1. Challenge of prosperity; no excuses for deprivation
2. Challenge of the loss of church dictatorship; need to found civic society
3. Challenge of providing real local democracy
4. Challenge of finding safe public arenas for real debate
5. Challenge of developing a consensus on shared values
6. Challenge of finding new entrey points, new doors, to communicate values into a consumer society
7. Challenge of individualism
8. Challenging the invisible; in segmented societies, the rich don't have to be confronted by the poor. Housing; public spaces, events, clubs.
9. Challenge of accommodation. State provision
10. Challenge of multi-cultural society; travellers, emigrants

1. Challenge of prosperity; no excuses for deprivation

There is no economic reason anymore to have unemployment, bad housing, real poverty and some of the ills that flow from that- literacy difficulties which affect up to 25 per cent of the population, and the other ills that flow mostly from poverty: crime, and drugs.

There is no economic reason anymore for bad public health services, inadequate schools, inadequate social welfare provision, inadequate provision of services for the mentally and physically handicapped.

There is no economic reason for a gap between rich and poor so large that it goes way beyond the market need for an incentive and actually starts to destroy not only the society on which the economy depends, but as a result, the economy itself.

But to create a political and social consensus to tackle these issues we need to create a sense of citizenship whici-1 we don't have, a sense of society which we are losing, a sense of real democracy which we have long ago lost. So behind the economic challenges, to which I will return, are fundamental social challenges.

2. Challenge of the loss of church dictatorship; need to found civic society

The Catholic Church was a great dictatorship. It controlled all activities: state, voluntary, social, cultural. Now it's gone and like eastern Europe we have to learn to construct for ourselves a civil society, a whole network that more developed societies like France, or Britain take for granted. The EU gives enormous grants to consultants to help reconstruct civil society in Estonia, Croatia, Romania. We could do with some.

Look at our community structure. It used to be based on the parish. People don't attend mass any more like they used

And often they don't want an association with the church. Schools, often church connected, used to be a focus point. But in the city at least, people don't necessarily send their children to the local school any more. The local tennis club, the local pub, the local supermarket are now substitutes for community. They are used by charities or health agencies trying to target people in a locality. Not adequate, but they are better than nothing.

Other countries, more developed, have in place a better network of civil society. France has. Britain has. Sometimes it is based on the structure of a parish church. Few people may attend it but they are happy to use the network of schools and activities as a community base because there isn't the hostility to the church that we have at our stage in becoming a post-catholic society. The church treated us like adolescents and now in the way adolescents reject their parents, we are rejecting the church. But what France, Britain, and the U.S. have, which we don't, is local democracy.

3. Challenge of providing real local democracy

Official structures reflect voluntary structures. Without local democracy, you have no democracy, and this state has the most centralised form of government in the whole of the European union. Look at regional and town government in France, at elected mayors, at town councils. Look at state and country government in the United States, at elected mayors, elected attorney generals, elected police chiefs. When were you last able to vote against someone who took a local decision drastically affecting your life? You couldn't, because it is not local councillors but local officials under the Managers and Secretaries Act who have most of the power and you don't vote for them. They run everything on the say-so of central departments (I won't mention the other little incentives of which we have heard in tribunals) because the centre controls their money. Until we have taxation collected locally, where local people can vote specifically for the purposes to which they want their money used; until they are voting in the people with the power, whether that means voting for county managers or councillors with real power, we won't have any meaningful local democracy and without local democracy, we have no democracy at all because people don't see the relevance of politics to their own lives. Real local democracy is central to the creation of communities, of civil society.

For years in this country, you were terrified of saying anything which would offend the church, or the sacred cows of nationalism,- or its obverse, revisionism. It is still difficult to have real honest debate on serious issues whether it is abortion, or accommodation for the travelling community, or immigrants because you are caught between two extremes, shouting one another down. The tradition of reasoned debate which has developed in more established societies is still seen as frightening and dangerous in a new country and we are a very new country which has no proper civil society network, a very new country indeed.

I chair open debates in Britain that would still be regarded as dangerous here on unity, on homosexuals as fathers, on in vitro fertilisation, on GM foods. And the danger of not having such honest debates is that things slide past us and happen with no debate on our part and we are presented with a fait accompli.

Take the development of non-union companies. How did it happen? Not a word even from the unions. We might frighten off American investment.

Take the Euro, which has been putting dangerous pressure on our economy. Not a word of criticism from any political party. We might frighten off those nice Germans with their large grants and transfers. No debate on what is a crucial economic and political issue for the future of this country. Would the British march into such a decision without debating it. No. Why? They have too much pride. They have a working civil society, despite Margaret Thatcher.

We need safe arenas where people won't feel they will be hounded out of society, screamed down if they make a reasoned argument, where we can explore ideas and not just take up positions. That is the sort of space that civil society creates.

Such a move to civil society, to local democracy, to finding of safe public arenas are vital because only that way will we develop a public consensus on shared values. We used to have values imposed. We were told what our values were. There were rules to back up those values and taboos in case we broke the rules. All that no longer exists. Now we must find our own shared code of values.

The glue the church used to stick us together is gone and we have to grow up and do it for ourselves. I have no problem with growing up. For too long we were treated as moral adolescents by the church, and now we are still behaving as adolescents, thinking that hatred and resentment of the past are an adequate agenda for the future. Well, they're not and only adolescents would think so. What should those values be? That's what we need to debate. It's time to start.

We used to know where and how to inject knowledge, wisdom, values into our society. We simply looked at the ways people defined themselves. They defined themselves by their religion, by their political affiliations or their notion of citizenship, by their families. These were the entry points.

Now they define themselves largely as consumers- by what they own, by what they consume and how and where they consume it. A recent Sunday times poll showed that young people regarded as the lowest form of life (after Charlie Haughey) traffic wardens and car clampers. 'I drive, therefore I am' 'I own a car, therefore I exist' they identify themselves, or their success, by what they drive, what they wear. Have you noticed the proliferation of life-style magazines and sections in the newspapers? They outweigh by far the politics and current affairs.

People need to make sure they are buying the right thing in the right place, that the logo is in the right place ('what's the worst label you could put on anybody?' asked a religion teacher. 'Dunne's Stores' answered the kids)

She wears Calvin Klein. He drives a Beamer. That's who he is, who she is. I would have said in my sixties way 'he's a Trot or a Maoist, or a Stalinist or a Fascist. He marches against Vietnam or he favours apartheid in South Africa.' Now possession, not politics, establishes identity.

So how do you reach such people? In the shops? Sometimes, yes. That's where politicians canvass. That's where people like the breast cancer screening project put their leaflets, where other public health agencies advertise. The supermarket is the new community centre.

So what institutions are left? What entry points are left?

*Take families, which, as John McGahern says, are Irish society. He says we have never had an agreed social code, agreed manners, agreed values other than those imposed on us. You could never write a novel about society here like Jane Austin, or Trollope have in England. Irish families, were the little independent republics in which Irish people lived. The Irish family, with the father as head of the household, was supported to the hilt by the Church, by the State and its laws. There was no society outside the traditional family, - and outside the traditional family was a dangerous place to be, unless it was more dangerous to be inside it.

But now we have increasingly new sorts of families, single parent families, separated families, divorced and second families, and we have a generation with a new approach to authority.

Parents find that applying rules to children isn't enough. They don't anymore accept handed-down codes, or hierarchy.

You need to find the emotional junctions of life- joy, grief, betrayal, loss- to explain to them why a certain value is important. You need to be able to explain how a lack of restraint in a certain area will hurt them or people they love. Pointing to individual consequences, appealing to enlightened self-interest, is a more effective way to explain the need for

An ethical code for the common good, rather than the use of rules and taboos. Most parents don't talk about rules anymore. They talk about deals i.e. 'ok, kid, this is the deal. I'll do this, if you'll do that.' they negotiate, they don't dictate. Unquestioning obedience is no longer a value in our world.

* The parish as an entry point is increasingly disappearing in urban areas

*Schools increasingly are not part of the parish and lay teachers have their own family concerns to think of. Also the authority issue is now relevant to teachers. With an increasingly educated ordinary populace, the teacher, the priest, have less status. And with the Internet, their role as guardians at the gate of knowledge is diminished as kids have access to libraries of information if not the skills to analyse them.

*The media is still a major entry point to society but again not as homogeneous as it used to be. Look in certain areas of the cities. They are reading non-Irish papers, the mirror, or the sun; they are either watching non-Irish TV stations or videos. Look at the dropping viewing figures for RTÉ. Whole areas of the country, particularly in the cities, are alienated from the public life of their own country.

*And why? Look at politicians. After the recent revelations from the planning and other tribunals you can understand people's sense of disillusion. But also people are recognising that politicians, and parliament as an institution in this country doesn't have the power it once did.

Just as power has moved away from local authority politicians, power has moved away from the national parliament to Brussels and to the US. The EU regulates our economy and the US owns it. Even in Ireland itself, decisions have moved away from parliament.

The new partnership model has a lot to recommend it but it makes parliament irrelevant. Powerful trades union leaders make deals with government or more truthfully with permanent civil servants. Parliament, and the opposition, has no say.

The collapse of the corporatist values of the catholic church have left us a little like Britain at the time of the industrial revolution. Individual effort and enterprise are smiled upon and rewarded. The work ethic rules. God helps those who help themselves. There was a time when such risk-taking, such wealth-seeking, profit-making was not smiled upon. Business was not encouraged. A clerically-dominated education shaped people for entry into professions, institutions, whether the civil service or the universities, into clerical jobs, into a secure hierarchy which reflected the church's own patterns. Conformity and obedience was given in exchange for security. There was a catholic way of thinking which feared the freedom of action and the individualism which is central to the enterprise spirit. Allow freedom of action and very soon you have freedom of individual conscience, almost a protestant way of

Seeing things and not what the Ireland of John Charles McQuaid trusted. Irish business people worked up to the point where tax made it not worthwhile to work anymore and then went out and played golf. Jobs were not created. Hundreds of thousands emigrated from an economy whose potential was never tested.

Now we have choices. A choice of jobs. People have a choice to stay in their own country and work. They can choose how to live their lives more than ever before, choosing for their individual situation. Women at last are choosing how to live their lives for themselves not for others, and that forces the rest of society to share the burden usually carried solely by women- that of child-rearing, of looking after elderly relatives. And that won't change. Individualism has put an end to the scandal of the unpaid labour of women.

People are questioning any authority which puts a limit on that freedom, whether it is church, state, family or other institutions. They think in terms of self-fulfilment here in this life. Heaven now. Not postponed. They believe, as do the Americans, that they have a divine right to happiness. This is not bad. It is much more creative than the life-denying, crucifying gospel of self-denial, mortification, self-hatred which was our lot for so long. But the energy it

Creates has to be harnessed for a more cohesive, caring effective society.

It can be done, and don't let's fool ourselves that it was ever done before. Back in the good old days of self-denial and mortification, we had one of the cruellest societies in western Europe.

How do you appeal to the better instincts of individualism? You appeal to enlightened self-interest. We do it anyway. What is saving your soul but enlightened self-interest? You argue that a more just cohesive society serves everyone better, including the individual. Great gaps between rich and poor rip a society apart. The untapped potential of those held back by poor circumstances, poor education, hopelessness, that untapped potential will benefit everybody.

And how do you get past the blindness of individualism, the self-absorption of individualism? You challenge the invisible.

This is vital because what people don't see they don't have to face up to. A segmented society with rich and poor ghettos allows people to ignore reality. We are now reaping the harvest of poor planning which allowed our society physically to segment itself into rich and poor areas. We need to develop socially mixed housing areas. We need public spaces in which everybody meets. Other countries are better at this: the Italian communist Gramsci was adamant about the need for public spaces and public entertainments and cultural events in which everybody joined. The Spanish paseo is an evening stroll in which everybody takes part. The French have their promenade. Maybe the weather helps but we don't have the same. Culture of public places. We have a great culture of closed clubs, half-closed pubs, a great notion of who is respectable and who isn't.

Some reflections on the vision and charism, along with challenges for today.

For many countries, and the united states is only one, the great leaps forward have come after an injection of new immigrant energy. There are even better times coming, if only we have the confidence to embrace them. These are not problems. These are opportunities to grasp, challenges to meet. Let's meet them.

Olivia O'Leary

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