Take your average nine-year-old now. Born in 2015. Five years before Covid...years before Ukraine, before Gaza and Israel, they have exprienced a change in the way the world has been.
So much has happened to form the foundations of their memories. Events that have shaken us and will continue to have implications for decades. But that nine-year-old has been born into a world of uniformity and division; of education and ignorance.
Never before has there been so much opportunity to be full of empathy. Never before has there been a need for so much empathy.
Imagine now, if that child lives for the next 100 years from today, what an amount of evolution she will see. What changes there might be for the better, or for the worse. What ailments strike us down today that will be cured in that time? What shape will the world’s political geography take? Will the promised climate change have made even more significant a mark in the way she lives her life?
I am thinking of all of this today because of the sad passing of Oughterard-resident Phyllis Furness. Her amazing life, whch extended to 109 years and 81 days came to an end this week, shutting the eyes of a woman who had seen so much change in a world transformed since her birth in 1915.
Phyllis was well known to many people because in pages of journals such as this and countless others, she has told her story of her childhood, her working life, her arrival in Ireland and her love for the place where she would spend the rest of her long life.
As the oldest woman in Ireland, she has known of and lived through the history of this State; of every Taoiseach, of every President. Galway have won all of their All-Irelands in the years she has existed.
The world into which she was born was vastly different to what we have today. A world at unease with itself; the whiff of Victorian times still in the air; she was born a full eleven years before the monarch who would serve for over seventy years on the throne of her native country.
Phyllis was a remarkable woman who loved life and nature and the role that community plays in making all of us more at ease with each other. Perhaps in the secret of her longevity, there is no secret; that in being decent and hardworking and generous with our time and concern that we get to make every moment of every life, no matter how long it should be, all the more worthwhile.
We are glad that our county was the home for the longest life lived. We hope that by looking at the way she led her life, that there are lessons to be learned; advice to be embraced and acted upon.
If you look at the nine-year-old this evening and imagine her being granted the health and wealth of a long life, we would hope that it be filled with the goodness that we can create by being good neighbours, responsible citizens and not at all selfish with the land beneath our feet; which after all will be there behind us when we go.
To Phyllis’s family and friends and neighbours, our deepest condolences. May she live on in every good thing you do.
