10 years, our perception as to whether life in Ireland has got better or worse is shaped by our own personal experiences.

The person who was frankest about this reality on Tuesday night’s Prime Time was Nell McCafferty — it was great, incidentally, to see her back to her usual good and boisterous form after her recent illness. When asked by Miriam O’Callaghan whether she felt that life in Ireland is better now than it was 20 years ago, Nell said that her answer to that question was of course going to be influenced more by events in her personal life in the last 20 years than by any general changes in Irish society.

Nell went on, in her own inimical style, to share with the nation how, for her, the most significant events in the last 20 years concerned her love life, and particularly that her heart had been badly broken.

Otherwise life had been good to her, she said, and she therefore was strongly of the view that things in Ireland had improved.

IN AN opinion poll conducted by Amárach for this special Prime Time programme, the figures about the Irish population’s sense of happiness and satisfaction with their lives were very interesting — 48% of those polled described themselves as happy and a further 47% described themselves as very happy.

In the same poll, when asked if they were satisfied with life, about two-thirds described themselves as generally satisfied.

All age groups were questioned for the Amárach poll and therefore the results reflect a collective view of the population. I have not been able to locate an age breakdown for these two questions and, in any case, the sample would be too small to allow accurate breakdowns per age group.

As a result I have not been able to confirm a theory I have that people of my own age group (a year or two short of 40) may have a particularly acute view of whether life in Ireland has changed for better or worse over the last two decades.

There is currently a demographic bulge of people who were in their mid to late teens in the late 1980s and who are in their mid to late 30s now.

These are the years of greatest change in any individual’s life.

For this particular age group, those years have also coincided with a time of great change in Irish society.

The flux in their individual lives has been compounded by flux in the society in which they have lived.

For some of those in this age group the change over the last 20 years has been even more dramatic because they have spent a large chunk of that time abroad.

It is estimated that somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 people in their 30s in Ireland today spent many of their after- school or after-college years living in Britain, the US or Australia.

Most of them have returned to Ireland sometime in the last 10 years.

The perspective which this segment of the population has on how much life in Ireland has changed over the last 20 years is even more likely to be influenced by their personal experiences than by any objective criteria because of their experiences while living abroad.

Change can be unnerving. The extent of change for my own age group has been particularly intense. In all the circumstances it is both surprising and reassuring that they appear to be so happy and satisfied.