It’s not that volunteerism is dead, it’s just we’ve stopped recognising it

We’re a rotten shower. We think about nothing but money. As long as we get bigger and bigger salaries to pay for our SUVs, we don’t give a sugar about climate change.

We stuff our old people into nursing homes rather than keeping them at home. We don’t volunteer to do anything for anybody else. We have created a society that causes suicide and drug-taking. We’re the sort of people our mothers warned us against hanging around with.

Bring on the handbasket for us all to go to Hell in.

It’s got so you’d be afraid, these days, to confess to being happy.

Happiness is unacceptable. It’s OK, according to the callers to radio programmes, to go out at the weekend and get footless, because — here’s the new mantra — “you have to have a laugh.” It’s not OK to claim happiness, that irrational, illogical constant burr of delight at just being alive. Unless, that is, you’re a survivor of a serious illness or a car crash or some similar trauma, in which case your happiness gets elevated into heroism, and earns a Fair Dues to You.

The assumption is that if you’re happy, you must not care about anybody else. Your glee in some way contributes to the very existence of the sick and indigent. You’re responsible in some way for A&E, stamp duty and the poor price paid for coffee beans to impoverished farmers up the Andes.

Even if you’re a naturally happy person, you begin to think you’re missing something everybody else knows about. This Heartless Ireland lark, for example. Nobody volunteers any more. God be with the days. God be with WHAT days? The days when little committee-minded busy-bodies joined dozens of organisations and spent their time avoiding family life by keeping minutes and raising whinges under Matters Arising and keeping tabs on everybody else? Volunteerism and do-goodery have a thin line dividing them and half the time do-goodery is control-freakery validated by good intentions.

At least fundraising just sets out to get money for whatever good causes are left over after the National Lottery funds are disbursed. My suspicion is that fundraising has taken an awful lot of volunteers off the streets and put them up mountains like Kilimanjaro instead. People who would have annoyed you at traffic lights rattling money buckets at you and beaming if you gave them a couple of Euro now send you letters promising to climb twenty thousand feet up some foreign hill and wanting sponsorship of a Euro a foot. Which, of course, may remove them from the volunteer census-count.

I’d be for a lot more research before I believe volunteerism is dead. It’s just taking a different form, partly because some of the hands-on activities volunteers used to manage are now outside their compass because of health and safety regulations. But when an American friend ran the Dublin Marathon last week, she was astonished by the numbers of volunteers, whether of the medical kind (including St John’s Ambulance workers) or of the non-medical kind, including cheerleaders devoted to helping marathoner hit their wall or surmount it or do whatever they’re supposed to do with it.

In addition, of course, there’s the fact that spontaneous volunteering doesn’t get counted at all. I was told recently about a woman in her mid-eighties, who, driving her little car on a series of newly-completed roads unfamiliar to her, took the wrong turning onto a roundabout, suddenly finding herself in a cacophony of hand-thumped car horns and shouted demands that she go back where she’d come from and what the hell was she at, anyway? (It’s an oddity of road-use that when someone other than ourselves make a mistake, we instantly decide the act was deliberate, malicious and motivated by a nature filled with evil intent.) The elderly lady froze at the wheel of her car, doubly terrified by a massive oncoming truck out of the cab of which a driver leaned, gesturing with a much-tattooed arm.

“Go back,” he yelled. “You have to go back.”

“I can’t,” she responded. The door of the cab swung open, and the driver’s massive boots descended onto the tarmac. He advanced on her, wearing a sweat stained vest out of which swelled shoulders Arnold would have been proud of in his day.

“Awright, Ma’am,” he roared. “I’ll get you back. Now, put ‘er into reverse and steer right.”

At this point, the horn-blowers went berserk. Bad enough to be obstructed by a little suburban runabout, but to be held up by an artic was too much.

The truck-driver took time out to favour the entire roundabout with a raised single finger. Then he went back to directing the eighty-five year old, walking alongside her car until he had her in the right lane and was sure she knew were she was headed. He smacked an oversized palm on the roof of the little car, wished her well and walked in his own good time and at his own deliberately provocative lounging pace back to his truck.

The trucker in the vest is a volunteer. An uncounted volunteer, because he doesn’t belong in any organisation. Certainly an under-appreciated volunteer, given the horn-blowing and rude gestures from the other cars. But a volunteer, nonetheless.

In fact, there’s a sub-culture of traffic volunteers, permanently on call.

We hear about road rage. We never hear of road compassion. But it’s much more prevalent. Last week, I watched a driver make a fast and authoritative U-turn in front of the office where I work. She mis-calculated by about a hands-breadth, walloping the kerb with such force, the front tyre blew. Even though the tyre blew, the impetus of the U-turn brought the car right out into the middle of the street where it blocked traffic going both ways. Within seconds, lads in hoodies and others in Armani suits lined up behind it, ready to push, while another guy instructed the mortified driver as to how she should steer.

It’s as joyous to watch this clustering of road-rescuers as it is to watch a flock of birds sweeping back and forth across the sky in washing waves of movement. You run out of petrol, and before you have even begun to think “AA,” three or four of them present themselves, ready for service. They horse your car up on the path and disappear back into their own lives.

Nobody counts them as volunteers. Nobody registers their action as social commitment.

But that’s what it is.