Native resilience could yet transform this disaster into an opportunity

During the boom years, shame disappeared, replaced by a nouveau riche urge for getting, spending and displaying. It wasn’t enough to keep up with the Jones’s. You had to be way ahead of the Jones’s

This newspaper last week ran a photograph right across the front page. A deeply sad photograph showing hundreds of people lining up in Church Street, Dublin, to get free food from the Capuchin friars. At first glance, the picture evoked those black and white photographs of Americans queuing at soup kitchens during the Great Depression.

But if you studied it, that photograph told a layered set of stories. The people in the queue were mostly male and relatively young, whereas the Depression photographs showed older men.

Or maybe they just looked older because so many of them wore fedoras. The members of the Church Street queue were hatless. They also didn’t hide their faces from the camera.

Queuing for a food parcel was not a shameful activity, as they saw it. It was just what you did in a recession. In a recession, you get pragmatic. Native resilience comes to the fore.

Resilience? Demonstrated by quiet, desperate queuing for food? Indubitably. According to Brother Kevin Crowley, who organises the food handouts, demand has doubled in a fortnight.

While that means people are poorer and hungrier, it also points to a good grapevine. People heard from other people where would be a good place to get something to eat, and got themselves lined up at the right time in the right place.

In similar fashion, construction workers throughout the country are coping by taking on the jobs they’d have been too busy to tackle during the good years. Mostly for cash.

Now, you may believe it’s dishonest that someone would take their (admittedly pathetic) dole money and then sneak off, do the odd plumbing or wiring or repair job, trouser a few €20 notes and pay no tax on it, but the hod-carrier who’s been laid off has a word for that kind of moral code. Po-faced, he calls it.

Just as the mantra, during the boom years, was “You hafta have a laugh” the current mantra is “you hafta survive,” and if that means breaking a few rules set by a bunch of legislators currently held in pretty universal contempt as overpaid, unrealistic and culpable, then those rules are going to be broken.

Most of the adaptive measures being deployed by the country in response to the turndown, even in advance of this week’s emergency budget, don’t involve rule-breaking. What they do involve is significant lifestyle change.

The fact that the traffic in our cities has eased, and that it takes less time to get from one point to another, is the result of so many people abandoning their cars.

Some of them are travelling by public transport, some by bike, some are walking. One man told me, during the week, he was on his way to his brother-in-law’s house in a rural area, to store his car for a couple of years.

“We’ve been a two-car family,” he shrugged. “Now, we have to make choices, and one of them is that we’re becoming a one-car family.

Takes a bit more planning, each day, but we’ll manage.”

It’s a funny thing. Whenever a seminally influential figure dies or a politician of significance retires, there’s always much talk of their departure representing “the end of an era,” which it never does. The ordinary people are never credited with ending an era or initiating another, yet that is precisely what’s happening, unsung and uncelebrated, at the moment.

Almost at a stroke, and certainly within a period of a few months, the majority of Irish citizens have relinquished the expectations, habits and possessions of the boom years.

During those years, the central theme in Irish life was one of entitlement.

That played out, in the construction sector, by an expectation, loudly and constantly expressed, that young couples had an entitlement to get onto the property ladder. (I haven’t seen a property ladder in ages.

Have you?) Stamp duty, which, up to that point, had been an eternal verity, suddenly became an unwarranted and unacceptable obstacle and anything less than a 100% mortgage, made available on the phone within an hour of application, an outrage.

All that has been sheared away and replaced with a new set of social realities. One of those realities is that of 20-somethings and 30-somethings returning to the family home, with all of the advantages (recreation of the extended family, greater contact between generations) and disadvantages (the friction inherent in too many people sharing a smaller space) that shift involves.

Even the pattern of dating among the single has been changed by the move back home.

But the changes are not just those of reduction and resignation to the inevitable. When a public body recently advertised two courses for public participation, one of them in rose-pruning, the other in vegetable-growing, hundreds signed up for the vegetable-growing.

Three signed up for the rose-pruning. Similarly, courses in how to rear chickens in your back garden are over-subscribed. No doubt some TV station with a bit of wit will soon re-run that sit-com series, The Good Life, from several decades back about a suburban couple trying to achieve self-sufficiency in their semi.

That programme is newly relevant, if only because something close to suburban self-sufficiency is easier and cheaper now than it was then. Composters and GreenCones can radically cut down the need to use the local authority waste-collection service. Wind turbines and solar panels can reduce the cost of energy.

Treble glazing and insulation can cut the need for fuel. A water bucket and a cheap mechanical device allows any committed environmentalist to make their own briquettes out of newspapers at the weekend.

Probably the best change of all is the rediscovery of shame. During the boom years, shame disappeared, replaced by a nouveau riche urge for getting, spending and displaying. It wasn’t enough to keep up with the Jones’s. You had to be way ahead of the Jones’s. And the Jones’s had to know it. Every advert played to the self-pander in us: “Because you’re worth it.”

Now, shame has come back into play, and even those who still have the money hesitate before spending it in an obvious way. Hence the scarcity of 09 registered cars.

People who could afford a new car don’t want to look like showoffs.

None of this is to suggest that national resilience can ameliorate the staggering impoverishment of older people dependent on bank shares, or offer anything to young people with cystic fibrosis.

But it can usher in a new era of improved personal health/fitness, where the environment gains much more than it would have in good times.

Dr James Reilly reminded this weekend’s Fine Gael Árd Fheis it was in 1948, standing in the wreckage of a World War, that Britain created a health service that became the envy of the world. He has a point.

Irish resilience could yet transform this disaster into an opportunity. Irish people could build a new era out of the wreckage of the old.