If Ireland is known for being the land of welcomes, why, then, did an EU report find that 20% of us are categorised as lonely, wonders Peadar King
ON a darkening winter’s evening, an easy quiet settled between my neighbour and myself as we sat at the bar of the village pub.
In the background a timber fire crackled: low conversations flowed easily between other customers. Quite unexpectedly, my neighbour said ‘It was awful wasn’t it?’. Not sure what he was referencing, I must have looked somewhat puzzled. ‘Covid,’ he said. ‘Remember Covid. Only for the food deliveries from the local shop and the paper, I wouldn’t have seen a soul that whole time.’ The conversation trailed off. Covid.
Life has moved on but for many the memory lingers. ‘Cocooned, wasn’t that the word?’ he asked. ‘It’s a terrible word. We were locked away.’
It was a hard, hard time. Particularly for people over 70 years of age forced to stay at home. We are herd animals, people who crave company. Even the most solitary – and solitude can be healthy – of us need some human contact at some stage in our lives. So, Covid was one tough time. Tough on children who couldn’t get out to play. Tough on teenagers denied the highs and lows of those most tumultuous of years. Young college-going people locked away in ‘Zoom’ zones that could never substitute for real-life interaction. And their very often ragged-run parents at a loss as to what to do. And then the isolation of the alone. Loneliness.
We like to think it’s not in our DNA. The garrulous Irish. The up-for-the-craic Irish. The (river) dancing Irish. The Irish of the thousand welcomes. And yet. What reveals often masks. The telephone voice. The front-door face. ‘A face to meet the faces that you meet,’ to borrow a quote from TS Eliot’s great sweep of a poem The Love Song of J Alfred
Prufrock.
That mask was unmasked in a mammoth recent European Parliament report ‘Loneliness Prevalence in the EU’ drawn from 25,000 respondents in 27 countries. It was a survey that revealed that 20% of Irish respondents reported feeling lonely. That’s one in every five people in the country. Extraordinarily, and perhaps counter-intuitively, of all the 27 countries in the EU, Ireland had the highest levels of loneliness.
‘All the lonely people, where do they all come from?’ to borrow from The Beatles’ (Paul McCartney)’s Eleanor Rigby from their 1966 album Revolver.
The Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Croatia, and Austria had the lowest levels of loneliness – all below 10%.
It is a remarkable finding. One that challenges our very sense of ourselves. The GAA. The Churches – and now the mosques and synagogues. The pub. The school. The workplace. What are we if not close-knit communities? Places we like to think bind us. And they do, but not all of us.
All the while loneliness rumbles along under the surface. Perhaps it’s just part of the human condition. Clearly, part of the Irish condition too.
I’ve recently read John Boyne’s A History of Loneliness, the story of an Irish Catholic priest who spirals into loneliness crushed by the duplicity of the Catholic Church to which he dedicated his life. It was a harrowing read. Lonely Boy by Cork writer Daragh Fleming was, he says, written ‘as a means to figure out why I became so lonely after my friend died by suicide.’
The underpinnings of loneliness are complex and multi-faceted. But there are some big-ticket items, according to the EU study. Elevated levels of loneliness among adolescents or young adults, lower levels in mid-adulthood, and increased levels again in old age were cited.
Men were reported as slightly lonelier than women, but the difference is very small and not significant. Lower socio-economic status is linked to a higher degree of loneliness as is unemployment. The presence of a partner or a spouse in an individual’s life can be a protective factor against feeling lonely and their absence a risk factor for loneliness. Many of these are inter-related factors. What it all boils down to in the end, according to the EU study, is that all risk factors ultimately come down to social interactions and personal relationships.
Taking the 20% figure and applying it to Cork may very well be a blunt measure of the extent of loneliness in Co Cork. Allowing for that, what does that blunt instrument look like?
There are 116,831 lonely people in Co Cork, or were at the time the survey was conducted. Using the 2022 Central Statistics data, town-by-town, the West Cork loneliness map looks like this: Bandon 1,639, Bantry 585, Castletownbere 199, Clonakilty 1,022, Kinsale 1,344, Macroom 819, and Skibbereen 580. That’s a lot of lonely people. One in five.
Of course, yes, this is a blunt instrument and does not consider all of those who live in rural areas. For all of that, it just might be a revealing instrument as all of these lonely people must live somewhere.
Many of us who live in West Cork may like to think of it as a haven, as a comforting, convivial, companionable place to be. And perhaps it is – for 80% of the population.
For the 20% who do not share that experience of the place, it just might be a lonely place to be. West Cork, a place of loneliness.
Who would have thought?
