So in Dublin, parts of Leinster and some of Tipperary there is a hosepipe ban. And what do I care about such menial suburbanism? I don’t own a hose, nor a garden. I have no plants to water nor paddling pools to fill up. Such is the life of the bohemian newspaper columnist, I suppose. But I do care about good manners and proper citizen behaviour – which makes me very interested in the hosepipe ban indeed.
If you were to just quietly peer out of your curtains into next door’s garden only to spot your neighbour flouting the ban – in place until August 26th owing to the heatwave – then Uisce Éireann has a solution for you. Here it is, the number of the customer care team, ready and waiting for you to report such moral turpitude: 1800 278 278. Go ahead, dob them in. Practically, no one ever gets fined. Theoretically, it could cost Sean and Norma €5,000. It feels good to induce financial suffering in others, no?
I am fairly lapsed, but even I can remember “love thy neighbour” as one of the central moral lessons of the bible. It’s quite catchy, and really drummed into us as youngsters, so I think there are no excuses for anything other than perfectly neighbourly behaviour. And what counts? A friendly wave in the morning, a promise to feed the cats when they are on holiday, picking up each other’s mail. All the classic rigmarole, Virtue 101. Can I add another? Don’t be a goddamn snitch.
I am loath to bring up the Covid years. But this is reminiscent. In the United Kingdom, one police service received such an avalanche of complaints about neighbours going for jogs more than once a day or heading out to the supermarket too frequently, that the commissioner had to beg people to stop ratting on one another on the BBC. In Ireland, Simon Harris had to tell the nation that the public health laws about unnecessary travel were “not about snitching on your neighbour”. This did not stop endless anecdotal reports of neighbours counting cars in driveways and reporting excess gatherings. You remember.
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Have we only recently become a nation of pearl-clutching, petit-bourgeois prigs? (I’d write that down again in bold if I had the space.) I am not so sure. I think we have likely always lived on one giant Hibernian Privet Drive and Covid merely revealed the tendency rather than created it. Every nation has a screw loose in its common psyche: in England it is the instinct for twee, Great British Bake Off-style whimsy; in France it might be all the striking; with Americans you can take your pick of turbo-matter-of-factness, the false nicety, or the revealed preference for government-by-lunacy. Is inter-citizen policing Ireland’s psychic hang-up?
Covid proved us remarkably good at policing the lives of ordinary people – so good, in fact, that we don’t even need a dystopian and imperious government to do it for us. The 2023 Booker Prize winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, was about a totalitarian regime in modern Ireland. But what it captured best was not the top-down exertion of control via government, rather the creeping sense that the neighbours were turning on the protagonist family, slowly excluding them from a community, constantly peering at them through the curtains, exercising the regime’s will without the regime even asking them to.
It is a dramatic analogy to use in the context of a hosepipe ban, I know, I know. But let us enjoy the bathos of it all anyway. You see, if we cannot be permissive when we see our neighbours watering their petunias against the best wishes of Uisce Éireann, how do we expect everyone to behave in a national lockdown? Oh, my apologies – we have the evidence from 2020 and we know that it does not cover Ireland’s intersocial temperament in shining glory.
[ Uisce Éireann defends hotline for people to report ‘non-essential’ use of waterOpens in new window ]
This, I suspect, comes from a similar place as Ireland’s intellectual orthodoxy. Take, for example, the media landscape. The UK ecosystem can sustain newspapers across a broad spectrum – from the progressive, sort-of-woke Guardian to the shire Tory Telegraph over to the renegade and unpredictable populist Sun. Here? There are small outlets on the fringe, but the centre of gravity drags the mainstream to, well, the centre. Irish tolerance for dissent from the status quo is just much lower than elsewhere.
The moral of the story, really, is that we cannot overstate the social value of being a good, clubbable neighbour. And that means not telling on each other for minor infractions of diktats from public bodies. We blather on about the loss of community spirit in the digital age, how social media has siloed us and taken away the good old days. I am not minded to disagree – but we cannot make that case in good faith while also setting up hotlines for snitching. It’s just not very “love thy neighbour”, is it?
