Cullen’s rags-to-riches story solves nothing

BILL Cullen’s recent tirade against young and well-trained unemployed people on RTÉ’s The Frontline last Monday smacked more of sour grapes than of any helpful input into the debate on our current economic crisis.

I share a poverty-stricken background similar to Mr Cullen’s and I am envious also of the opportunities available to younger people today. However, unlike Mr Cullen, I have no desire to inflict my childhood experiences of hardship on anyone else.

As Samuel Beckett once asked, “is the lobster a better lobster for being boiled alive?”

Mr Cullen’s jaded rags-to-riches story may be the standard lazy filler between the TV and Sunday supplement advertisements but it does nothing to further our understanding of how we can attain a fairer and just society.

The facile American Dream notion put forward by Mr Cullen and his fellow-travellers – ie, that with hard work and dedication everyone can become super-rich – is clearly posited on two erroneous assumptions:

1. That the poor are poor because they don’t work hard enough

2. That all who follow Mr Cullen’s work ethic will become millionaires.

As anyone who has ever waited tables, stacked shelves, cleaned drains, collected dustbins, etc, will attest, such work is no place for idlers. And should Mr Cullen’s world, peopled exclusively by hard-working millionaires, ever materialise who would carry out these self-same tasks?

As for myself I have spent all my adult life trying to ensure my own children received the best education available. I have done this not in the hope they would become selfish and rich bores who parade themselves and their trite ideologies nightly on our TV screens, but rather in the hope they will contribute as best they can to a society that is fair and in which all are afforded their dignity as human beings, whatever their financial circumstance.

As for the young being arrogant, self-centred, whining irritants who blame everyone for their problems ... well, they are and they do.

That’s life, but experience has taught us older folk that our young will eventually grow up. In the meantime are we once again, in the words of Prof Joe Lee, “prepared to scatter our children around the world in order to preserve our own standard of living”.

Derry Chambers

Cill na Martra

Macroom

Co Cork