WhyTell the Truth When a Lie Will Do?

It was one of those quirky sayings that I picked up about Glencolmcille. "Why tell the truth when a lie will do?" I can hear it now on the lips of Old Johnnie, in his sweet Donegal brogue, with the merest hint of a smile glinting in his dark eyes. "Bah," he commented one evening - "Joe doesn't tell any lies!" While there may have been some smidgeon of respect behind the comment, it was not exactly a compliment. After all, seeing how successfully one could pull the wool over some people's eyes was a time-honoured sport, honed over generations who had to deal with bossy and over-bearing landlords.

     He tried it on Fiona pretty quickly when we landed in Braide, fresh from English middle-class life. She went over to  his house with some ticks that she had extracted from the children, on a saucer, to ask what they were and find out if they were harmful. "Ah, them's very good to eat!" said old Johnnie. 

    In that square head beneath the grizzly grey hair, set on the squat, powerful body, the questions must have played endlessly as his solitary toil went on - 'was Connie Dan lying about the big money he got for that beast? What is going on between Moira and Sean? Is the world coming to an End?' What after all would one be doing with a mind unless it were to play with such questions? And what kind of a man does not sometimes come against the final culmination of them - 'What is Truth, anyway?'

     How many people in England today would even recognise this query, from when it was most famously employed? By Pontius Pilate questioning Jesus, I suppose that I had better add! For surely the contemporary 'crisis of truth' has not a little to do with the fact that only a minority now have a basic acquaintance with Holy Scripture. I am not even commenting that the world would be so much better and happier if everyone believed the Gospel. What I am saying is that it is unlikely that our civilisation can last much longer when people have no knowledge of or acquaintance with the Man who claimed to be the Truth, and not the least opportunity to put to themselves the questions, 'could his word be true?' Or even, 'if there were such a thing as truth, is that really what it might it look like?'

     One aspect of the matter should be obvious - the Truth can get one crucified. It is simply incompatible with narcissicism. To perceive it requires training and discipline, and a  civilisation requires foundational stories that commend it to succeeding generations. Any profession is built upon the recognition of certain truths, which sometimes may well be inconvenient. A professional person is someone who one can rely on spot and express the truth of a given set of conditions, whatever they may be, 'in season and out of season'.

     Regular readers of this blog will know that I value the sea

particularly as a teacher of truth. It sometimes seems these  days that my career as a professional sailor came to an end when I recognised an inconvenient truth - as we were sailing along on a beautiful day with everything going well, except that the bilge pump was working overtime, in spite of my having done my best to fix the leaks, and we were heading north, homeward bound for Ireland, on the Portuguese coast. I chose to put the Anna M on the concrete at Nazaré, despite the facts that there were plenty of fathoms beneath us, we had a brand new liferaft, a fine long sandy beach under our lee, and she was insured for €60,000.... But there you go, that course of action would have involved some whoppers! Who would want to have ended their career that way?

     We are all confronted with a rather larger 'inconvient truth'! Our spaceship Earth is in serious trouble. We need to fix it, fast. It will not suit a lot of people to recognise this fact, and cost a lot of money. But truth is a habit and a skill that we seem to be losing. Even old Johnnie Andy would have admitted that it is well to avoid lying to oneself with that dangerous little phrase - 'oh, it will be fine!'

     Time was when Englishmen prided themselves on speaking truth and standing up for it, at whatever cost to themselves. When I confounded my Dad with the information that we were heading to live in Ireland, one of his parting shots was 'Never trust an Irish lawyer!' I doubt if he was even aware that even in those days some of the unfortunate lesser breeds of the world harboured a very different kind of stereotype - that of the deceitful, devious and downright untrustworthy Englishman. 

     I wish I could shout it across the land of my birth - please, please do not elect one of them as your Prime Minister!