On St Patrick’s Day 1943 Eamon De Valera broadcast to the Irish people, starting his address as follows:
‘The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live.’
It was, of course, a hopeless idyll and the realities of life in that State became glaringly obvious with the scandals of recent years.
I think of Dev’s speech as I get served up the items that pass for news in our ‘ideal Mann’. The banality and absurdity of some so-called news items has become so commonplace that their authors think it is ‘real news’.
All the Manx news media seem a tad short of realism when it comes to reporting the realities of what is for many people a different isle from the one we like to think we live in. Patronage and cronyism are still very much to the fore here with a small cabal running the show, occasionally admitting the odd newcomer into the ‘gene pool’ to keep it interesting.
Society here tends to be shaped like a pyramid with those clawing to ascend the sides having replaced ‘Manx crab’ syndrome as a facet of island life. At the top of the pyramid of course are ‘the establishment apparatchiks’.
It’s not clear who these people are, a mixture possibly of legal, business and political interests. Politicos are the weakest placed of this triumvirate, their fortunes are subject to the fickle twists of electoral fortune and their fall from grace can be speedy.
At the base the great amorphous mass of working people increasingly subject to more and more punitive charges and stealth taxes designed to try to keep this unsteady ship from capsizing.
Oh, some of them will ‘warble’ on via Facebook, internet comments or forums but in reality they know they can make no difference to the manner in which events are shaped. Some astonishingly hide anonymously afraid, in the 21st century, to use their own name. In other words they are useless and gutless!
The island meanwhile likes to emphasise its differences focusing on our ‘make-believe independence’, when in reality we are increasingly just an offshore county of England. We have our funny flag, funny cats, funny sheep, we also have some funny characters. These latter are invariably called by the establishment, ‘true Manxmen’, which generally means they lost all sense of Manx identity years ago and embraced a sort of court jester role to the Lordship of Man.
The island has a sense of community that stretches back for centuries. That should conjure up a vision not dissimilar to that outlined by poor old De Valera, except the reality is this is a community that birched children and persecuted gays – and that’s just the bits we can talk about.
That was all in the past I hear you say! Well, I say humbug! The same mean spirit still lives in the hearts of many. Scratch some ‘island residents’ (are there such things as Manx people any more?) and you’ll find a bigot trying to get out.
Enough of this gloom. We have our village fairs, the Tynwald pantomime, community events and the Guild - and there’s always the odd ‘true Manxman’ there faithfully fulfilling that jester role to the establishment.
So (to quote Dev again) are we ‘a people living the life that God desires that men should live’?
Well not quite, even the ‘Manx Church’, which is part of the establishment, tried to rip itself apart recently. Did that ragbag of petitioners really think their protestations would unseat the Bishop?