Sometimes it’s hard to know where to turn. That many of us, if not all of us, are feeling disorientated and discombobulated in the current climate is no great surprise.

The world is truly ‘in a terrible state o’ chassis’ to borrow from Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock.

The world gone mad. It is easy to be despondent. Weighed down. It’s not that we haven’t been here before.

I was born just thirteen years after the end of World War II in what a whole generation of people in this country knew as The Emergency.

Years of emigration followed when Ireland haemorrhaged its population. The 1950s and the 1980s. And then years of austerity following a brief flirtation with excess.

Excess for some.

Painful debilitating years of austerity.

For those most affected by the policies that were implemented following the 2008 crash, they were simply told ‘there was no alternative’.

TINA. There is no alternative. The mantra during years of austerity was invoked by politicians and economists; the very cheerleaders of the Celtic Tiger excesses.

That and another mantra: ‘anger is no substitute for policy’. Yes, anger is real and felt for good reason. And another.

‘We are all in this together.’ We weren’t. Reductionist catchphrases designed to close-off counter arguments. The very people who promised soft landings devised policies for the many who had least to gain from the bountiful years of the few. The years of austerity.

Lest we forget.

And now another TINA. The mindless pursuit of the hegemony of the militaristic mindset.

We need to increase our spending on defence and security. We do not. We have choice. We have agency. It is possible to imagine a different world order. Towards that end, literature if very often best placed to point the way. ‘Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will’ wrote playwright, critic, vegetarian, naturist, socialist, opponent of organised religion, hereditary privilege and class inequality, pacifist and anti-war activist and Nobel Laurette George Bernard Shaw.

He was also a prolific pamphleteer. He denounced the long lying in state of the English queen Victoria as ‘insanitary’ and urged her quick cremation or shallow burial in a perishable coffin much, as one can imagine, to the profound vexation of the English establishment.

He was, to borrow from another writer (Robert Bolt), A Man for All Seasons. Shaw’s West Cork connections run deep. In 1898 at the age of forty-two, he married women’s rights activist Charlotte Payne-Townshend from Rosscarbery, described by Shaw’s biographer Michael Holroyd as reserved and insecure; a reserve that had its origins, he claimed, in ‘having suffered a good deal from family bonds and conventionality’. It was not until 1905 that they made their first visit to West Cork when they stayed at Charlette’s family home. Local lore has it that he regularly swam naked in Castlehaven strand. What Charlotte’s conventional family thought of their unconventional in-law remains hidden. None of that matters now. What we are left with is his gift to us all. A reminder of the power of the imagination. It is possible, now more than ever, essential to imagine another world. We Irish have both the imaginative capacity and the political will to imagine an altogether different world.

History too points the way. In his landmark speech to the thirteenth session of the United Nations, on Friday 19 September 1958, then Minister for External Affairs Frank Aiken, asked: ‘What can this Assembly do or advise which will best serve at the present time the purposes of peace? What can we do to divert the skills and resources of humanity away from the preparation of war and towards economic and social improvement? How can the course of history be turned away from death and towards life?’

War is brutal and ugly. Unforgiving. It takes a terrible toll on the young sent out to fight wars declared by those who have the luxury of never having to fight in war unlike the hapless and helpless civilian populations caught up in its nefarious grip. As a former Chief of Staff of the Anti-Treaty IRA, Frank Aiken knew war. The dead and the slowly dying. The injuries that live on.  The trauma that lingers. His was a speech for the ages. ‘Our problem therefore is how to hold our destructive powers in check, how to avoid destruction, and anarchy while we invoke and perfect the art of living in peace.’

The contrast with the current discourse could not be starker. Speaking at the recent Munich Security Conference Ursula von der Leyen called for ‘a surge in European defence spend’. Mark Rutte, former Prime Minister of the Netherlands and current Secretary General of NATO stated that ‘On average, European countries easily spend up to a quarter of their national income on pensions, health and social security systems.’ We need some of that money, Rutte went on to say. Just think about that. Taking from the old and the sick to pay for the killing of our sisters and brothers. That is the world Rutte wants for us. There is an alternative. History tells us so. Rereading Aiken’s speech lifts the spirit. Here hope rhymes from this history. Hope too in the hope President Catherine Connolly holds for all of us. As did George Bernard Shaw. Perhaps it was during one of those swims in Castlehaven that inspired him to imagine that other world.

I imagine George Bernard Shaw back to the cemetery that holds generations of Castlehaven people, facing Reen as he enters Castlehaven’s crystal-clear waters; floating naked to the world, face towards the sky, imagining an altogether different world. The pacifist, naturist at one with the world imagining a world for all of us, a world without rancour. A world at peace with itself. ‘Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.’ Thoughts to carry you wherever and whenever you enter West Cork crystal waters.

The old ruined Church at Castlehaven beach.

Castlehaven beach looking south across the bay towards Reen Pier. (Photos: Anne Minihane)