In times gone bye…

It is sometimes easy to remember the past with ‘rose colored glasses’,and colored they were. A collection of good happy moments from childhood days can cause a delusion and safeguard the cold hard clement that was Ireland for the majority working class.Wisdom was rare, and ignorance the norm. Hard cruel rules were handed out from the dominated classes and the masses as they prepared their children for a careless world in which they inherited and contributed to. Poverty and ignorance can be a safeguard and imagination is a world which the child can live in with secure and comfort.After all a childhood God and youth combined ,will provide the company for the imagination.Yates didn’t need to “Take away the human child” the child could take themselves away. Sadly youth passes and the ‘child like’ man or woman emerges from their refuge unprepared and with childlike expectations.
It is the nineteen seventeens and the child is ,to borrow a line from an old song “The child is a man now hes time worn and tough” .How can one survive in this extraordinarily complex world with out a ‘road map’ every one need an identity and indeed have,well many children in Ireland from the foundation of the state up to the nineteens eighties had no identity. We were a bad construction of the interested party’s.

However the human spirit can adjust and change to survive in terrible situations and ,although the identity that was acted out to ‘get by’ it was only waiting an opportunity to shine as it often will.