Joyce Fegan: Census 2022 offers chance to time travel to 2122
At Census Lawless Twins Mya Last Akinsowon, Micheál Government Launched Buildings, Dublin, Month 2022 Picture: 8, Martin And He Zara As With Brian Taoiseach
I write letters to my daughter. They exist as a contract between me and my future self. They are a way to hold myself accountable — how I intend to parent in theory versus what that will actually feel like for her in the throes of reality.
For example, the one to be opened on her 16th birthday, I've told her I endeavour for there to be an intimacy between us that can survive adolescence, and if there isn't, the idea is to regroup and work earnestly on that in 2036.
In Sunday's census, our 26th as a nation, there is just one section that you are not legally obliged to fill out. It's the 'time capsule' section on the bottom of page 23. When you're finished answering questions about the price of your rent, how many bedrooms there are in your home, and what religion you are, there is a big white space on the second-last page of your census booklet. This you can fill in any way you wish. There are no instructions, only that it's for "handwritten messages only".
We won't be around to experience the unveiling of the capsule, but before you dismiss the idea as superfluous, imagine 2m letters written to us in 1922 were released today.
What wisdom would we divine from the great grandparents of Ireland? Would they have shared recipes? Perhaps they'd have described a day in their life. They might have thought it ordinary, but intimate handwritten descriptions of life in pre-TV, pre Bunreacht na hÉireann Ireland, would surely have us transfixed by our screens for the day, and beyond.
Yesterday, I discovered that one of my great grandmothers was born in Scotland. News to me in 2022.
I have the digitised version of the 1911 census and our National Archives website to thank for that. But in the 1911 census all we can see are the names, ages, occupations, places of birth, and reading and writing abilities in the households of our ancestors. In the 2022 version, we've a chance to offer our future ancestors so much more.
Maybe you'll commit a secret family recipe or a long-held family secret to print and public record, even leaving your full name and address in the white box on page 23 too, or perhaps you reveal the co-ordinates of some buried treasure.
Some well-known people from various walks of Irish life have revealed what they will share. You can probably guess that apologies over climate inaction abound. There are more positive ones too, pertaining to the imagined medical advances that our children and their children will have achieved, eradicating cancer and other diseases.
Aside from the odd joke about Mayo ever winning the Sam Maguire, any note I've seen is all about imagining best-possible scenarios. Kind of like those letters to my daughter.
The time capsule notes that people have already publicly shared are exercises in aspiration. Is it possible though that we make ourselves accountable to those ideals?
If I ever have a grandchild, and perhaps great-grandchild, and they're alive in 2122, the first place my mind goes to is the climate. Where are the sea levels, where are global temperatures, and how hospitable is the planet? Nothing else, not even mortgage interest rates or the mindset around affordable housing, matters.
From here, I'll want to know how we in the North treated people fleeing inhospitable climes in the south. Did we continue to punch down and send them back to where they came from to sort it out themselves?
Did we go with NIMBY — not in my backyard — because the Rio Grande is a far cry from the Shannon or the Suir? Or did we make room? In 2122, are we still "othering" those who have to leave their home through no fault of their own?
After climate and migration, my mind goes to personal rights. Will women and girls in Ireland still have the right to choose, or will that right have been rowed back on?
I wonder this because in America right now, a place where most states offered accessible abortion care, those rights are being rescinded.
In 2021, Poland's abortion rights regressed there too. Attitudes are always in flux, and therefore, so too are laws. In 2122, what places in the world will women not have control over their destiny, if they don't have control over their reproductive lives?
The people whose opinions we allow censor or silence or immobilise our activism and progress now will be long dead in 2122. Maybe we should care less what people think and more about the lives of our people 100 years from now.
I don't trust 'the cloud', meaning I currently have 38,695 photos and 375 videos on my iPhone. Space is constantly an issue, but so too is privacy and so I prioritise the latter over the barely noticeable annoyance at having to delete stuff in order to increase storage for more.
Back in the day, my parents printed the important pictures. People made albums. Countries held archives. In 100 years' time, Facebook or Instagram will exist in some other iteration, maybe not, and all these images will likely die not with us, but with our phones, be that next year or the year after.
Our future ancestors will wonder how these native technologists suddenly got so bad at record-keeping.
The census is a chance to do the opposite, to commit the recipe, the secret, the promises of better, to our country's archives. What aspirations will you share for the future and can we make them a reality in the present, if so many of us share the same values?