A Moral Decline? Not Necessarily
Shelagh Fogarty says our role models are often very close to home.
28 Jan 2012, 10:33
Radio 5 Live's Shelagh Fogarty
I'll keep it brief this week because there's only one thing I really want to write about. Peter Oborne writes in the Telegraph this week about the decline in moral standards in the UK. One of the points he made was that a generation of young people has grown up witnessing shockingly low standards in the behaviour of public figures - leaders whose role is to set the bar high, failing to do so. He points to MP's expenses, New Labour spin, David Cameron employing Andy Coulson and News International. I'm sure it's true that public figures' conduct does set the tone, piece by piece, but I still firmly believe our most influential examples are close to home. I had news this week of three deaths - including an aunt, and a family friend. Both women were impressive to their fingertips, while at a glance just ordinary people who raised their families and respected their neighbours. What makes them exceptional is their utter integrity and I use the present tense deliberately because once witnessed it is never lost. My aunt faced huge hardship in her life, including the deaths of two of her adult sons to an accident and illness, but on she went, always impeccable in appearance and she "never showed the white flag". She'd been a nurse in the Fifties both in the UK and Ireland and was the first person we visited every Summer on our holidays in Tipperary - city kids in seventh heaven on a beautiful farm called Claree. I loved her and was a little in awe too, as I was of all my aunties - Mary, Anne, Sheelagh, Nance, Peggy, Bridgid. I'm absolutely certain that as well as my parents, these women - how they conducted themselves in good and bad times, the jobs they had and lives they led, all very different - helped to knit my own sense of what it means to live well. Decency doesn't come by chance. As my Aunty Mary would probably say now, "it's bred in the bones". Lucky bones.
Comments (0)
Subscribe to this posts's comments feed