Time to cut out all the waste and stop calling rail passengers customers

The piece below appears in the regional newspapers of IN&M today.

By MIchael Commane
My father was born in 1909, before the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 and five years before the outbreak of the First World War.

It was another world, different times. I’m old enough to remember the arrival of electricity at my grand-uncle’s farm in Tipperary in the late 1950s.

Maybe it was because it was something new for him but my father for all 95 years of his life never understood why people would leave a light on in a room if there was no on in the room. Indeed, many is the row we had about it. In my ignorance at the time I would point out that it costs as much turning on and off lights and anyway leaving lights on help make our environment more positive. Silly I.

I have a wheelbarrow at home, which my father repaired well over 20 years ago. It still works and is in great use these days when I am raking up the autumn leaves in the garden.

My father wasted nothing. Washers and screws were a protected species that were safely stored in jars in the shed. When it came to fixing things such as a wheelbarrow the necessary material for the job was always at hand.

Back in the 1950s he built a pathway to park his car, 50 years later it is exactly as it was on completion. Not one single crack in the cement.
Up to very recently I fixed all my bicycle punctures. If he knew that I was now leaving the bike down to a bicycle shop for them to throw out the punctured tube to replace it with a new one he would turn in his grave.

For the last 20 to 30 years it was considered silly, mean, old fashioned to fix things. It was the era of throwing things out. We invented the skip.

When one looks back in history to think of those inventions that were significant in the affairs of mankind, most of us will mention the wheel.

Maybe the advent of the skip had its inevitable progression to the €35/€50 billion banking disaster that has led us to chronic bankruptcy.
It has been the bankers, the PR gurus, those slick and fast speaking exquisitely groomed women and men who ‘explained’ that waste, profligacy and actually skips were moving Ireland ‘forward’.

They won the day and the debate and we all realised the folly of keeping, saving and repairing. So we kept all the lights on, wasted as much as we could and anytime we needed money we borrowed it from those polite people in the bank. This was the new order and it was only fools and morons who were not ‘up-to-speed’ who were sadly ‘missing the boat’.

It went great for years and years. And then smack, it all collapsed.
It’s hard to change people’s ways. Naturally the movers and shakers still want to see us all as consumers – people/clowns who buy their products and make them rich or at least give them a few bob to offset their loans and debts.

Last week while shopping in a supermarket I was buying a loaf of bread. The display date was the previous day. Guess what, the bread would have to be binned. I asked to see a manager and it was explained to me that they could not sell me the bread. After some words between us I was given the bread, free of cost.

How much is wasted every day in our State?

Recently the Minister for Finance pointed out that anger will get us nowhere. He probably is right. It certainly will not get us out of this mess. But standing up to so many mad mantras that have been spewing out of the mouths of clowns might well bring us back to earth and get us to begin acting in a way that simply follows the rules of common sense.

Why in God’s name should we not fix a puncture, turn off a light in an empty room and stop wasting food?

Have you ever noticed how those slick and fast speaking exquisitely groomed women and men insist on calling us customers. At Heuston Station the PA system keeps telling us we are customers. I hate it because I am not a customer. When I am on a train I am a passenger and not a victim of marauders trying to pick my pockets.

It’s that nonsense that has been part of the ingredient that has led us to where we are. We have manufactured our own disaster and sadly allowed ourselves to be fooled so easily. And guess what, we are not going to change. Gombeen men and women that we sure are.