According to the World Health Organisation Ireland is set to be the fattest country in Europe by as soon as 2030. By that date 89 per cent of Irishmen and 85 per cent of Irishwomen will be obese.
They are quite astonishing predictions. And who would have thought it? The Irish of all people set to be the new fat people, the new Americans of the European continent. We’ve come a long way haven’t we?
Now, in the interests of disclosure, I should admit that after a football injury that put an end to my ability to play a weekly game of intense five-a-side football, plus the advance of years, I started to put on a few pounds myself.
I do a little now just to keep them at bay. It comes to us all. Yet over the last few years I have heard more than one person say, observationally rather than nastily, that Ireland has got fat.
And somehow it looks like we are about to get fatter. Which in some ways shows just how successful we are. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that our obesity will be our reminder of the glory days of the Celtic Tiger long after the Tiger is a very distant memory.
How could it not be? What else did the Celtic Tiger teach us but that the meaning of life was excess? More and more.
The very role of the citizen during all of those years was to consume. Cars, outside decking, holidays, shopping trips to New York.
Where was the message to consume less of anything in all of that? Of course, that doesn’t let any of us off the hook. When you pile the pounds on you can be fairly sure it is because of something you are doing. Or not doing.
It’ll be up to you too to get those pounds off. Yet, something about the whole health promotion narrative, with its undertones of self-responsibility and personal advancement, excludes so many other factors that it lets society off stock free.
So, Professor Donal O’Shea, Head of the Weight Management Service in St. Vincent’s in Dublin, commenting that, in terms of obesity in the ‘less well-educated, less-well off groups the upward trend is dramatic’, is not just a statement about health facts.
It is a comment upon our society and the comment is that the poorer, less educated members of society are fatter. And if they are fatter then they must be lazier.
Which fits in very nicely, doesn’t it, with a society that likes to say to us that those at the top of the pile are there merely through merit and those at the bottom through a lack of something essential.
In this way the obesity problem being worse amongst a certain social class has nothing to with any social factors.
It has nothing to do with a lack of money and cheap, convenient, fattening foods that are more accessible and fitting into a certain kind of lifestyle than Jamie Oliver could ever imagine.
It has nothing to do with a society that still worships consuming, that offers 24-hour supermarkets and an insistence not on simple things like a family eating together but the citizen as an economic unit.
An economic unit that should embrace zero hours contracts, be available for work whenever called, whether dinner is on the table or not, full in the knowledge that the call for work is never going to intrude at some of our society’s more comfortable dinner tables.
In this way obesity becomes purely a matter of personal responsibility and has no other factors in play at all.
Yet not so, so long ago in this country the side-effect of poverty was hunger and malnutrition.
Strangely though when the poor were hungry it was their fault too. They weren’t good enough, productive enough or economical enough.
Now the side-effect of poverty is the exact opposite, obesity, but the blame is still the same. It is personal failings or the failings of an entire class.
The fact that some of the simpler foods of a few decades ago are now the preserve of Farmer’s Markets and the simpler food of today is a €1 burger from a multi-national is neither here nor there. No social factor matters in this.
Ireland is getting fatter, will soon be the fattest in Europe and its poor and its worst educated will be the fattest of all.
Keep watching to see whose fault it will be.
