Looking back over this manuscript on a year-by-year basis I can see that my impressionistic approach, while heavily influenced by career developments, has underplayed political events and experience in favour of registering what it felt to live life in terms of family values and personal convictions.

Although the year 2010 has turned out to be a truly landmark year for Ireland’s politics and economic and financial framework, the three events I will remember most are glorious outings with friends and family and an October holiday that introduced Anne and myself to Istanbul and the Middle East.

After adding these memorable events to the accumulated record I may treat myself to the luxury of a brief reflection on moving on from current crises to a better future.

In mid-July, a former Dalkey sea scout roped me in to make up a quartet of contemporaries involved more than forty years ago in a rowing expedition to Dalkey Island.

That earlier expedition included bivouacking overnight on the top of the Martello tower, which had been built in Napoleonic times to protect Killiney Bay, the entry to Dalkey sound, and Dublin Bay, from a possible French naval incursion.

The quartet picked to revisit the island, heading out from Bullock Harbour, Dalkey, in one of the current scout group’s sailing boats, on a perfect sunny morning with a lively breeze, never using an oar except for landing on the island and our return mooring in Bullock at lunchtime.

Sailing down the sound, lounging back as the least experienced yachtsman of the crew, a sense of the innocence with which we had invaded the island as young men so many years before suddenly flooded in. We all seemed to share this experience, wondering at the sheltered environment in which we had grown up and the lack of any sense of risk in our scouting activities and early adult lives at a time when there was no possibility of recourse to a mobile phone in an emergency. We were unanimous that we had probably learnt more through our scouting experiences than from any formal education.

It punctured the mood somewhat to think of how so many group outdoor adventures are now constrained by administrative demands for health and safety regulation and insurance cover, while access to drink, drugs and casual sex is not just freely available but promoted in many ways by advertising and the media.

This happy day of scouting reminiscences was followed in August by a Sunday which I think will be remembered by all the participants as a feast of enjoyment on what was probably the warmest and sunniest day of the year on Ireland’s east coast. Justin and Amma, Eli and Emer had come to Dublin to holiday in Killiney Castle Hotel at a time when out great friends, the Hinds, had come over from Belgium to holiday with mutual friends near Brittas Bay in Co. Wicklow. We had planned the Sunday as an opportunity for our grandchildren to see the Brittas beach so beloved of Justin, and for us all to meet up with the Hinds.

It should be said that the Hinds’s hosts, Declan and Ann Budd, are famous for their generous and welcoming al fresco hospitality on a low-profile property that abuts a small sheltered beach. A garden of trees, shrubs and colourful flowering plants protects their holiday home and surrounding accommodation before sloping down to the beach through an area of grassy dune. The path to the beach crosses the reed bed of a stream winding out to the sea across open sand.

In the warmth of that Sunday’s blazing sunshine our hosts welcomed a panoply of friends of all ages for lunch at tables around the garden and through the house. What made the day so exceptional for our extended family was that we all had great company for long chats, sandcastle building on the beach, swimming, or whatever.

As we drove back to Dublin we wondered at the warmth and energy of our hosts that had made possible such an enriching exchange of ideas and contacts. We had enjoyed this hospitality before and look forward to enjoying it again. Let’s hope future years may bring the same sunshine that made the garden and beach such a paradise.

The search for that kind of paradise is one of the things that powers the Mediterranean tourist industry. In October, on the recommendation of friends, we succumbed for the first time to the idea of a cruise and set out for three days in Istanbul before joining MS Island Sky, a ship carrying 116 passengers that would take us down through the Dardanelles and into the Eastern Mediterranean. Calls to ports or anchorages in Greece, Southern Turkey, Lebanon and Syria enabled us to visit some of the outstanding sites and sights of the Levant.

We saw the ancient ports of Ephesus and Byblos, the Crusader castle of Crak des Chevaliers, and the citadel of Aleppo with a sense of awe at what they represent in terms of our civilisation.

On returning home I tried to learn a bit more about the Arab world. I have been struck by the analysis of a leading historian that the current preoccupations of students and intellectuals in the Middle East are nationalism, socialism and Islam. As here in Ireland we face into extraordinary political, economic and social challenges, with an election due early in 2011, I would love to think Irish students and intellectuals were concentrating their thoughts on broad issues and that – in transposition of the Arab focus – I would see a new and deep reflection on the future of this island as a single community, demanding a sense of justice and fair treatment for that community, and asking how Christian and other faiths might contribute to the shaping of that community.

There is little sign that the pending general election will generate such a reflection or offer the possibility of finding the leadership and personalities essential to such a rethinking of our future.

On the contrary, our media seems delighted to focus on the ephemera of personality clashes generated by a pattern of confrontational politics that has no fit with the fundamental long-term challenges of education, energy and other resources, climate change, and the new information society. There is also a crying need for a new pattern of governance and public administration capable of ensuring the equitable financing of a fairer, modern society.

Read more: 2011 to 2017 – Conclusion and Future