Happiness is a ‘noble’ thought but best to avoid some advice

Terence Cosgrave on a new book that explores the Irish view of happiness and contentment

Given the year that’s in it — with swine flu jabs and job losses, floods and showers of bankers, it’s hard sometimes to look on the bright side of life.
Cheated out of a World Cup where we didn’t get a replay — despite our track record of reversing results in replays (for example, the Nice and Lisbon treaties) — the only real replay we are likely to be treated to in the next few years is the 1980s — this time in colour with even more unemployment and emigration!
Indeed, expressing the thought that one might be happy and content these days is a bit like renting a house around 1998 — one is thought of as either a fool or a knave for not joining in the general hysteria.
And we Irish always had a poor relationship with the wealth and success of the Celtic Tiger. “It’ll all end in tears,” they said, and were only truly content when it did. Cue misery, back-biting and bitchiness, unemployment, envy, criminality, faith-sapping weather and a government so incompetent it would lose its own Mickey Mouse if it owned Disneyland.
In other words, the classic Irish condition. We gave the world Beckett and An Béal Bócht, Peig Sayers and priestly pederasts — not much to thrill the soul and spread sweetness and light.
So a new book exploring what happiness means to Irish people is an achievement in itself.
In Sonas: Celtic Thoughts on Happiness a host of Irish people express what happiness means to them, in diverse and often deeply personal ways — though the omission of Father Jack is surely and oversight as his three-word contribution would at least have the advantage of brevity, which another Irishman regarded as the soul of wit. Whether revealed as something to be glimpsed, grasped, sought after or savoured, in Sonas, the Irish look at the different guises of happiness and how, if you stop to savour it, you can find happiness all around you.
The pieces in Sonas: Celtic Thoughts on Happiness reflect the philosophies, motivations and spiritual paths that can help us keep an optimistic eye to the future, even in troubled times. This is a book to remind you about what’s important in life – a book to bring a smile to your face.
And then there’s the contribution from Bertie Ahern. (We all know what makes Bertie happy in life — the massive pension(s) we’re all paying for, plus the car for life and the driver to take him wherever, whenever. He spun for Ireland, and we repay him with a spin whenever he likes.
So, in a sense, this format, though successful in the past, has perhaps run its course. We are no longer looking to the pillars of society for their wisdom and guidance in the way we once did.
Unfortunately, it is, to quote another Irishman, it’s difficult to separate the dancer from the dance. Literally, in the case of Michael Flatley.
Flatley’s three-word, Fr Jack-like contribution (“Nothing is impossible”) is hardly the uplifting passage of prose that will reinflate the tired soul or stir the weak and wounded to ignore their woes and press on for a brighter day.
What it says says more about Michael Flatley and what he thinks about himself. See me! See what I have achieved! “Nothing is impossible” because I, Michael Flatley have achieved so much. “And with such modesty”, he almost also adds.
That’s not to say there aren’t gems of wisdom and knowledge here.
Heartfelt and honest
Mary Kenny’s contribution is heartfelt and honest. “The best thing I ever did was to quit drinking alcohol”, she writes and describes in open and emotional terms how she found her happiness. “Sobriety is the radiance of life, I would even say,” she writes, “drunkeness is the avoidance of full experience.”
Compiled by Dr Catherine Conlon — a lecturer in public health in UCC — the book is a (noble) effort to raise money for the Christine Noble Children’s Foundation.
Fintan O’Toole, Adi Roche, Maurice Nelligan, and many others make interesting contributions that do cause the reader to reflect rather than react with distaste, but ultimately one is left with the thought that happiness is a state of mind. Which is why the peerless Mick O’Connell has it right here:
“Personally, I thank the Lord for many things such as parents, who set down good standards, and now, a family of my own and the special gift of a Down Syndrome son.”
He didn’t get in a book.