Month: October 2019

Despite all the hype, Storm Lorenzo passed us by recently without too much fuss. It huffed and puffed a bit up the west coast and dropped some water on us, but by and large it was a non-event. No doubt we’ll face a few more of these in the months ahead.

Even though it didn’t amount to much, it did give us something to talk about. The weather is a favourite topic of ours and we love to chat about what it was like yesterday, what it’s doing today and predicting what tomorrow’s weather is going to bring us. We thank God for the fine days, curse the wet ones and blame the dampness for all the pains in the joints.

Many of us would struggle to make conversation in a Mediterranean country where the weather is rarely discussed. There’s not much to talk about when the sun shines every day and the only clothes you need are shorts, t-shirt and a pair of flip flops. You’d get some strange looks if you started talking about soft days and the great drying out.

We see a lot of bad weather in Ireland, so we’re delighted when we get a break from it. A few days without rain soon becomes a lengthy dry spell and if the sun shines for longer than an hour and rises above 12 degrees, it’s classified as a heat wave.

We get a lot of wind too and it regularly howls down here in Cork Harbour and on those days, we batten down the hatches, wait for it all to calm down again, then carry on as usual. At least that’s what we used do but in recent times, a strong breeze is treated as a national emergency.

There was a time, not so long ago, when we only knew a storm was coming when we heard the wind whistling through the windows. The old timber sash windows never made a proper air-tight seal like the modern windows do, because if they were tight enough to keep out the wind, they were too tight to open, so they were always draughty.

Doors were the same. They rattled too and sometimes they left in the rain as well. On those occasions, towels and cloths were placed strategically around the windows and the bottom of the doors to reduce the air flow and hold back the water. As soon as it was over, everything was gathered up again, washed, dried and put away for the next event.

There were some natural indicators that bad weather was on the way and fishermen especially had their own favourites that they swore by. A quarter moon lying on its back, red sky in the morning and seagulls flying inland, were all signs that things were going to turn nasty.

There was another sign of impending doom, but it took a bit more of an effort to get an accurate forecast from it. It was said that if a mole digs its hole 2½ feet deep, you can expect severe weather. If it’s only two feet deep, then the weather won’t be so bad and if he only digs one foot down you can expect a mild winter.

That method wasn’t very practical if you just wanted to know whether to put the washing out or not.

These days we have meteorological people and they’re a bit more scientific about predicting weather patterns but even with all the information and technology available to them, Mother Nature can still be unpredictable so it’s not an exact science. We have apps on our phones too that give us hour by hour predictions, but are they really necessary?

We got lots of warnings about Storm Lorenzo and they proved to be largely unfounded. Some comments on social media complained that it was over hyped while others complained that advising people to stay indoors was bad for business. Some even seemed almost disappointed that the storm never materialised at all.

Predicting storms is big business and it’s very dramatic when we see The National Emergency Co-ordination Group and local emergency groups on TV, meeting in their bunkers and issuing coloured warnings about power cuts, falling trees, and flooding as the storm makes landfall with violent winds and dangerous driving conditions.

For the last event, RTE showed reporters standing out in the wind and rain as they warned the rest of us to stay indoors. David McCullough did an outdoor piece to camera to promote a segment on Prime Time, but it was difficult to hear what he was saying above the noise of the wind and he looked like he could disappear up into the clouds at any moment.

Poor Theresa Mannion can’t do one of these reports without getting soaked to the skin while screaming at the rest of us to stay safe, but do we really need this drama? Surely, they could deliver their message just as easily from the comfort of a sheltered spot indoors albeit without the special effects.

Or stop doing them altogether because they’re only upsetting people. They’re damned if they issue warnings and damned if the storm doesn’t materialise.

The business community, except for the bakeries, doesn’t like it when people are told to stay indoors because their tills are too silent. Insurance companies don’t want to hear about storms because they have to work round the clock to get the words ‘An act of God’ into as many sentences as possible.

So, maybe we’d all be better off if we went back to the old way of doing things, relying on the seagulls, the moles and the red sky. At least that way, we can’t blame anyone for the bad weather and when it comes, just get the towels and ride it out.

My grandmother died when I was a youngster, and she was laid to rest in the local cemetery. She was in her eighties when she died and had worked all her life, only retiring when she hit her mid- seventies.

She was a mid-wife and spent her early years living on Spike Island which meant she had to get a launch to Cobh whenever she was needed, often in bad weather, at all hours of the day and night. She delivered more than two thousand babies in her time, so she was well known.

On the day of her funeral, there was, as you might expect, a large crowd of mourners at the graveside. When the coffin was lowered into the grave, an elderly man stepped forward and started speaking. I can’t remember exactly what he said, only that he was talking about my grandmother and about some of the things she had done during her lifetime. It was the first time I had heard a eulogy.

I’m not sure if it was pre-arranged or if anybody had been expecting it but it came as a complete surprise to me and at the end of it there was a round of applause. As far as I can remember, he was a retired soldier and friend of the family. It was a very nice touch.

Since then, every eulogy I have heard has been delivered inside the church, at the end of the funeral service. This has been going on for years and I have heard dozens of them during my lifetime, so I expected the same to happen when my mother-in-law died recently.

Her son was going to deliver it, but I was taken aback when I learned that he wouldn’t be allowed to deliver it in the church. He was advised he would have to do it elsewhere.

The Catholic Church does not want eulogies delivered in the church anymore and while this was news to me, it’s a decision that was taken a long time ago. The Vatican made it clear as far back as 1989 when it stated that “a brief homily based on the readings should always be given at the funeral liturgy, but never any kind of eulogy.”

Pope John Paul II repeated that in 2000 and stated: “At the Funeral Mass there should, as a rule, be a short homily, but never a eulogy of any kind.” The reason the Catholic Church doesn’t permit eulogies is because the focus of the Catholic Funeral Mass is not supposed to be about the life of the deceased, but about the saving mercy of God that brings the deceased into eternal life.

That seems to be clear enough and when you join any club, you must play by their rules. But as far as I can see, eulogies are still delivered in some places, so while they are officially ‘discouraged’, if the family insist on a eulogy, they might not be stopped.

I did some research and I came across a piece written by a Msgr. Mannion. He holds a Ph.D in sacramental theology from The Catholic University of America. He was founding president of The Society for Catholic Liturgy in 1995 and the founding editor of the Society’s journal, Antiphon and founded the Mundelein Liturgical Institute in 2000.

I think it’s safe to assume that this man knows the rules of the Church and according to him, eulogies at Catholic funerals are officially discouraged unless delivered at the graveside or at the luncheon that generally follows the funeral.

His difficulty with the eulogy is that it usually comes at the end of the Mass when people are psychologically and spiritually prepared to bring matters to a conclusion. Most people find the prayers and rituals of the funeral Mass very comforting and healing. Prolonged and emotional words spoken at the end of the Mass tend to undo all the healing that has occurred during the Mass.

I think that’s debateable but while not being able to give a eulogy at the Funeral Mass might not sit well with many people, there are other practical reasons why eulogies are discouraged.

Funeral directors and priests often operate to a tight schedule and must coordinate events because of other activities taking place in the churches and the graveyards and while they don’t want to be rushing anyone, they do need to avoid unnecessary delays too.

In Mnsr. Mannions experience, there are a number of factors that can cause problems for the schedule and he was often faced with two or more people wanting to speak at the end of the Mass and sometimes he had up to five people delivering a eulogy and speakers often went on for fifteen to thirty minutes.  

Many times, eulogies were delivered by people who became very emotional and had great difficulty in delivering their words which became very uncomfortable for the assembly and often resulted in more grief for the bereaved.

On one occasion Mnsr. Mannion had to sit through a eulogy while a child of the deceased openly proclaimed that he knew that all this “Church stuff” was important to his father, but that he didn’t believe in any of it — especially life after death!

I understand the need for a sense of decorum, and nobody wants to listen to a eulogy that is likely to upset the family or disrespect the priest but maybe that could be avoided if a script was given to the priest in advance of the funeral Mass.

My mother-in-law was 100 years and 6 months old when she died. She was a religious woman and a dedicated Mass goer all her life. Her son delivered her eulogy in the graveyard and I think it’s a pity it had to be done there.

I read recently that a man was arrested in Cork after he was found in possession of heroin worth €105,000 and €2,000 of cocaine.

It took me back to a time when I started out in Dublin in 1980, as a young member of An Garda Siochana. The illegal drug scene was well established, and heroin was in full flow and a serious problem even then.

Just a couple of weeks after arriving at my first station in Blackrock, more than half a ton of cannabis, worth 2 million pounds, was seized at Dublin docks. The haul was discovered in a container at the port and gardai knew at that stage, they were dealing with highly organised gangs with sophisticated networks, who could successfully import huge quantities of drugs.

That’s almost forty years ago and since then, there has been an increase in the amount of drugs entering the country illegally and a rise in the number of people consuming them. The country is awash with cannabis, cocaine, and heroin and what is being detected represents a fraction of what is getting through the net.

Users are injecting openly in public places and the evidence is on our streets and in our parks with discarded needles and other drug paraphernalia strewn on the ground every day.

There has been a sharp rise in casual drug use in Cork and experts have warned that cocaine has infiltrated all sections of society, to the point that it is now normalised in social settings, and addiction counsellors are seeing more and more people hooked on the drug.

I don’t think that news will come as a great surprise to any of us and all the signs indicate that drug abuse in Cork these days is worse than ever, so maybe the time has come for a different approach.

Ann Murphy reported in The Echo that a former lord mayor of Cork said plans for a supervised injection centre for the city need to be advanced despite a similar plan being rejected in Dublin.

Mick Finn, an independent member of Cork City Council, also said people need to realise that heroin users are addicts who need medical help and services, including a supervised injection centre, to help them. He said the location of an injection centre in Cork is likely to result in a debate and opposition, but he stressed that it is required to provide a safe place for heroin addicts.

Senator Colette Kelleher has also called for a safe injection centre in Cork because she says the centre is needed for harm reduction and to give dignity to those battling addiction and research shows safe injection centres can help people learn about harm reduction and safe injecting.  

I knew Colette when she was head of the Cork Simon Community and she has vast experience in this area, so her opinion is worth listening to.

The Cork Local Drugs and Alcohol Task Force and the HSE also expressed an interest in developing a supervised injection centre in Cork, with public health experts describing it as a fantastic public health tool that will save lives.

The thought of it frightens a lot of people but it’s time to look at the evidence. There have been many attempts to tackle the drug problem over the years, but they have all failed to rid society of the scourge of drugs.

There’s no shame in that though because no other jurisdiction has solved the problem either although some do claim to have made a difference with the use of medically supervised injecting centres.

These are places where addicts can go to use their drugs under medical supervision in a controlled environment. Users are provided with access to clean, sterile injecting equipment with trained staff on hand to provide emergency care in the event of an overdose. Staff also provide advice on treatment and rehabilitation.

The Uniting Church has been operating a Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC) in Sydney, Australia since 2001 and they advertise it as a compassionate and practical health service. Registered nurses and counsellors and health education officers supervise episodes of drug injecting that would otherwise happen elsewhere.

They provide immediate access to emergency medical care in the event of an overdose or other health issue and the staff connect with clients and offer them referrals to a variety of services, including specialist addiction treatment. It makes sense but not everyone will like the idea.

Daniel McConnell wrote in the Irish Examiner, that there were grave concerns within Government over its plan to liberalise Ireland’s drug laws. Retired Judge Garrett Sheehan, chairman of the Government’s working group on “alternative approaches to possession of drugs for personal use” submitted a minority report to ministers.

He recommended that the Government resists calls for decriminalisation; that they restore the rule of law; that drug rehabilitation programmes be urgently audited and evaluated; that people are educated about the dangers of drug use, and that there is a greater policing of recreational drug use adding that at present, the threat of imprisonment can act as a catalyst for undergoing treatment.

In other words, let’s keep doing what we’ve been doing all along, even though it isn’t working.  

We’ve seen over the last forty years that prison, or the threat of it, won’t solve the drug problem. Drug addicts are beyond worrying about anything other than where the next fix is coming from, and habitual criminals don’t mind doing a bit of prison time because there’s too much money to be made so it’s worth the risk.

Take a seat in any courthouse and witness the number of repeat offenders appearing every day with lists of previous convictions as long as your arm. That tells the real story of the effectiveness of the threat of jail.

I wrote a piece a few months ago about my brush with prostate cancer and as you can imagine, I was happy to see the back of 2018. On the positive side though, the response to that article was enormous and I know a couple of guys who had themselves checked as a result of reading it, so that’s good.

The whole point of the exercise was to advise as many as possible about the importance of having their PSA checked and the need to be proactive where their health is concerned. There’s no point in waiting for symptoms because they might never appear and that’s important to remember. Just ask John Wall.

He is a 48-year-old Air Traffic Controller and father of three from Quin, Co Clare, and a couple of years ago he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and unfortunately for him, it has become a terminal illness. He has been very active on social media over the last 12 months or so, highlighting the need for men to get themselves checked.

It’s been 2 years since his diagnosis and he says that while it is a terminal diagnosis for him, it could have been avoided quite easily if he had had the sense to have a simple blood test annually. He should have had his PSA checked and he feels that all 30-something males out there should be visiting their GP once a year.

John’s advice is not to wait; “More often than not we wait for a problem rather than pre-empting one before we make that visit. Don’t make the same mistake I did, it could save your life.”

After I had my own surgery, my surgeon confirmed to me that we were right to move when we did because the cancer was beginning to migrate beyond the prostate. That was an endorsement of my decision to take matters into my own hands when faced with the prospect of delays and becoming part of the HSE statistics.

There were 700,000 people on hospital waiting lists at that time and I was one of those. I was in a hurry to get things moving but I didn’t get that sense of urgency from the system I was stuck in. Looking back on it now, if I had adopted that same laid-back approach that I encountered, I could very well have ended up in serious trouble and I’ll give you one example.

After receiving my diagnosis, I was advised to have an isotope bone scan to determine if the cancer had spread beyond the prostate gland. That was the middle of August and I was given a date for this scan in the CUH for the 5th November. Add on another few weeks to get the result of that and I was facing a wait of about three months.

When I questioned the reason for this delay, I was told that it was due to a large queue in the CUH. I wasn’t prepared to wait that long, so I went to the Bon Secours Hospital and had it done within a week. When I asked what kind of a waiting-list they had in the Bons for this procedure, they told me they had none.  

The obvious question then is, why wasn’t I advised that this test was available at a different hospital? It would have made sense to accommodate those of us with private health insurance in a hospital where there is no queue and remove us from the waiting list in the CUH to shorten the wait there for others.

It’s also quite possible that there may have been patients in the public system in the CUH who would have been willing to pay for the bone test privately if they had been given the option. They might gladly have taken the opportunity to be seen earlier at a cost of about €380 and this would have reduced the queue in the CUH even more.

In the lead up to the surgery, I felt like a very small cog in an enormous wheel. I felt largely invisible and I got no sense of urgency. The wheel was turning very slowly and at times, it seemed to me that the payments I was making along the way were more of a priority than my welfare.

I was beginning to question the value of early detection and intervention. The medical advice encourages us to check ourselves for changes in our body and to contact a doctor if we notice something different, so I was a little confused when I seemed to be the only one trying to speed things up.

That’s not a reflection on the medical staff on the front line who are trying to do the impossible, but it is a damning inditement on those responsible for the administration of this broken health system. Nursing is a vocation and those people are fighting hard to keep the system afloat.

My patience eventually ran out and I contacted the Mater Private Hospital in Dublin. From that point on I felt I was being looked after and events moved quickly after that. That’s how the system should work for everyone, but we all know it doesn’t.

The most important lesson I’ve learned, is not to wait for symptoms to occur because they don’t always appear. That can’t be said often enough. And don’t panic if you receive a diagnosis of prostate cancer. It’s not nice to hear, but it’s not the end of the world either; it’s a common complaint in men and is, usually, very treatable.

While the surgical procedure might be a little uncomfortable, it’s a lot better than the alternative. Patient experiences vary, and recoveries are different for everyone, but anyone faced with the prospect of surgery should stay positive.