Soft Irish Rain

AFTER eight GP visits, two courses each of antibiotics and steroids, several cough bottles, inhalations, lemsips and still a persistent infection, it was time for a change in direction.

My GP was baffled and slightly dubious. My frustration was growing and my symptoms, sweats, shivers, copious mucuous, stubbornly persisting.

And as is always the way of change, it turned up unexpectedly.

A few phone conversations and email exchanges with a work contact and we found ourselves sitting in the front room of a secluded lodge in north Sligo, earlier this evening, me having my blood tested.

Our enthusiastic physician exuded good health, positive energy and inspiration. She had changed her own health beyond recognition when she started eating only foods that suited her blood type and now she was quietly spreading the word.

She believes it is the future of medicine.

We left armed with seaweed, recipes and luckily having discovered that we both shared the same blood group O.

My illness is still undiagnosed but now there is a roadmap which I believe will build up my immunity and make me healthier.

There are implications of course. Change for me, means change for two of us.

Our minds are racing through foods we have loved together, now off the list.

No potatoes, No cabbage, No bacon. No brown bread. No Guinness. I’m feeling stripped of my Irishness!

But it’s not all bad! In fact as blood groups go, O is a good one. We can still eat organic meat, most vegetables, and rye bread tastes pretty good.

As for green tea, I can feel its power with every mouthful.

It is the start of something. A journey to better health. The books are already ordered, the shopping trip is planned.

And I am excited about its possibilities.

Best of all I have someone who is supporting me. I get to travel this road with the one I love.

The Wake

Saturday morning two of my neighbors died in a car accident, John Gallagher aged 55 and his son Sean aged 24. They were coming back from the Derry City Airport after leaving Sean’s girlfriend to her flight back home to England. The facts of the accident, as far as they are known,are well reported in the newspapers so there is no need to go on about it here.

What I actually want to talk about is how our little town handles tragedy. By Saturday afternoon you could feel it in the air, just by walking around town even if you spoke to
no one, you would know that something was very different. Of course you don’t walk around and talk to no one, people that you normally exchange no more than “hello” with are talking about how sad it is , how awful it is for her, no need to say what “it” is or who “her” is because everybody knows, we speak in a kind of  small town shorthand.

The removal is Sunday evening at 6:00, and people start to congregate on the street near the Gallagher house. The cortege arrives at about 7:00 and hundreds of people come from every direction. They just materialize, soon nearly the whole town is standing around outside the house in complete silence, it is hard to imagine that many people showing their  respect by their presence alone, nothing needs to be said.

If you were to film this and show it without explanation to an audience from a city where people choose not to know their neighbors, where privacy is valued above community, they would think it was creepy, they wouldn’t know what to make of this silent gathering, but to someone who knows this town, this is just the way things are done. Prior to the removal, an estimated one thousand people had called in to the morgue to lend their support to the family. All day on Monday  a steady stream of callers to the family home, came in and filed upstairs to where the two bodies were laid in state. The family kept constant watch in the room and callers came in and viewed the bodies and offered their sympathy and filed out.

Members of the extended family and closest friends stay on downstairs and endless pots of tea are produced, trays of sandwiches are passed around. The sandwiches by the way were provided by the local shop and the neighbors, neither the sandwiches nor payment was asked for, the food just turns up. Drinking at Irish wakes? I assume it must go on but I have never seen it, it is not a feature of wakes in Donegal. The visitors will keep coming until the hour from which the family has asked that the house is to be private. Then the door will be shut and no one else will come.

This beautiful ritual is probably dying out. How much longer it will continue is anyones guess. In some parts of the country it is already gone but in Donegal it is still just the way things are done.

I wish I knew how to document this wake, I could not think of photographing it. Turning up with a camera would be unthinkable because I was not there as an observer, I was there as a participant. I am a member of this community, I am not a local I have only been here eight and a half years. I will never live long enough not to be an outsider, a blow-in but the welcome that I have received  here is something that I will always treasure. By the way John Gallagher is not a local either, he was born and raised on Arranmore Island, he came her 25 years ago. Is half your life long enough to become a local? It doesn’t matter, this is just the way things are done here.

“Is if for a special occasion?” gushed the shop assistant, as I tried on the dress.
“Well actually, yes,” I blurted. “It’s for my husband’s daughter’s wedding. I suppose you could say, my stepdaughter,” I faltered, and a puzzled look briefly crossed her face.

When we think of stepchildren, our minds are as likely to be cast into the fairytale world of half-orphaned children getting landed with wicked stepmothers, as to a contemporary family configuration.
Does an adult offspring who already has two perfectly alive parents fulfilling the parental role, require, or more importantly want a step-mom or dad?
And if the answer is no, what do they call that other adult that marries their divorced parent or what do we call ourselves?
And what exactly is our role, if any?
Never have these questions been more pertinent than now, with the wedding of my American husband’s daughter looming.
My beloved’s daughter and son came into my life as fully grown adults, resentful of the woman who had ‘taken’ their father to Ireland.
I first met them by way of a photograph sent to me by their father when our relationship was blossoming.
The picture, taken some time previously, of a High School graduation, showed a father beaming with pride and a young man and woman, looking like they wanted the ground to open up and swallow them.
I studied their sulky teenage demeanour with curiosity. Meeting them was still in the abstract but it was their father’s love-filled words that remained with me, long after the picture got mislaid.
‘Of course, I love them because they are my children but I am also proud of the young adults they have become,” he wrote.
I have never had a child so I will never fully know that overwhelming love felt by parents. Sometimes I get a glimpse of it, or even feel it briefly, but it isn’t a constant. Having parents means knowing one end of the relationship but being a parent is clearly a whole other thing as he has quietly taught me.
The day I met my husband’s daughter, I was so nervous I kept changing my clothes. We had spent the previous night in our camper van in one of Florida’s beautiful State Parks, and celebrated his birthday at midnight by dancing to the cacophony of tree frogs down by the water.
We drove to Orlando early the next morning to face a different kind of music, I knew he was excited. I knew how strong their bond was from listening to how he laughed when he spoke to her by phone.
From what he had said, I also knew to expect a full-on, outspoken young woman who prided herself in telling it like it is.
But I couldn’t have imagined a more frosty reception! She had been called into work at the last minute, although I never quite believed that, and we were left alone in a house in a dodgy neighbourhood with an empty fridge, a drunken boyfriend in bed and a lodger who had a dog being kept alive on drugs.
She said she would be a few hours. We waited for about 12 hours before she came home. Our eyes were square from watching TV. Because we were to go out to dinner we stayed hungry for most of the day. When we went out she spent most of the night with her boyfriend at the bar. Later we went to the same comedy club she had brought her mother for her birthday.  She drove us home way too fast with some very angry rap music, playing way too loudly.
On our way to her favourite beach the next day, she couldn’t bring herself to say much to me except to ask, a little pointedly I thought, whether I had any children and whether I would like any.
It was about then I realised that there was very little I could actively do to make this relationship work except trust that sooner or later her anger would subside and she would eventually accept me. I knew she wasn’t the kind of person who could be won over and more importantly, I knew she would resent my trying.
All I could do was give her time and fervently hope that she would eventually see how happy her father was in his new life and realise that it didn’t alter his relationship with her.
Her mother remarried before we did. For her brother’s wedding five years ago I traveled but didn’t attend as they felt, on my prompting, that it might be awkward for his mother.
Then when she announced the date for her wedding, I gave her the same option but was mildly surprised when she insisted I be there.
Several things had happened in the meantime which I believe had a profound impact on her. I know we have a way to go but I am witnessing a thawing towards me as she lets the anger go.
Recently I read an article about how the divorce of parents affects adult children, with some even saying they wished it had happened when they were younger. It made me see for the first time how hard it had all been for them.
Her father still believes that he did the right thing by staying in a marriage in which he was deeply unhappy until his two children were fully grown but he too probably underestimated the impact his leaving had.
I recall one time we arrived to visit, his daughter collected us from the airport. She was out of her skin with joy,  jumping up and down and shouting “Daddy’s here. Daddy’s here.” I had to turn away to hide my tears.
Next week we will travel to her wedding. I expect there will be awkward moments when I may even feel excluded but that’s okay. I know her father will be bursting with pride and I will share his joy.
She has been through a lot in her young life and has come through it with courage and a searing self-honesty, which I humbly respect and admire.
I know she will be beautiful. This will be her day, and I as her father’s wife, will feel proud to be a part of it.
And I’ll have the tissues at the ready because, whether I call myself stepmother or not, I’m sure to shed a tear.

Exactly how powerful IS the media?

Some recent, seemingly unrelated incidents have got me thinking.
For several days last week and the week before, the Liveline airwaves jolted with some truly shocking tales of random violence on the streets of Tipperary Town. While most incidents appear to have occurred on St Patrick’s Day, and some it appears within sight of patrolling gardai, it seems it has been an ongoing problem for months or maybe even longer.
In one incident on our national holiday, a garda approached a man who had just assaulted someone and told him he couldn’t be hitting people like that. But it didn’t end there.
One young American visitor had to cut his holiday short after he was attacked on the street in sight of his girlfriend and sister.
Caller after caller recounted assaults that for the most part went unreported or un-investigated by gardai. One woman even claimed that she and her daughter were advised by a garda not to press charges for fear of negative repercussions.
By last tuesday it seemed clear that the attacks were emanating from one unnamed family group who, if the callers are to be believed have been terrorising the townspeople unhindered.
Then comes the extraordinary news live on air of a major garda operation involving armed and unarmed patrols, special response units- hitherto deployed in the gangland strongholds of Limerick- and wait for it, a garda helicopter, as gardai closed in on suspects.
Coincidence or what?
Good news no doubt for the good people of Tipp Town who want their streets back but, really? Is that what it takes to get action and is that level of force actually required?
The second incident was a little more benign but nonetheless troubling. It began last Sunday with a report in the Sunday Tribune of a so-called guerrilla artist hanging unflattering paintings of Taoiseach Brian Cowen in two Dublin galleries. By Monday, the story was picked up by several tabloid newspapers but when it was reported on the flagship 9pm news bulletin by the national broadcaster, RTE it provoked the ire of the Fianna Fail press officer who complained to RTE. One outraged Dublin TD even called for the RTE Director General to stand down. The artist had made email contact with independent radio station Today FM which was then visited by gardai demanding access to the emails in their bid to track him down. You have to wonder who ordered this. As it turned out the artist voluntarily showed up to make a statement to gardai- before the helicopter and the emergency response unit were deployed…..
And then there is the ongoing high profile asylum case of Nigerian mother Pamela Izevbekhai who claims that her daughters are under threat of female genital mutilation if they are forced to return to Nigeria. They have lived in Ireland for four years and have received a large amount of media attention because Pamela’s oldest daughter Elizabeth bled to death as a result of the brutal procedure when she was a baby.
But this is now being disputed after it emerged that two gardai had travelled to Nigeria to verify Pamela’s story and had interviewed the doctor who had previously verified her story. He is now saying there never was such a baby or such an incident. And he is demanding money from any media outlet that wants to interview him.
Is every asylum case investigated so meticulously by the Garda Siochana?
Pamela is already fighting a deportation order and her case has been taken up by the European Court of Human Rights. It would be highly embarrassing for Ireland to be shown to have got it wrong.

Three separate stories with a common thread.
They are all about saving face in the court of public opinion, whatever the financial or in some cases, human cost.

Since when did St Patrick’s Day get abbreviated to Patty’s Day? I keep seeing these references and doing a double take. I mean Paddy’s Day has become common parlance but honestly, Patty’s Day?
I’m thinking back to St Patrick’s Days of yore deep in the rural midlands.
It was the day when my family had two opportunities to shine.
First, my father was dispatched in early morning to forage for the perfect shamrock. Not fake stuff, not clover but freshly plucked three leaved shamrock in abundance and somehow he never returned empty-handed to the delight of my mother.
Then we marched off the short walk to the chapel, proudly wearing huge sprigs of dew dripping shamrock alongside our St Patrick’s Day badges.
Every year on that one day the parish priest conducted the Mass in Irish, so armed with Irish prayer books and thanks to weeks of painstaking rehearsals with our committed parents, we were poised to ring out the responses in triumphant Gaelic unison.
Ours were the only voices in an otherwise mute congregation. Occasionally our mother, a fluent speaker, was even called on to do a reading, another family triumph.
Much of the remainder of the day was spent discussing the poor excuses for shamrock worn by most of our neighbours and their embarrassing lack of Irish as the prayer books were carefully attached together with elastic bands and stored away with the badges until the following year.

The Tory Island home of Neville Presho, marked on either side of building with an x, in 1976 before it was demolished.

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.
Imagine boarding up your holiday home on a remote island off the Irish coast and heading off to New Zealand only to return eight years later to find an empty space.
That’s exactly what happened to engineer-turned documentary maker, Neville Presho, who is currently in the Irish courts fighting for compensation.
The island in question is Tory off Donegal’s north west coast.
Presho first visited it in 1976 and like many before him and since was beguiled by its remote beauty. A few years later he purchased a six bedroomed two storey house on the edge of the Atlantic and used it as a holiday home for his frequent visits over subsequent years.
Presho had big ideas, big ambitions, big aspirations for his new island home and its Gaeltacht people. He wanted to help but he was a man who jumped from one idea to the next and soon New Zealand beckoned.
In his absence, his house was first squatted in by visiting trades-people and later mysteriously burned, finally falling down, and vanishing, stone by stone without a trace. In its place was what looked like a car park and the septic tank for the new hotel directly across the road.
When gardai investigated no one knew anything, not even the island king, Patsy Dan Rodgers, who personally welcomes all visitors to the island.
Hotelier, Pat Doohan maintains the house burned down as a result of dodgy wiring and the weather finished it off.

Presho, suffering from bi-polar disorder, diagnosed for the first time after his house disappeared, believes it was malicious and prays for the wrong doers. His life lies in tatters. Marriage over, he is estranged from his children and his home.
Constrained by the statute of limitation, he may not get the justice he so desperately craves. A High Court judge will deliver his ruling at the end of the month.

Once a year, the sheep dotted hills around Lough Gartan pulsate to the sound of lively discourse, courtesy of the Colmcille Winter School. No surprise that this year’s theme was The Recession and no surprise either that despite the panoramic surroundings on the edges of Glenveagh National Park, the mood was glum. Trinity College economics professor, Frank Barry pulled no punches in his scathing criticism of the Government for irresponsible fiscal policies, which have created the mess we are now in. And no, contrary to the mantra of government ministers, Ireland is not the innocent victim of world recession. Au contraire! We made it happen all by ourselves and the global crisis has just compounded matters. We have plummeted from a six per cent growth rate two years ago to a predicted growth rate of minus four per cent this year. In the words of Prof. Barry, that is a spectacular collapse second only in disastrous performance to Iceland. So how did we do it? We let developers and bankers run amuck. We flitted away the copious proceeds of the boom with no thought for tomorrow, paid ourselves too much and let our tax base collapse so when the downturn hit, there were no reserves. There are no reserves so once again, front line essential services are in the firing line for cutbacks they can’t endure. When I say we did all that, of course most people were mere bystanders but we elected (and even re-elected) those who could, nay should, have managed our country responsibly.
“We had become so dependent on the construction sector in Ireland. The size of the construction sector in Ireland was twice the European average, twice the US average, so it was clearly becoming unsustainable in terms of its share of employment, because of the housing boom. So it was going to burst at some time or another. The only instrument at our government’s disposal to protect us against that was fiscal policy. That means that in the good times we should have been running much much bigger budget surpluses than we were running so that we would have the resources available to protect ourselves in the bad times. That is what countercyclical fiscal policy is about, that it goes against the fiscal cycle…. Fiscal policy should have been used to slow down the housing boom because that was the only way. This is not rocket science. It is pretty simple.”
Barry pointed out that the EC twice warned the Irish Government about its pro cyclical fiscal policies and to our shame, was twice ignored. Both times in 2001 and 2007 were on the eve of General Elections when Irish Finance ministers are wont to getting the economy rip roaring drunk. Instead of reining in spending in 2001, Charlie McCreevy chose populism and to the cheers of the public introduced SSIA saving schemes, reduced income taxes and relaxed measures that had been introduced to control the property boom. The pro cyclical policies pushed wages up too high resulting in a loss of competitiveness and when the house boom ended tax revenue “collapsed catastrophically”. But Barry isn’t letting trade unions off the hook either.
“The fact that income taxes have eroded as a share of tax revenue is really a consequence of social partnership in place since ‘86, ‘87. The social partnership deals are to be understood as the unions saying to government we will offer you moderate wage demands but in return you have to give us income tax reductions. That is the entire history of the first twenty years of social partnership. And it worked. It brought industrial peace. It helped get us out of the original fiscal practices but it means that income taxes kept coming down and down. And income taxes as a share of tax revenue are a very stable source of tax revenue compared to the others.”
And a normally more circumspect Michael O’Regan, political correspondent with the Irish Times was also in no mood to suffer fools in what he described as a thoroughly hopeless situation. He blamed the state we’re in on greed, incompetence and opportunism.
“What we have today is absolutely wretchedly hopeless government. This is simply a fact.”
His prediction of social unrest, even revolution, was echoed enthusiastically by the audience. A lone Fianna Fail councillor gamely attempted to defend the party but seemed to lose his train of thought. Back in Dublin on Saturday evening, Taoiseach Brian Cowen extolled that Ireland would rise again. On the shores of Gartan lake a rising of a different kind was being contemplated.