Changes in the West

Bishop Patrick Rooke described some of the changes in the west of Ireland since his childhood in his sermon at last Sunday’s service of enthronement in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Killala.

Bishop Rooke said: Much of my knowledge of the West of Ireland comes from childhood holidays spent here over the month of August each year until I was 10 or 11.  I remember the long long journey from Dublin with nine of us –yes, nine of us, without a seat belt in sight, crammed into a Morris Minor. 

I can still picture my late father bent double in a quiet corner somewhere with his radio held to his ear as he desperately tried to decipher the commentary of the latest cricket test match. 

On my Uncle’s farm where we stayed, I recall the arrival of the first hay bailer and the excitement that it would bring to an end the laborious task of building haycocks with hay forks. Yes, I really am that old!

How things have changed.


Now we have motorways traversing the country. Cars are nothing like what they were then. 

Thanks to satellites, placed thousands of miles up in the sky, we now have little or no difficulty with radio signals, let alone television, mobile phone and internet connection.  

Life on the farm has changed beyond recognition with massive multi–purpose farm machinery available to ensure maximum speed at the lowest possible cost in terms of manual labour.

And it isn’t just that we can do things we couldn’t have dreamt of doing then, but also that they, in turn, have changed bigger things about society and the way we live. 

For instance, now that we can be in touch pretty much with anywhere in the world and at anytime;  so our rules of courtesy and privacy are challenged as never before.
So too how we find and keep friends, contacts and do business are very different.

Even 10 years ago we could hardly have predicted how our lives today would be altered so dramatically by email and the web. So also employment patterns and opportunities have changed – not always for the better!  

And who knows what changes are ahead and how in another 10 or 20 years life will have moved on.  Each great invention will involve some kind of shift, the benefits and costs of which will, no doubt, be great;  so that of one thing we can be sure, life will never be the same again.

‘Life will never be the same again’ – familiar words we have all said ourselves at some time or other. Words that the Pharisees and Sadducees too must have uttered in response to our Lord’s command – “Love your neighbour as yourself. He was introducing something very new to them – something that was no less of a shift in the existing world order, which is why it caused so much conflict.  ‘Love the Lord you God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’ – they could cope with that.  But ‘Love your neighbour as yourself,’ that was quite a different matter!

It is hardly radical stuff to our way of thinking, but what Jesus was proposing was a whole new way of life for them. He was challenging moral and hierarchical standards – No longer were the rich, as a matter of rite, assured a place in the kingdom of heaven, while those at the bottom of the social pile were to be placed on an equal footing with the ‘respectable and religious’. 

The familiar was being turned upside down….and they didn’t like it!

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