| The Joe Horgan Column By Joe
Horgan
I’ll tell you how we get our post. The local postman, knowing we are
all regular visitors to the house of our parents, drops all the post off
there. We in effect have our own sorting office. Now there are a number
of reasons for this. I live up a long lane and have never got around to
putting a post box up at the bottom of it, my other siblings have either
just moved or are in the middle of building and so on. So for the sake of
ease he drops it all at the one address. Sometimes we manage to pass the
postman on the road and he’ll wind down the window and deliver the letters
there and then. In a place like this he knows you by sight anyway. You’ll
see him in the pub occasionally, know where he lives, and know who he goes
fishing with. I could and should put that post box up and I keep meaning
to. And I will one day. But you know, what’s the hurry?
Now before this all starts to sound a little bit Ballykissangel lets
just say that I don’t have any concerns about post going astray. Indeed
we have had occasional calls from people whom have had our post by mistake
and because this remains a small, intimate place chances are you’ll get
the odd stray one back anyway. But the post does not just rely on a local
postman knowing your name and leaving your letters somewhere where you can
eventually track them down. An Post actually has a state of the art tracking
system that pinpoints every house in the country. It is all computerised.
It is all very, very modern. It is all very, very efficient. It has a personal
element because we live in a small rural area but it is not a service governed
by chance.
So what is it with postcodes? What is this government’s obsession with
having what it considers to be the badges of modernity even when there is
no definable reason for having them? Why did they spend e50million on an
electronic voting system that expert after expert told them wouldn’t work
and which now sits rotting in some warehouse somewhere? Why did McDowell
say that if the British introduced identity cards we would too? Why do we
need postcodes just because others have them?
The government has talked as usual in terms of modern infrastructure
and opening up the country more to business as if this was a land where
post was delivered once a week by a fellow with a donkey. And is that essentially
what the problem is here? Do the government and those in power still have
some sort of mental cringe about old, backward Ireland that makes them in
their tailored suits and shiny offices just still that little bit insecure
when Bertie and co sit at the top table with Blair and Chirac? Do they feel
they have to try extra hard to prove how modern and contemporary they are?
Is that why we have to expunge any vestige of anything different about us
as a nation whether it be the old rules of the GAA or the old townlands
we have instead of postcodes? Would a French government minister stand up
and say that French coffee houses and bars are poor social environments
compared to the lively human hustle and bustle of an Irish pub and he was
going to introduce measures to install them in order to change French social
habits to be more in line with those of the Irish?
And what of those townlands? As more and more of rural Ireland disappears
and the names of individual fields and lanes are forgotten townlands remain
as a signifier and marker of a place that hasn’t just been invented in the
last 10 years. A whole folk memory and history, an ingredient of who we
are and might just be is often found in such seemingly insubstantial things.
When Ireland was colonised by the British one of the deliberate acts of
the coloniser was to replace the names the Irish had given to places with
those of the new masters, the British. It is a common historical theme.
Christopher Columbus even went so far as claiming to have discovered the
Americas, which must have come as some surprise to those already living
there. Our new masters seem intent on claiming they discovered new Ireland
hiding amongst the green, damp rags of the old one.
Do these things make any sense? In a country where the main body pushing
for more and more stretches of motorway across the country has just announced
that no motorway in Ireland is to have a service station because the country
is too small to warrant such a thing are these cowboys making any sense
at all?
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