Waterford and its People: I Love how it frustrates me and it frustrates me how much I love it
We can thank Winterval, Spraoi, Harvest Festival, Dungarvan Food Festival, our sporting culture, our community leaders, and our artists, all acting as harbingers that lay foundations to usher in a potential brighter future for Waterford. Photo: Joe Evans
For the same reason I love the people of Waterford, is the same reason I am frustrated by them. Not only are we one another’s best friends, we are our own worst enemies. Not only are we quick to pick each other up and dust ourselves off, we are just as quick to put each other down. Our collective mentality is a sublimely calibrated and finely tuned mechanism that anyone without time here wouldn’t understand. Our mindset is that of a people and place of immense potential, which harbours hope, but after years of constant promises of delivery, we are always poised to embrace the inevitable – of being forgotten again.
We almost have 24/7 cardiac care, a proper university, an airport and passable national representation. We have a sleeping giant ready to rouse itself from its slumber to become a powerhouse of Irish economics, education, culture, and society, but it’s sedated. Our cynicism is borne from decades of “almosts”. This shouldn’t be excused, but this mentality is understandable.
This promotes us as constant moaners who detract from potential investment in any capacity as we put out an image that is not conducive for progression. We have fostered an unconscious fetish in socio-economic sadomasochism for the self-ordained title as the forgotten city and people of Ireland.
We have been left to our own devices, all the while our forgotten diamond of a county, formed through years of extreme pressures, has seen Waterford organisations and people constantly polish our hidden gem of a home, no matter the circumstances, to have its light pierce through into the national public consciousness.
We can thank Winterval, Spraoi, Harvest Festival, Dungarvan Food Festival, our sporting culture, our community leaders, and our artists, all acting as harbingers that lay foundations to usher in a potential brighter future for Waterford.
The love and frustration I have for everything Waterford is something I find to be just and understandable. We, the people of Waterford, are not only the unstoppable force, we are also the immovable object, and it is this refined duality of stubbornness that defines us. Sometimes we need to recognise that we must stand out of our own way as we are an amazing people that deserve better.
