A New Ireland

In this new Ireland we will be a people with a whole new set of values. No longer will we judge people by their name or culture:they will not be defined according to their name or the school they attended. They will be judged only by the quality of their lives, by the contribution they bring to society, we will have a society liberated from the shackles of the past, a place where men and women have decided that they will be motivated and identified by the principles of God's Kingdom and none else.

Unfortunately the whole of Irish society is under the constant threat of secularism. The institutional church is in meltdown and thousands of people who leave our churches, of all the denominations, never return. Many of them go nowhere to worship the next Sunday but some go to one of the new churches.

While the churches are suffering the net effect is for the mass of people to loose their anchor on life and they slip into the "me" culture which makes it demands on life robing the whole of society of its cohesiveness and stability. Marriages are either serial or simply take place and anti-social behaviour has become common place. While all this happens we scamper around looking for scapegoats; the police or lack of appropriate numbers of police, politicians who can't even be trusted to make appropriate expense claims never mind work together with those they disagree with and then there is the church. Few people are asking the right questions about the kind of society we really want nor about the price we are prepared to pay to get it.

How are we going to get out of this quagmire? Tghe Old Testament says that "without a vision the people perish" and we have no vision for the future apart from the limited view of a political dispensation depending on what part of the community we come from. My vision is for a community of people who fear nothing but failing God, a community of people committed to God through Jesus Christ who will learn to live together: who can deal with differences of opinion in a mature way and who see all people throiugh the eyes of that same Christ who had compassion on the weak and the poor and the marginalised. A vision where the poor are blessed and not the rich, where the peacemakers are blessed and not the war mongers, where the meek and th gentle are the people who are honoured. An Ireland like this will be a place wherewe would all want to live. What do you think?