On Community…becoming Empowered Citizens

Originally published 20. April 2011, the message applies more than ever!

I believe the citizens of Ireland in the Republic and in Northern Ireland will finally elect worthy representatives– if empowered to witness a mature belief that we deserve governments and institutional authorities that are competent, responsive and respectful of the citizenry.

When my adolescent children were rebelling, I would assert my authority by saying “this is not a democracy”, well my fellow Irish, Northern Irish or British men and women – this is a democracy – on both sides of the border. We get the representation we deserve.

I believe that culturally and anthropologically, Ireland is in that same adolescent place. Seen in this light, we can collectively rebel against the parents, the government and the authorities to whom we had relinquished our power. We were dependent on institutions charged with our care and security and they have failed us. We believed and behaved as told. We didn’t question, we believed the financial institutions would hold, the church would educate and protect our children, our pensions would be secure. In failing us, they have abused that trust.

Would I expect a child I had bankrupted, lied to and left homeless to respect and obey me? No.

What I am asking you to do is join me in becoming empowered citizens. Seizing this moment for Ireland would be to require institutions to serve and protect us. Representatives would be forced to answer to the citizenry. Citizens would have to let go of “I am powerless to change it” and go to the polls to choose competent, respectful and responsive leadership.

“Myth lets you know where you are across the ages of life ” *

There is an heroic journey we are all called upon to make at some point in our lives when we live authentically and leave behind our dependencies on an old way of being that may not be working for us anymore.

Personally, I thought I had to live the way my parents had prescribed, where they had chosen and to please their vision of who I should be. When I came into being as my own person, an authority for my own life, responsible for my own happiness I grew up. In my forties.

Civically, I know we can have the leadership we deserve. A collective “adolescence” seems about right for this ancient land with millennia ahead…

Join me, at the polls and in the public spaces, on our collective heroic journey to require competent, responsive and respectful leadership.

* Joseph Campbell illustrates this developmental truth in his own words:

Five minutes, too dear? Start at 3:20!

The universality of the “heroic journey” is discussed here:

…not surprising that in the journey as described – the outcome is to “bring life back into the culture”.



Community…on an Authentic Political Identity

A post On Becoming Empowered Citizens described my sense that Ireland was, metaphorically, in an adolescent place ready to rebel against the authorities such as the church and state, and reclaim the power relinquished to them in absolute trust  and obedience for generations. The recent election certainly reflected a beginning.

That spoke to the way we have handled our political response to the economic crisis, however, we proved ourselves fully adult and authentic in our political identity as citizens of the Republic of Ireland.

The high points of the recent visit by the Queen have been well reported. Coverage of the ceremony at the Garden of Remembrance was as moving as my own first experience of it. I’ve little doubt the British head of state mourned the loss of her dear uncle and the British young who served their country. She did so while honouring the Irish who died.  The capacity to hold the grief on both sides is born of maturity.

I was pleased and proud to count myself as an Irish citizen most significantly during her visit to Cork. Her warm reception during the walkabout, not possible in Dublin, was a fitting appreciation for her effort to come. The maturity of calling a demonstration not in protest but in celebration of Cork’s Republican past a respectfully short distance away, was heroic and historic.

The peace process is clearly that, a process. We are not all at the same stage of acceptance, of reconciliation or even in agreement. But the gathering at Sullivan’s Quay was a respectful acknowledgment of our shared process. While accepting the reality of the democratically elected government’s invitation, there was a positive assertion of another narrative. We as citizens of this Island – whether North and South of the border each have our own narrative. Respect for each other and our stories is all that is required for the peace process to move forward.

The leadership of Sinn Féin has clearly struggled within their ranks to move their narrative to a place which allowed for the respectful treatment of this particular foreign head of state. Perhaps there is a lesson in that struggle for us all.

The words spoken were clearly well chosen and even well rehearsed on all sides. I believe that will be the way that we move the conversation forward. I would support all friends, colleagues and readers to come together and develop a language for the respectful treatment of each other’s stories. None of us can afford to take offense when it is not intended, nor can we be unthinking in our choice of language.

Let us choose our words carefully, in English and in Irish. Let us choose to be inclusive and respectful of our individual sense of our identities. Let us move forward in a way that allows us to never have to say of this period that there is much “which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.