Meanings of Life in Contemporary Ireland

Webs of Significance

T. Inglis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137429124
• eBook ISBN: 9781137413727
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Demography
• Index: Social Sciences

The struggle to create and sustain meaning in our everyday lives is fought using cultural ingredients to spin the webs of meaning that keep us going. To help reveal the complexity and intricacy of the webs of meaning in which they are suspended, Tom Inglis interviewed one-hundred people in their native home of Ireland to discover what was most important and meaningful for them in their lives. Inglis believes language is a medium: there is never an exact correspondence between what is said and what is felt and understood. Using a variety of theoretical lenses developed within sociology and anthropology, Inglis places their lives within the context of Ireland's social and cultural transformations, and of longer-term processes of change such as increased globalisation, individualisation, and informalisation.

C H A P T E R 1

WEBS OF SIGNIFICANCE

ANGELA DOYLE LIVES IN GREYROCK,¹ ONE OF THE NEW COMMUTER TOWNS that developed around Dublin during the heydays of the Celtic Tiger economy. She is forty-one. She is married with three children. She is a stay-at-home mother. She grew up in the suburbs of Dublin where her parents still live in the same house. She is the second youngest of five children. She has three sisters and one brother. They were all born fairly close to one another. The eldest sister is forty-eight. Although she does not see much of them, she says they are a close-knit family.

As a child, she went to the local primary school and then on to secondary school. She was a suburban girl with lots of friends. She knew her husband, Martin, as a teenager. He lived around the corner. “We used to hang around together . . . so we know each other since we were sixteen.” Looking back she initially said she had a happy childhood: “It was grand, it was fine.” But then, almost immediately, she became emotional, corrected herself, and said. “My father was an alcoholic so . . . it would . . . [have been] different.”

After she finished school, she went to work in a large factory. She moved to another factory and then she and Martin got married. Their son John was born two years later. It was after her daughter Sarah was born in another two years that they decided that she would give up her job and they would move to Greyrock: “The house price was cheap and so I could give up work and be with the children.” Martin works as a service engineer and, like many others in Greyrock, he commutes to Dublin to work.

They had one more child, Frank. He is nine. John and Sarah are teenagers. Angela misses her own family, and sometimes she regrets leaving Dublin. But, she says, the “kids love it down here . . . so there is no way we would move back [to Dublin] even . . . if we won the Lotto . . . It would be a real shock for them to move from here.” She loves her house, her garden, the estate, and Greyrock. She thinks it is especially good for the children:

I think it’s just . . . quiet and . . . you can let them out and you don’t have to be worried about them. And they’ve good friends. This estate is really nice . . . they can go out with their friends and, you know, the neighbours will keep an eye on them and everything.

Family is very important to Angela. It gives her the most satisfaction in life. She says it is simple. “Happy family, happy kids, and we’re all sitting watching a DVD together and everything is happy.” She is still very close to her sisters and brothers and her nieces and nephews. She doesn’t see much of them, but they preside in their absence. “If there is anything wrong I could ring them and rely on them.” She is closest to her younger sister: she phones her at least once a week. She would be on the phone to her mother every day or every second day. She hears everything about the wider family through her. “My mother is the go-between for everybody.”

Angela has learnt to understand and deal with her father. Although he is an alcoholic “he didn’t ruin it, he wasn’t you know, a bad alcoholic . . . We went to the beach . . . we went on family holidays . . . like my mother was sort of in charge of the money so he didn’t have the money.” She says that her father was drinking “as far back as I can remember.” She remembers the time he gave up drinking for a while. They all went down to the psychiatric hospital to talk with him and the psychologist: “We all did it like, we did it for him like . . . none of us said no . . . but you know . . . it’s his fault not our fault . . . you know . . . he’s his own worst enemy, like you know.”

Angela has learnt to be honest and open about her father. “Well I tell everybody my father’s an alcoholic . . . I’m not one to hide, you know what I mean.” When her oldest son, John, took the pledge at Confirmation, they told him that his grandfather was an alcoholic. But, she says, John hadn’t even noticed. Although she is wary of him, she allows her father to have contact with the children. “I trust my father to mind my kids, you know what I mean like . . . if the kids go up [to Dublin] he’d bring them down crab fishing and he’d go for a walk and he’d have chats with them and everything like that.” She has also developed strategies to deal with her father that she has learned from experience, “he’s only allowed down [to Greyrock] if he hasn’t been out [drinking].”

None of the family is close to her father. For Angela, “he’s there, but he’s not there.” Most of the time, she says “you could say out of sight out of mind.” When she was young, her father went away to work. But her mother was always there. She says that her mother was always helping people out, and that she learnt from her the importance of being helpful and kind.

Angela is chairperson of the local primary school parents’ association (PTA). When I asked her why she became involved in this voluntary work, she said “I’ve always liked helping . . . I don’t see the big deal of going and helping people . . . I just like doing it.” However, she recognizes that it has other benefits. She says that it gives her a chance “to meet people and I have a chat . . . and its gets me out of the house like, and you know.” Her involvement in the PTA followed on from her becoming secretary of the local Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) club:

Well the children were in the football . . . the older one joined when he was ten and they didn’t have . . . help, so I started typing up the names . . . and doing bits like that, and then they asked me to be the secretary. I did that for two years and that was enough. And then I was at the [school] AGM . . . I’m always with the parents in the school, even if I wasn’t . . . on the committee as such. But I always volunteered to help if there was anything on. So then I was just elected as chairperson . . . this year.

Although, as chairperson of the PTA, she holds a position of importance in the community, she has no interest in becoming involved in politics. She votes, but that is about all. And when she votes it is for the candidate rather than the party. “I vote for the people that have . . . done things for the local community . . . anybody . . . once they’ve come to the door and said things and . . . I know they’ve done it.” Similarly, although she was secretary of the local football club, she has little or no interest in sport. “I’d follow the Irish team and the rugby and that, but other than that, I wouldn’t really be into sport.”

Angela’s life revolves around her family and her house. It is the hub of her activities and her sense of self. She has developed a large mature garden. She mainly grows flowers, but this year, with the children, she has begun a vegetable plot. She also likes to make her own greeting cards. She used to always make things for her children, like costumes. She used to get the children to make their own cards for their aunts and uncles, and then she started making her own Christmas and birthday cards. Now she doesn’t buy them anymore. She handmakes them all.

Like many of the hundred people that I interviewed in 2008–9, Angela was worried about the economic recession that had begun to take hold in the country. Being in the public sector, her husband suffered both a pay cut and an increase in the contribution he had to make to his pension. “We were going grand and then just to have this big lump [of money] taken out, now you’re saying ‘oh my God.’” She worries about her husband, because he worries about money. “I’d like to have more money just to have the worry gone and not with the way it is at the moment, you know . . . with the pensions . . . I’m not saying loads of money, just enough, you know that just you don’t have to worry at the back of your head . . . ’cause I’m quite happy with my life, just a bit more money.”

Angela struggles with mental health issues too. After the birth of one of her children, she suffered badly from postnatal depression. She let herself go: “When your brain is messed up . . . when you feel down and everything, you just you don’t care really what you look like.” She says she gets stressed too easily: “When I’m having people for dinner I get stressed . . . I’m trying to be less stressed . . . When I was a secretary [of the club] I was very stressed . . . and the kids didn’t want me doing it anymore, so [that was] another reason I gave it up.”

She thinks she is too emotional. When she saw the questions and topics we would be covering in the interview and, in particular the one about suffering any illness, loss, or tragedy, she said she knew that she would start crying. “I don’t cry as much as I used to, I’m better . . . [it used to be] if I’d see a coffin on the telly I’d start crying.” She does not like the idea that, if they saw her crying, people would think: “just, [so] you know, Angela’s crying again.”

As well as dealing with her father, Angela has had other upsets in her life. Six years ago, she had a miscarriage at twenty weeks. Then she became pregnant again, but there was another tragedy. The baby was born dead, and she herself almost died:

I had a full term stillbirth, well it was thirty-six weeks and I developed a health syndrome which was kidney and liver failure. My liver . . . stopped, but they got it going again. I was nearly going to be put onto dialysis and I saw the white lights. I went out on the delivery table twice, so that was the biggest tragedy.

She is stoical about it all: “I’m lucky to be alive, and if it was me that died and the baby survived, there’s four kids without a mammy.”

Angela is Catholic. She believes in God and she reaches out to him through Catholic prayers and rituals. “I mightn’t say nice things to him but I do talk to him.” She does not think much about whether Jesus is the son of God: “I’m told he is and . . . I haven’t been interested in whether he was or not, but yeah he is.” Similarly, while she believes in the teachings about Our Lady, she really holds that “it is God, or nobody like.” She says her prayers every night: “I’d say the Our Father and the Hail Mary and then I’d say bless my mum and dad and my family.”

She thinks that God did intervene and save her life that time she nearly died. She believes in miracles. As an example, she says that when she and Martin went to Lourdes, he went through the water and came out dry. She says she is a little superstitious, especially about magpies. “Well if I saw one now I’d have to salute it [to] cancel my bad luck, you know this sort of way . . . and then, well if we saw two, I’d say that’s grand, something good’s going to happen. And then under ladders, I wouldn’t like to walk under a ladder now.”

There is a strong magical element to her religious thinking. If she loses anything, she prays to St. Anthony and promises him a fiver if she finds it. She also has medals and scapulars. “They bless me, they mind me.” She does not think of hell. She believes that everyone goes to heaven. “Heaven is up there and it’s nice . . . It’s full of clouds and I’m going to meet everybody else that has died.”

Although her children go the local Catholic schools and although they have had their First Holy Communions and Confirmations through the school, the church has little importance for her: “I think I can manage without the church.” She rarely goes to Mass. She would go at Christmas and sometimes she would go to her own local church: “I’d go in . . . like you know, if it’s the two babies’ birthdays [her miscarriage and still born child], or anybody else who has died. I’d go in and light a candle for them.” However, she says that when she suffered the miscarriage and stillbirth, it was not the Church or her religion that made her feel better; it was her husband, her children, and her wider family. The Catholic church is still a major institution in her life, not least because she lives in a society in which 85 percent of people are Catholic. She comes from a deeply committed Catholic family and her children attend a Catholic school in which she is the president of the PTA.

She thinks the church is always asking for money when it has plenty of it. She also has little time for priests: “They haven’t got as much power as they used to and I think . . . for older priests like it’s very hard.” Nevertheless, she thinks that many priests “think they’re God, nearly, you know what I mean that they have this almighty power over you and they don’t anymore.” Martin’s uncle is a priest and “he christened all the kids, he married us, he did the funerals, he does everything in the family for us.” But she sees him as different: “He’s an uncle so we don’t see him as a priest or anything like that.”

She says that, in comparison to herself, her younger sister is extremely religious: “She’d make up for all of us in the family. She’d had enough prayers [said] for all of us.” Angela narrates the story of the time her aunt gave her a medal; she thinks it might have been of St. Theresa, and she took it from her handbag to show her sister and how her sister “blessed herself and kissed it” because she believes you get “extreme power from it.” Angela said that when she saw her sister’s reaction, she quickly took the medal from her and put it back in her bag as if she found its potential power frightening.

As with money, success is not important to Angela. She sees success in terms of having a happy family: “Success [is] in my family and success [is] in my kids doing ok . . . and healthy and happy kids that’s important to me.” The happiness of her life revolves around her husband, her children, and her wider family; “once there’s no stresses around me . . . [and] I just know that the kids . . . and Martin are happy. That’s what makes me happy.”

UNDERSTANDING ANGELA

Angela Doyle has a knowledge and understanding of Irish culture.² It has shaped the way she sees and understands the world. She uses it to create and sustain the webs of meaning in which she is suspended.³ But culture is not closed and stationary. It is perhaps best conceived of as a huge complex reservoir of meaning and understanding that permeates every individual and every aspect of social life. It is filled with millions of cultural ingredients, symbols, words, gestures, ways of being, saying, and doing, many of which have been captured in books, songs, radio and television programs, films, and so forth. Some of the stories are local and national. Others have their origins outside Ireland.⁴ Angela makes use of a tiny portion of the culture to which she has been exposed to spin her webs of meaning.⁵ As we shall see, while there is some similarity to the webs of meaning that people in this study have spun, while they have made use of similar language, incidents, experiences, and anecdotes, while they have similar stories to tell, they are all different. This is what makes the webs of meaning so complicated. People make use of different cultural elements and then spin them differently to create their own unique webs. We can, then, see Angela as having a repertoire of culture, of different ways of being and presenting herself depending on the acts and scenes in which she is participating. She uses symbols, gestures, words, phrases, and anecdotes to create, maintain, and develop an identity and sense of self. These have been gathered together into different frames of thought. She shifts between these frames of thought, some of which are inconsistent and perhaps contradictory, as for example, when she talked about the Catholic Church and its priests. She uses all of these different cultural ingredients, these repertoires, strategies, and frames, to create an overall personal cultural style.⁶

To understand Angela Doyle, we need to understand her within the context of how Irish people use culture to create webs of meaning, to create identities and a sense of self, of what they talk about, the way they talk and present themselves, and of what is important and meaningful to them.⁷ We need to develop a feel for what it is to be Irish. But we also need to develop an understanding of how Irish culture has been shaped by changes in social structures and discourses (e.g., the penetration, of consumer capitalist society and liberal-individualism), by shifts in the balances of power between institutions within social fields (e.g., the growth in the power of the media and the state in the religious field and the decli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1. Webs of Significance
• 2. Culture as Meaning
• 3. Place, Family, and Identity
• 4. Money and Success
• 5. Politics
• 6. Sport
• 7. Religion
• 8. Love
• 9. Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index