I Will Not Listen to You

national | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Saturday December 03, 2005 15:36 by Sean Crudden - impero sean.crudden at iol dot ie Jenkinstown, Dundalk, Co Louth. 087 9739945

Can You Get Your Point Across?

In an age of spin and the sound-bite no-one is listening. Have we lost the capacity to talk and to listen? Are we all just parrots programmed by mass media which considerably undervalue the individual? Is democracy just a clash of stereotypes?

Have you ever been in the upper room where the movers and shakers stand in the background glowering into pints of Guinness in dark, unforgiving, threatening posture with their backs turned on the speakers, enthusiasts and idealists? - a silent conspiracy of connivers and manipulators casting a shadow of the dead hand of control over the proceedings.

It wasn’t politics I was watching the other night - in the party political sense. But it is a paradigm which will be replicated all over the country where democracy is supposed to reign.

Candidly I think it is time to call out the talkers, the actors, the clowns, the comedians, the artists.

If you cannot sit down and write, or stand up and state your case openly, then restrain your hand from reaching for the levers of control, dictation, legislation, power.

Really I think that the real requirement in this community and in Ireland in general is for the people who can talk to be allowed to talk freely and to be listened to. There must be some institutionalised way of breaking through the barriers of the narrow, received thinking that dominates public life in Ireland and which runs like some perverse starch through the fabric of public life here.