What is happening to us?

Years ago one used to say that people are like steel: when it loses its temper it loses its worth. Today one would say that a nation is like steel: when a nation loses its temper, it loses its moral value.

A very important message for Malta and Gozo is that by Ombudsman Commissioner Emily O'Reilly, an extract of which appeared in the Irish Times on November 6, under the heading "Ireland: what has happened to us?"

Like Ireland, Malta is no longer an island. It is opportune to reproduce a few extracts from Ms O'Reilly's deep study:

"Many of us recoil at the vulgar fest that is much of modern Ireland. The rampant, unrestrained drunkenness, the brutal, random violence that infects the smallest of our townlands and villages, the incontinent use of foul language with no thought to place or company, the obscene parading of wealth, the debasement of our civic life, the fracturing of our community life, the god-like status given to celebrities all too often replaced down the line with a venomous desire to attack and destroy those who were on pedestals the week before, the creation of 'reality' TV.

"But it wasn't meant to be like this, we will protest. Divorce was meant to be for the deeply unhappy, not the mildly bored; drunkenness was supposed to be practised by the marginalised, not the boys and girls with cars and careers and more prospects than their granny could shake a stick at.

"Who or what is the real us? Were we real when we were modest in our habits, and daily communicants, and Mass attendees, and self-effacing contributors to charity, and energetic participants in voluntary work - or are we real now as we either indulge in, or look enviously upon, the phenomena I have described?

"It would be good if we recognised the new religions of sex and drink and shopping for what they are and tiptoed back to the church... It would be good to insert ourselves into the lives of our community, reawaken our sense of what we can contribute but also what we can receive - the preciousness of belonging, of being caught up in something stronger than your own individual self.

"It would be good to discipline our children by disciplining ourselves, to realise the risks of jaded appetites, of needs too quickly and too elaborately met, of lives made too cynical, too aware through the imposition of distorted adult views of what constitutes happiness, to realise also that the new impoverished are not those without DVDs and the latest PlayStations and mobiles and private cinemas and the cut down Fendi bags but those, perhaps, who have them and who have got them without the slightest personal effort, without that peculiar joy known as delayed gratification.

"There is moral poverty; the staggeringly swift creation of a society in which we are increasingly neutral in our judgments of all sorts of objectively bad behaviour, be it infidelity, the abandonment of families, loutish behaviour on the sports field or underage sexual behaviour..."

Thank you, Ms O'Reilly.