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If you’re part of the “Twitter elite” you can’t have escaped hearing about the Morgan Kelly article in the Irish Times. It’s quite a frightening read but there’s little we can do about it at this stage.

Right now (Monday 8th November 2010 at 11:45am), “Morgan” is trending at number on Twitter which means a lot of people are talking about the article. There is some solace and solidarity in knowing that we’re all reading the same thing and concerned for the future.

It’s a pity that it takes doom and gloom to induce this solidarity. As John Waters wrote in the Irish Catholic this week :

“Although, when things were going well, we lost all sense of a collective endeavour, we now seem to understand ourselves as belonging to some collective entity which is doing badly and has been badly done-by. We share pessimism, anger, fear, to an extent that we never, in the good years, shared hope, joy or happiness.”

Perhaps worse than the content of the Morgan Kelly article is the fact that to me it seems we have just become a billion euro number. Ireland is a blip on a screen in some far off trading floor; an opportunity for some to continue making themselves richer at the roulette wheel of the financial market.

I wrote a blog post in March titled “Remember Us“. I’ll leave you with an extract from that post.

“Despite the changed circumstances the country finds itself in, we are still us.

We still laugh.

We still play.

We still make funny faces in photographs.

We still get married.

We still celebrate the arrival of new life.

We still care for our senior citizens.

We still wear our county colours with pride.

We still toast our good health.

We still enjoy our heritage.

We still run free on the beaches.

We love.

We cry.

We dance.

We pray.

We dream.

We make music.

We hold hands.

We are still us.

We always have been us.

We always will be us.“