Limerick Local Heroes

Anger is a positive emotion.

There's a lot of it going around lately, and it grows deeper by the day, not helped by our prime minister telling the world that we're mad, even as his government hands over billions to creditors of a private company.

That anger needs an outlet, and people need a way to vent, but ultimately, unless anger is channeled and transmutes into determination, it festers and becomes bitterness instead.

Anger makes us powerful, while bitterness just makes us bitter, so eventually we have to seek a new direction forward.  As our government bleeds us dry to pay the creditors of a private company, people are wondering where to turn, and searching for some kind of hope.

The Local Heroes initiative might offer one way forward, as people come together to chart out a new direction in a way that's the very antithesis of the tooth-and-claw free market that destroyed our economy.  If the property bubble was created by  unprincipled sharks in the banks and flash, half-educated  spivs in the estate agencies, all circling to make as many killings as they could in their short-term feeding frenzy, the Local Heroes idea is about giving, supporting and sharing.

There was a time in rural Ireland where the concept of the meitheal meant that no task was too big.  Why?  Because everyone came together and helped to harvest your grain, or you joined a meitheal to build my barn, or you and I got together with our neighbours to dig drainage ditches on someone's land.

We still do it on a smaller scale, every time neighbours come together to build a garden wall or to plant a hedge, but now the concept is coming back on a large scale.

Welcome to the era of the mega-meitheal.  In our community, we have the people, we have the skills, and we have the imagination to create  a new way forward, independently of a government whose only objective is to make sure that the super-rich don't suffer during this economic depression.  Businesses, individuals and community groups are giving freely of their rime and energy for the public good, in a way that politicians must find worrying because they don't control it.

This is the very opposite of the greed-fuelled snout-in-the-trough orgy that we had to endure for the last decade.  The steering group comes from business, sport, arts, education and every other facet of our local community.  Nobody is paid.   Everyone gives their time free and there is an impressive amount of professional knowledge available within this loose affiliation of concerned people.

Next Monday evening, 30th January, the Local Heroes initiative will hold a mass meeting in Limerick's Strand Hotel.  It's based on the American idea of a town-hall meeting.  If you have pride in your city, you have ideas to offer, you want to create jobs for friends, family and neighbours, go along and be heard.

Numbers are limited to 450 and I'm told that won't be enough.

See you there.  6pm in the Strand,