Marc Coleman again

I wrote last month some critical remarks about an article by Marc Coleman in "The Irish Times", and had intended to follow it up with some more positive things about the article, but then Enza flew in. However, both in fairness to him - he has had a sleepless few weeks, apparently - and because the points he made are so important, I post the follow-up now.

He observes that :

We take the State for granted and assume that all aid for the poor must be channeled through it. The willingness of people to care for the elderly is declining placing a burden on the state. In schools teachers are increasingly forced to provide parenting services because some real parents are either too busy scared or disinterested while juvenile delinquency and crime place an increasing burden on An Garda Siochana. ..Everywhere and more often than before the taxpayer is confronted with the cost of a declining common ethic which in this country comes from Christianity. The question to ask now is whether the State is going too far ...trying to solve problems that can only be solved by people families and communities acting on their own initiatives ... bonds of ethics and civility are falling asunder ...they were fostered by Judaeo-Christian tradition stretching back centuries. In the naive assumption that the State will foot the bill, those traditions are being abandoned in favour of synthetic alternatives ...[while] a consumerist culture is giving people too little time with families and more money to indulge the alternatives. Thus, the substance of life - religion family and community - is being squeezed in a relentless pincer by the two great materialist forces of our age - capitalism and state interventionism.

With only a quibble or two e.g.the use of "dis-interested" when he means "uninterested", I would endorse every word of that.