Time has changed the meaning of community

I rarely venture to Dublin now. Too much noise, too much traffic, too much hassle. On the rare occasions when I have to visit our capital city, to tell the truth, I can’t wait to get away from it.

It’s one thing to get there, to find a path through a maze of ever-changing traffic arrangements, to make sure I’m on the right road and going in the right direction, to have the right app downloaded to be able to access public transport and not to lose my money when I eventually hit the streets of Dublin.

It’s something else to be able to get home. After furiously negotiating the inner city, getting on the M50 and heading west always feels a kind of liberation. Like the summer holidays from school. I’ve successfully seen the back of something.

Back home the view is different. And more limited. A series of writing commitments means that I spend more time knocking out words on my computer and looking into my garden for inspiration. Until recently the view was a deep green with a lawn extending out in front of me. An overgrown hedge cascades over a perimeter wall. Swallows dip and dive as a neighbour’s cat loiters with intent around the place. I sense now, since I’ve left it behind me, how this small part of God’s earth could become my whole reality.

It depends, of course, on the view. Where you are and what you do become your real reality. What exists is whatever happens within the limits of our horizons. In some sense we may possess our world. At a deeper level our worlds possess us.

A child no more than eight years old sits on a piece of cardboard on O’Connell Bridge holding out a white plastic cup with a few coins in it. Her eyes devour passes by as if demanding their involvement in her world. Or at least, some of their money. An African shabbily dressed and pulling furiously on a long cigarette stands at the corner of a pharmacy near the GPO and looks into the middle distance. A man who looks like a business executive talks into a mobile phone as he tries to heal a taxi. Same place, different worlds. Same view but the perspective is different.

I get a sense that community no longer really exists. At least not in the traditional sense of a necessary engagement with those who live around us. Progressively, people live in different worlds that scarcely impinge on each other. Shopping, going to Mass, different forms of recreation are all movable feasts. Whatever community now exists takes the form of a gathering around shared experiences like work or sport or school.

We used to hear stories of people living in housing estates in Dublin and not knowing that somebody had died just three doors away from them. Now people can live cheek by jowl in the country and don't know their neighbour’s name. Or who lives in the house just down the road from them. Visiting a neighbour’s house (or ‘rambling’ as it’s known) has, in the space of a few years, transformed itself from neighbourly interest into an invasion of privacy, an infringement into people’s space. Our horizons are narrowing as we create smaller and more private worlds.

I remember once in New York visiting friends. Outside the ground floor apartment, the street was so busy that we had to park a few hundred yards away in an underground car park. Cars whizzed by continuously, strange looking people smoked unusual looking cigarettes and beamed or scolded at passersby. It wasn’t a place where you’d stop for a chat to while away the day. It certainly wasn’t a place to linger at night.

Inside the apartment a different world existed. A small bit of Ireland with a large Mayo influence – including on a chair a copy of the Western People – conspired to convince you that you were at home. There was even a back garden with a lawn, some cherry trees in delicious bloom, walls covered in ivy and a decking area with an overhang to provide what privacy there was among the high-rise buildings. And, yes, we had bacon and cabbage for dinner. The distance between two very different worlds was just a wall. That New York scene is being replicated all over Ireland. Individual interests are beginning to dictate the pattern of life and by extension the contracts that people have with one another. If you are a member of a golf club or go to Mass (or don’t go to Mass anymore) or work as part of a team, then most of your life becomes focused around the people you know, the club, the activities you participate in and the sports you favour. Our allegiance is to a progressively narrower interest. And it takes something like a death in the family or Mayo playing in another All-Ireland final or the pope coming to Ireland to re-assert even for the time our allegiance to a wider world.

Meanwhile, most of us spend most of our lives focusing on a narrow garden outside the window that is in danger of becoming our whole reality while the rest of the world has become a distant place which like Dublin we hope we may one day never have to visit.