A Nation Once Again

We are a rabble, Ireland is a country without nationhood, we exist in tiny segments of self interest and parish politics we live in an anarchy with cynical politicians going on television debates making bland statements designed to sway the middle-classes, what about the ATM'S they declare like they were ever going to run out of cash, like the European union would close down its financial markets just to teach little old Ireland a lesson.


Yet the disease goes deeper outside of sport and even that is dubious, what other sense of nationhood do we cherish?


We have such a low sense of self, and indeed as one former US ambassador put it we have no sense of outrage. Why is this when the ordinary folk in this little country are facing austerity, they must watch in awe as the bankers and developers get rescued and more financially draining institutions are created to deal with the mess. Which of course they don't deal with and various suits are wheeled out to try and justify the preposterous reality, which is hammering the final nails into our economic coffin.


People give out about European union accusing this massive bureaucracy of stealing our sovereignty when in fact we all but handed that over when we joined the common market, we basically gave away our biggest natural resource or fishing industry, we did this to facilitate electoral votes for our main political parties, in essence they sucked up to the agricultural lobby where they both had their power base.



But in order to lose one's sovereignty one has to own it first, and when only a minority of the populace actually owns a state's sovereignty, then by proxy it is up for sale to the highest bidder. Ireland through its patriotic revolution swapped one merchant class for another, instead of the English overlords we replaced them with our own Irish ones. Those brave men and women who saw the struggle not just in nationalist terms but as a revolution against capitalism were executed or beaten into the ground. The spin was alive and well and one wonders how much the American capitalist system assisted in the transfer of power and wealth, and perhaps even in regards who got shot and who lived on.



The legacy that is left to the citizens of this country is one of complete anarchy in that it is every man and woman for themselves, the whole system under which we live is based on a bland consumerism this is not unlike the dark black and white days of soviet communism. Every one wants the same things the same mobile phones, cars, the nice house and the good private religious run school, young teenagers wear the same clothes aspire to the same meaningless degree's. Like how many marketing graduates does an economy need, and how many food safety degree graduates can get jobs?


The idea of statehood or collective responsibility to things like health, education, and social welfare are foreign to most of our citizens they will tell you simply that there was never any help for them, and indeed they had to slog long and hard to earn a crust, yet they fail to realise that statehood and collective responsibility are indeed profit making, for example if we took real ownership of our natural resources including fisheries how much would this generate for an economy on its knees?


It is time to re-examine or notion of nationhood because in reality as things stand now our nationhood is our economy, it is one and the same as all ownership and action is governed by some fat cat investor who instructs some poor minnow who sits at a computer all day long to place bets for him, the results of this so called trading basically effects every sphere of our lives, and we as citizens allow this because people will lament that there is no alternative. I for one lament that we are still living under an archaic system that is undemocratic cumbersome. extremely wasteful, unfair and unequal, and loss making.


Maybe sometime soon the people of this little country might realise that we do have the power to re-claim what is rightfully ours and that is our true sovereignty, we can achieve this by insisting on collective responsibility for us, ourselves.