The spirit of Shillelagh is a national asset that should not be

I USED to think Shillelagh was a placename invented for American movies.

But it’s real, and it’s buzzing.

In fact the whole of Co Wicklow (Shillelagh is a proud village in the south of that proud county) was alive with people and colour this past weekend.

We stayed a couple of nights in Shillelagh, played golf in Coolattin, ate in Tinahely, went to the market in Macreddin, bought ice cream in Aughrim and passed through Carnew, Avoca, Laragh, Annamoe and Callary on the way home.

These are all places I remember from childhood, but haven’t visited again until relatively recently. One of my daughters married a man from Carnew. Tony (that’s the son-in-law) is steeped in Wicklow tradition and can talk for hours about the rivalries and tribal rows that keep the county going.

It has often been said that club football in Wicklow is played at an extraordinary high level of skill and intensity, but that the inter-parish passions have always prevented a top-class county team from being put together.

People will tell you the greatest achievement of Mick O’Dwyer’s illustrious career in football has been to put together a Wicklow team that managed to go further in the All-Ireland championship than any of its predecessors. But his second greatest achievement was to get men and boys from Carnew and Tinahely standing side by side on the terraces of Aughrim and Portlaoise, cheering themselves hoarse for their own county.

It’s always been my perception, rightly or wrongly, that the very thing that made Wicklow proud was the thing that made it poor.

Wicklow is a county divided by mountains and rivers, and that has made it an inaccessible place over the years. Every town, it seems, is on the road to nowhere. That sense of isolation generates a strong bond to the village or the local community, but it hampers economic development.

Apart from its coastal towns, dotted as they are along the N11, Wicklow has never had a strong record in attracting multinational industry to its hinterland.

So, despite its proximity to the capital city, the “Garden of Ireland” has always had to depend on sheep and horse farming as its primary industry.

But what I’ve discovered in my recent visits to the county is that Wicklow used the years of the Celtic Tiger well. Its towns and villages have been upgraded from the sleepy, backward hamlets I remember and they’re now some of the prettiest and most charming in the whole country. The county seems to have been spared a lot of the poor planning that allowed houses to spring up all over the rest of Ireland with no regard to the overall look and feel of the local community.

And what is fascinating is that the spirit of the Celtic Tiger years is still well and truly alive. In fact, I’ve been thinking that’s pretty true all over Ireland, isn’t it? I know we’ve been hit by a tidal wave of bad news and that the future, at least in the short term, is looking pretty bleak.

But everywhere you go — everywhere I go, anyway — I meet people who are determined to make whatever contribution they can. That’s why a country market can be such a vibrant place to visit, or the annual fair in Tinahely, with its traditional arrays of vegetables, cakes and farm machinery.

At the end of the day, it’s all about people. As long as that sense of people looking out for each other stays alive, we can come through the recession intact.

I’ve actually been thinking that the years of prosperity had done damage to things like neighbourliness and the spirit of community. So it’s heartening, I have to say, to be able to travel around the country and still see people pulling together — and enjoying themselves in the process.

And it was heartening too to see the figures released by the Central Statistics Office last week on the whole subject of community networks.

The figures were gathered as part of two different surveys in 2006, and the results, as collated by the CSO, give great grounds for optimism.

For example, two out of every three people said they participated in at least one group activity. Nearly a quarter of people took part in informal, unpaid charitable work.

More than half of the population claimed they had at least six people whom they could turn to in time of need, while only 2% stated they had nobody to ask for help.

When asked, 85% said they believe that by working together, people in their neighbourhood can influence decisions that affect them. Four out of every five people agreed that most of the time people in their neighbourhood try to be helpful, while 62% agreed that, in general, most people can be trusted.

Apart from the fact that this seems to be to be very good news, and to say a lot about us that’s positive, I’m not sure why I find it surprising. In my own day job in Barnardos, for example, we couldn’t do what we do without the help and support of brilliant volunteers.

I know that’s true of other organisations I’ve been involved in as well, like Special Olympics, who rely on one of the largest groups of volunteers in the country. In fact I think the only organisation in Ireland that employs more volunteers than Special Olympics is the GAA itself.

I’ve written about that organisation before and I’m convinced that in any history of the last, say, 50 years in Ireland, the role of the GAA in building and sustaining community values will deserve a proud place.

But of course, there is a threat. Developing that whole spirit, and keeping it alive, requires some investment. Not a lot, but the state does make a tiny investment in developing the spirit of volunteering and in enabling volunteers and the people who need them to get together.

THAT’S the work of bodies like Volunteer Centres Ireland and Volunteering Ireland (I’d better declare an interest because I do some work with Volunteering Ireland — as a volunteer, naturally). Both organisations are tiny, but they perform immensely valuable work, locally and nationally.

Thousands of people who wanted to give something back to their communities have been helped to do so in ways that mean something to them as well, and the whole profile of volunteering has been steadily raised in the country at large.

And naturally, the tiny amount of investment involved in encouraging and celebrating volunteering, as well as raising awareness about it and facilitating volunteers, is all under threat from Bord Snip, of all things.

But I can’t believe any government would be so foolish as to threaten one of the things that sets us apart — and might just help us to come out of this recession stronger — to save a couple of hundred thousand euro.

That “thing” is community spirit. You can still see it flourish in Ireland, not just in the statistics, but in our towns and villages and throughout the countryside. It’s powerful and it comes straight from the people. We need it. We should be celebrating it, not threatening it.