​Joseph Daly

The movie “Waking Ned Divine” is set in the small Irish town of Tullymore.  The main character, Jackie O’Shea, learns that a member of his small community wins the Irish national lottery. Jackie is anxious to learn who the winner is so he can pretend to be close friends with them in order to mooch money from them. In order to learn the identity of the winner, Jackie plans a chicken dinner party and invites everyone in the town. While at the party, Jackie talks to each person in an attempt to find the winner of the lottery, however, one person doesn’t show up to the event and Jackie realizes that that person is probably the winner. Jackie than learns that the winner of the lottery, Ned divine, was so excited that he won his heart couldn’t handle the excitement and he died. Through the help of his community, and his close friend Michael O’Sullivan, Jackie enacts a plan where Ned Divine is impersonated so that the money can be claimed and split with all the members of the community.

                I personally thought the movie was very interesting because it brought up an issue that was discussed in honors What is the Good Life; the individuals role in the welfare of the community. In the movie, the winnings are split between everyone in the community but that wasn’t the original plan. Originally Jackie and Michael where going to claim the winnings together and cut everybody else out. But after the two of them realized that they would need the help of the entire community, they decided to split the winnings with everybody in an attempt to gain their support to fool the lottery proctor. In the end everyone ended up with around 130,000 pounds and each village member was happy. But this whole process raised the question, Did Jackie and Michel owe it to the community to share the winnings? Yes because the villagers help was needed. But what if it wasn’t? Would they still be morally obligated to share the money to make the community better off? One stance that was taken in class on “the individual’s role in the welfare of the community” is that the individual is only obligated to help the community if doing so helps them. Sharing the money with the members of his community wouldn’t have had a positive impact on Jackie because it would have meant less money for him. Jackie would have received no benefit from sharing the wealth and the only reason he did it in the first place was to avoid going to prison because without the communities’ aid the lottery proctor would have caught him. So a conclusion was made that an individual is only obligated to strengthen the welfare of his community when he is getting some benefit from it.