Sep 11 2024 68 mins 14
Professor Colin O’Gara is Head of Addiction Services at St. John of God Hospital and author of the book Gambling Addiction In Ireland: Causes Consequences and Recovery.
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There is a pattern, I suppose it’s so well-known that it’s a cliché, of people mellowing their view as they get older. One version is the famous quote, I think wrongly attributed to Churchill, ‘If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.’ But I think that isn’t exactly the effect in reality; regardless of your political views, as you get older, life’s complications present themselves, so it is harder not to take account of them and acknowledge that there are many exceptions that don’t fit into the more strident views you might have on any topic. Nuance is important.
You might be a free market capitalist, and point to the explosion of wealth that it is associated with, and say that everything should be governed by the market, but if you don’t eventually notice that some areas of life persistently just don’t respond to market forces, then you’re not paying attention.
Or you might be hardline socialist, and demand that the resources of society be shared fairly; but if you don’t ever recognise that wealth is not a fixed quantity, and people make a better fist of increasing that quantity when they get to keep a bigger share of what they create, then you end up with having the local market stall run by a committee of the party’s local coordinating executive, and you have little or nothing to sell on that market stall.
Now that sounds like I’m going to make the case for the centrist-dad position of being somewhat moderate on everything, but not quite. George Bernard Shaw wrote “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” This country exists because those who died that Eastertide attempted something completely impossible – absolutely hopeless, with no chance of success; but within five years more of their vision had been achieved than could ever have been imagined.
It’s also a cliché to point out how young the American Founding Fathers were, but it bears repeating. Alexander Hamilton, he of the musical, was 21 years old when he signed the Declaration of Independence. James Madison was 25 at the time. Aaron Burr was 20. James Munroe, later president, was 18. Eighteen.
My point is that if you want to achieve anything, you need to sometimes rise above the details. The arrogance and naivety of youth might serve you well in that. If you are paralysed about breaking eggs or throwing out babies, you will never manage to make an omelette or get rid of the bathwater… there are too many aphorisms on this topic, but I hope you get my point. And I’m not ignoring all the times that revolutionaries trying the creative destruction gig got all the destruction but precious little creativity.
I was thinking about all this because one listener asked me to comment on the recent Sinn Féin Affordable Housing plan.
It’s important to remember just how appalling this crisis is. We have been building probably 40,000 fewer homes than we need every year for more than a decade. Aside from the financial cost on people who have managed to get a home, there’s hundreds of thousands of people living in some poxy kip,
