Neighbourliness - A dreadful warning from Ohio

Ireland of the last century may not have been the best place for someone who cherished their privacy or their time alone to do as they pleased when they pleased.

This was a society where the Catholic Church, the State, or neighbours who imagined themselves helpful but really just felt superior very often crossed the fine line between neighbourliness and unwelcome, bossyintrusion. Very often the postman, certainly the local postmistress acting as a telephone operator, knew what many families had for breakfast, dinner and tea. This almost routine intrusion may be at the root of our national reticence bordering on secrecy and, ultimately, the lack of accountability that so dogs our public life.

Society was, however, made up of labyrinth relationships some of them dysfunctional but the great majority were supportive, well-intentioned, and enriched individuals and communities. In most cases there was usually an uncomplicated, natural concern for the wellbeing of people who lived around you, an idea encapsulated in that wonderful, and, at the moment very pertinent and powerful Irish word: Meitheal.

It would be wrong though to see the past through a rose-tinted rearview mirror as two of the better novels of the past 100 years remind us — Brinsley MacNamara’s 1918 Valley of the Squinting Windows and John McGahern’s wonderful That They May Face the Rising Sun from just over decade ago. These novels show an insular place with its own thought police and fundamentalists more than happy to try to impose their beliefs on everyone else. Nevertheless it was a place where community meant something, be it in an urban or a rural setting. You may not have been your brother’s keeper but rather his reliable helper in his moment of need.

But has that changed? It probably has but has it changed to the extent that the terrible story unfolding around the Castro brothers’ house of horrors in Cleveland, Ohio, where three women were kept against their will for 10 years, could happen here? Could several people be held captive and abused in an Irish urban setting without being discovered for a decade? Possibly, if not probably, almost certainly in a remote rural setting. Would any of those scenarios have been possible half a century ago? Probably not.

In an age where relationships, especially those outside the inner circle of our lives, are often more virtual than real this detachment has consequences, consequences Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight became aware of in the most dreadful way.

Maybe one of the lessons we can learn from Cleveland is that a community is far stronger, a far safer place if all it members realise that their own interests can be best served by being active and concerned about its wellbeing even if only at an arm’s length. This is especially so as a regular garda presence is just a memory in so many rural areas and indeed in some urban ones too.

A renewed, respectful sense of community, a new-age neighbourliness need not intrude as before but it could be again one of the warming and supportive traits that made this country such a very a good place to live.

It would after all be no more than doing, unasked, for your neighbours what you might hope they would do for you.