We’ve shown rebel spirit, but now I’ve got that sinking feeling

ALONG with much else, the Lisbon Treaty vote was surely an affirmation of the right of the individual to think and decide for him or herself whatever the intensity of the urgings from the institutions of State.

The Ireland of my youth in the 1950s strongly discouraged this dissenting voice. The individual was expected to conform to the collective and thinking in any real sense of the word was largely seen as either irreligious or almost anti-national (Both nationalism and religion did contribute much to our lives, too, but that’s en passant for now).

But basically, as WH Auden put it, “the weight and force of this world, all that carries weight and always weighs the same, lay in the hands of others…”