The Age of Reason
Veteran Broadcaster Gay Byrne takes on new role as Road Safety Chief
“It’s madness giving a tough job to an old boy like that, he’s past it at 72,” is a comment I’ve heard repeatedly this week. The ‘old boy’ is sharp as a razor-blade Gay Byrne, someone I’d prefer to have batting in my corner than most 30 or 40-year-olds I know. It’s enlightening, all the same, that some choose to cast up the broadcaster’s age as an impediment to his new role as road safety chief. This is the same Gay Byrne who has nothing left to prove: no career to build, no vested interests to kowtow to, no wealth to accrue. But he’s in his seventies so he can’t possibly manage the job.
And if that’s the conclusion we’re reaching about him, there’s only one conclusion we can reach about ourselves: we’re an ageist society. The truth is we’ve become so selfish, short-sighted and profit-driven that we consider old people a burden as opposed to an asset. The wisdom of age, the benefits of experience? We’ve forgotten such concepts ever existed. Dev would have no hope of the presidency if he were to stand in today’s climate – we would have put him out to pasture at the Twilight Years Nursing Home. As for Nelson Mandela, should we be fortunate enough to have a statesman of his calibre among us, he’d be sedated and tucked up in bed by 7pm every night.
Benjamin Franklin was bang on the money when he said: “All would live long but none would be old.” Being old is the most heinous crime you can commit in this youth-obsessed Utopia of ours. Old age is a state to be denounced, not embraced as part and parcel of the human condition. We presume the elderly have nothing to teach us – and it’s our loss.
Unfortunately it’s theirs too. It has been suggested that the way a civilisation treats the vulnerable groups within it, including its ageing population, is a mark of its calibre. Hmm. Not performing too well on that score, are we? Senior citizens have no voice in our Ireland of the 21st century, a criminal omission, but what’s really indefensible is the callous way we treat them as a matter of course. We leave them stranded on hospital trolleys, farm them out to nursing homes which wouldn’t pass muster as kennels, strip them of their pensions, their dignity, their autonomy.
We demote them as fellow human beings, and having performed that injustice we take it a step further and treat them as burdens. We fret about the greying of the population, whining how the demographics mean we won’t have enough workers in the labour force to contribute to their support. We grind our teeth over the pensions time-bomb and the health service drain, and apply that most merciless of expressions ‘bed-blockers’ to someone’s mother or grandmother. Yet old age is out there lying in the long grass for all of us. If we’re lucky. Yes, the birth rate is declining and conversely life expectancy is increasing. It’s true, there are challenges inherent in these factors. The average life expectancy has risen to 75 for men and 80 for women in Ireland, while we’re tending to live an extra two years per decade. But our general health has also improved, thanks to medical science, so it’s not just wrong but high-handed to assume that older people are universally frail and incapable of making a contribution. Many have a wealth of talents to offer if only we could be bothered availing of them. Instead we penalise people for not being 28 all their lives. Six out of 10 workers under the age of 50 who have been made redundant find another job within a year – only one in 10 over the age of 50 manage the same. There’s just one way to read those statistics: ageism is endemic. It’s the most common form of workplace discrimination with almost two in five of those victimised citing ageism as the reason, according to MORI research.
This is a form of bigotry which extends beyond the workplace, however. It occurs in health and social care, where age limitations are set on benefits; in education and training, where loans or funding are restricted; in financial services, where barriers to insurance have been put in place.
But still we think old age is never going to happen to us. You might imagine we had cracked the secret of eternal youth the way we ignore, downgrade and infantilise those a few decades older than us.
In some societies people of advancing years are revered. Nursing homes are unheard of in the Arab world, where families deem it an honour to care for their ageing relatives. By comparison we betray our elderly on a daily basis. We can’t wait to winkle them out of their houses, where they have some measure of independence, and off-load them into nursing homes – citing our busy-busy jobs and busy-busy lives in mitigation. Even before institutionalising them, we cringe from their wrinkles and stiffening limbs. We intend to stay young and beautiful forever – the thriving cosmetic surgery and beauty industries are testament to that. But a rumpled, crumpled Margaret Rutherford is twice as beautiful, to my mind, as a facelift-fixated Joan Rivers.
We should be protecting and honouring people in their Third Age – listening to their stories, celebrating the fact they retain the enthusiasm to engage with society, as Gay Byrne does. Instead we punish them for reminding us of our own mortality by pushing them from our sight. I’ve always liked the line about being able to gauge how old you’re growing by the amount of pain you experience upon contact with a new idea. We are frequently ultra-conservative in our middle years, however, while our more mature citizens can develop the habit of lateral thinking and prove genuinely innovative.
Besides, working patterns have changed. Often people aren’t entering the workplace until close on 30, between university degrees, professional qualifications, gap years and living abroad. Then they need time to distil experience, something that can’t be accumulated in a handful of years. So never mind the prejudice, we’re just plain stupid if we’re prepared to squander a lifetime of experience and write off people as feisty as Gay Byrne.
Let’s take stock here. Alan Greenspan has recently retired at 79 as head of the US Federal Reserve, while Gabriel Garcia Marquez continues to write insightful books at 78. Michelangelo was in his seventies when he became chief architect of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, his critics carping that he was too senile for the job. But it proved to be his crowning achievement as an architect. By these calculations, Gay Byrne should be just getting into his stride.
