Obsession with honouring the past is drowning out our future

We are in a national debate premised on the view that nature is like a bucket of coal to be burnt. Water is not a resource, a utility to be used — much less a so-called human ‘right’.

Our use of language is telling about our disconnection from the nature on which we are entirely dependent. Along with a lack of consideration of water as an essential part of the ecosystem is a lack of debate about the obligations attendant on our imagined rights over water. It is a tragi-comic reprise of King Canute’s command to hold back the waves.

We know this is a true mirror of our outlook. It is barely two years since people in the countryside were up-in-arms to defend their right to allow their uninspected septic tanks pollute the watercourse. Yesterday, Armistice Day, ceremonies of commemoration were held for the dead of two world wars. Eerily, as we approach the centenary of the Easter Rising, the foundational act of our Republic, the national discourse is increasingly preoccupied with endless remembrance, but the future is hardly spoken of at all. The Easter Rising was, if anything, the ultimate futuristic event in modern Irish history. Now, it is being made lifeless, in administrative aspic.