Month: April 2021

• 

Fife is a part of Scotland I’m familiar with. My brother-in-law has lived in Dalgety Bay just outside Edinburgh since the seventies, so I have been there many times over the years. It’s a lovely part of the world and while Scotland is associated with kilts, haggis, the Lough Ness monster and tossing the caber, there is a lot more to it.

The scenery is spectacular, and the Scots are easy to get along with because they’re like the Irish in many ways. They have a sense of humour too.

My wife and I went into a bar in 1979 and she asked me to get her a glass of lager with a dash of lime. I forgot the lime, so I went back up to the counter and asked the barman for a drop. I offered to pay because I knew they charged for it in some of the bars, but he recognised the accent and asked if I was from Ireland? I told him I was, and he said, light-heartedly “That’s OK then, there’s no charge. If you were English, it would cost you five pence.”  

I have a friend who also lives in Fife. He’s a recently retired policeman, and we spent some time working together on a project that brought us to several countries around Europe back in the noughties. Mark always seemed normal to me, but he never told me about his ancestors. I need to talk to him about them because they obviously had issues.

According to official records from the Fife Council, approximately 3,500 women were executed as witches in Scotland between 1560 and 1727. Some estimates even put that figure as high as 6,000 during a period when Europe was gripped by an anti-witch hysteria.

I don’t remember hearing any of this when I was growing up, but there was a time when witch-hunting was big business. While I was writing a piece about sleep deprivation a few weeks ago, I discovered that witch hunters scoured the land looking for suspects and when they caught them, they tortured them until they got a confession.

Sleep deprivation was one of the methods used. The suspected witches were kept awake for days until they eventually began to hallucinate and whatever they said while they were rambling was used as evidence to convict them at their trials.

According to Julian Goodare in National Geographic, the Scots believed that during the late 1500s, the devil was at work in the land and was known for his ability to create storms, kill livestock, and spread deadly illness. Satan sought to undermine human society from within and was recruiting secret agents to do his bidding. These people were witches, and the authorities believed they had to be eradicated for the sake of the kingdom.

And eradicated they were. Out of a population of roughly a million people, about 2,500 accused witches, most of them women, were executed.

The typical stereotype of an accused witch was an elderly, quarrelsome female and many were nominated as suspects by neighbours who just didn’t like them. Those women would be interrogated and forced to name accomplices, who would then be accused of having made a pact with the devil.

There were male witches too, but it was more difficult to convict them. They had to do something specific in order to be charged with witchcraft which explains why 85 percent of the convicted witches were female. Not a lot of evidence was required for women and sometimes they were simply identified as witches by virtue of having a mark like a scar, a mole, a cyst or maybe even just a skin tag.

This was interpreted as the “devil’s mark”, made by contact with the devil when sealing his pact with a witch. That was enough to bring them in for interrogation and a dose of sleep deprivation which was the most common method of torture. The confused and terrified women would readily admit to anything just to get out of their predicament.

In most European countries, witches were burned at the stake, but the Scots were more humanitarian and preferred to strangle suspected witches first. They weren’t always so considerate though and on one occasion a crowd killed an accused woman by dragging her to the beach, where they placed a door on top of her and piled stones on top of it until she died.

Another enterprising lady struck a deal with her tormentors to avoid the death penalty. Margaret Aitken, the so-called great witch of Balwearie, told them she had a special power to detect other witches. She used that power to travel around Scotland pointing out witches, many of whom were innocent but were put to death on her word alone. She eventually slipped up when she failed to identify one woman whom she had previously fingered, and she was uncovered as a fraud. 

There was another lady called Lilias Adie who was accused of witchcraft and sentenced to burn at the stake but before the brutal execution could be carried out, she died in prison. Possibly from suicide to avoid being strangled and burned at the stake.

Marco Margaritoff wrote about this woman who was terribly mistreated in prison and those who abused her were so afraid she would come back to life, that they locked her in a wooden box rather than a coffin. Her body was buried along the seashore in Fife, and to ensure that the devil did not reactivate her body, the grave was covered with a half-ton slab of stone.

That didn’t stop relic hunters though who still managed to rob the remains of Lilias Adie in 1852, and those remains are still missing. She was only in her late 50s or early 60s when she died.

• 

Eamon Ryan, our Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, has a new plan to save Planet Earth. He wants to do away with cheap flights to holiday destinations to cut down on harmful emissions. He says he is working with his European partners to ensure that cheap flights won’t be easily accessible in the future.

He says this will help Ireland reach zero carbon emissions by 2050 but it also means families will pay more for their breaks in the sun. That’s unlikely to win him any bonus points in the popularity stakes but it’s not the first time he’s gone against the grain.

He previously suggested that people living in rural Ireland, should start car sharing to reduce our carbon footprint. He also wanted wolves to be reintroduced into Ireland 250 years after they became extinct, because they should have a place in Ireland’s environment and would contribute positively to the ecosystem and the State’s national habitat.

He has raised a few eyebrows on other occasions too. While making a speech on racism, he used the very word he shouldn’t, and then he wanted us to grow our own salads in window boxes on south facing windowsills so we could be self-sufficient.

Minister Ryan also has plans for Dublin. He wants a city where a good education and skilled work will be available for those who seek it, where people can afford to rent or buy a house, where access to an efficient and reliable public transport system is guaranteed. Where cycling and walking are also a viable and healthy option for people getting in and out of the city centre.

That sounds fantastic but what politicians want for Dublin is of little interest to me down here in Cork. I live in Cobh, and as far as politicians are concerned, it’s the forgotten land. The condition of the roads, broadband, hospitals, garda stations and post-offices generally in rural Ireland suggests that our future is as precarious as that of the dodo bird.

The health of the Planet is a serious issue. Young people in particular are getting more animated about the subject with Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage activist on climate change, leading the charge. It’s their future we’re talking about, so they have every right to be concerned.

That’s music to the ears of the Green Party and their supporters, but it’s not going down well with everyone. Well, me anyway because it’s giving their leader, Eamon Ryan a platform. I’ve never met him, and he comes across as a genuine character, but I can’t take him seriously and that’s a pity because I would like to be supportive.

There’s no doubt the Planet is in trouble and something needs to change. According to the World Wildlife Fund, African elephant populations have declined, more than 100,000 orangutans have been lost, the whale shark population has fallen by more than 50% and black and white rhinos are down by 63%. Polar bear numbers are projected to decline by 30% in thirty years-time.

We’re destroying their natural habitat by looting the forests for timber. We’re killing elephants and rhinos for their ivory, killing sharks for their fins and other animals for trophies. We’re filling the oceans with plastic with disastrous implications for animal and plant life.

A dead whale washed up in eastern Indonesia and it had a large amount of waste in its stomach including flip-flops, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags, a nylon sack, 115 drinking cups and 1,000 pieces of assorted plastic.

I was fortunate some years ago when I got to visit the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. I spent a day diving from a boat and snorkelling among the coral and the fish. Fish of all shapes, size and colour swam around me and at times they rubbed against me as they passed by. The water was absolutely crystal clear, and I never saw such a display of colour, it was spectacular.

Now it’s in danger of disappearing. We are facing a huge challenge according to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The world’s leading scientists are telling us that we have only about ten years to prevent the Earth heating up and if we don’t get our act together, we are going to be in serious trouble.

If the temperature increases by as little as a half a degree more, the world will be at greater risk from drought, floods, and extreme heat. Not only will that have a negative impact on hundreds of millions of people, but it will also severely damage the coral and the Arctic.

You would think that with all the knowledge we have about how the Planet lives, breathes, and provides for us, that we would show greater interest in protecting it. We should hand it over to future generations the way we found it but instead we’re hell bent on destroying it.

I won’t ever be a member of the Green Party. I don’t believe we should all go around barefoot, wearing clothes made from grass and eating raw vegetables, but I do think it is time that we took a serious look at what we are leaving behind us. We can do better.

We produce nearly 300 million tons of plastic every year, half of which is for single use. More than 8 million tons of plastic is dumped into our oceans annually and much of it ends up being consumed by the creatures living there.

All the experts agree that climate change is occurring earlier and more rapidly than expected and we are being told now that we have 12 years to limit a climate change catastrophe. We can’t afford to fail because the stakes are too high, but I still can’t take Eamon Ryan seriously.

• 

Like most people, I have been compliant with the restrictions imposed on us during Covid-19. I’ve done what I’ve been asked to do but the longer it goes on, the more frustrated I’m getting and as I am your ‘average man in the street’, I reckon I’m not the only one.

I have no problem following orders as long as the plan makes sense, but headless chicken style leadership frustrates me. I need proper direction with a clear message delivered by one person, preferably a leader. It’s difficult to stick to a plan that lacks structure and varies in context depending on who is delivering it.

The problem I have with the Government’s handling of the pandemic is that I can’t figure out who to listen to. Many people appear on our TV screens telling us what to do. Politicians, experts from NPHET and the HSE, and a host of independent experts happy to throw in their tuppence worth but the messages are often mixed and that makes it hard to have confidence in the messengers.

It shouldn’t be difficult for the relevant stakeholders to get into a huddle, consider the expert advice, come up with a plan and deliver clear instructions in one voice to the rest of us. It shouldn’t be, but it is and that’s not going to change either as long as we continue with the Chinese whispers style of information dissemination.

Chinese whispers, a game many of you will be familiar with, is often used as a warm-up exercise in situations where people come together for the first time. It acts as an ice breaker, designed to break the initial tension and get people talking to each other.

I hate these things normally, but this one is a bit of fun and there is also a practical side to it. It can be used as a training aide to illustrate how stories can sometimes become altered in the telling. How an account of an event described by one person can be unintentionally distorted when it has been passed on a few times.

It’s a technique that is also used to demonstrate to police officers how an account of an incident from a witness, given in good faith, might not be accurate or reliable. It shows too how several witnesses to the same event, might give different accounts, with some details getting lost in the telling.

It’s a simple exercise that can be played out anywhere, and the more people involved, the better. In short, the first person whispers a little story to the person next to them and that person then tells it to the next person and so on. It continues down the line, one at a time, until the last person has heard it.

The last person to receive the message then relates it back to the group and it usually happens that the story at the end of the exercise will be bear very little similarity to the original version.

It proves that while we all hear the words, we don’t always hear the same message. It demonstrates the importance of having a good communication system in place in any organisation to ensure that the right message is getting through to the people who need it most.

Many organisations suffer from Chinese whispers and during my time, An Garda Siochana was no different. Instructions coming from garda management in the Phoenix Park often got distorted as they travelled down through the ranks to the garda on the beat. What began life in the Commissioners’ office as a duck could end up as an octopus by the time it reached the various stations around the country.

Not deliberately, it’s just because we hear things differently. The military are better in that regard, and I think the police and Government could learn something from the way they communicate with their troops.

I spent a year in a military camp in Cyprus when I worked with the United Nations. Once a week we had what they called an International Briefing. It started at 8am on the dot and anyone who wasn’t already in position when the Commanding Officer (CO) entered the room, remained outside. Everybody had to be in place and ready to go at the appointed time and there were no exceptions.

Each section, or department, had a seat at the table and that seat had to be occupied by the head of that section. If he or she was not available, then the next in line took the seat. The position or seat never changed, so when the CO wanted to know something specific, he referred to the seat where the person from the relevant department should be sitting.

There had to be someone sitting there who could answer his question and while the face of the person might change, the seating arrangement remained the same.

The CO would go around the table and take reports from each section and then he would give his orders from HQ to his people for transmission to his troops. There was no questioning these instructions, regardless of what the individuals might have thought about them. They were not open to interpretation or discussion.

The meetings were formal, structured and stuck to the agenda. They were fast, efficient and effective. It took a while to get used to that style because it was a new experience for me. Meetings at home were different. They rarely started on time, seldom kept to the agenda, and dragged on until everyone lost the will to live.

The Government should be doing better though. They’re paying dearly for communications experts and PR consultants but still can’t get it right. I know where to find the right people to help – give the Defence Forces a shout.

• 

Births, deaths and marriages are a big deal in Ireland. We’re an empathetic, sociable outfit and we like to support each other in good times and bad, usually with a few drinks. Until recently, we had parties suitable for every occasion but Covid restrictions have put these on hold – for most of us anyway.

A small minority ignore the regulations and carry on as normal while the rest of us learn different ways of doing things, including how we send our loved ones to their final resting place.

I was never great at attending funerals in my younger days. I always felt awkward meeting the bereaved. Sympathising with them made me feel uncomfortable because I never knew what to say. When I did attend a service, I usually slipped away quietly afterwards without offering my condolences to anyone.

It was easier that way and I figured it didn’t make too much difference to the mourners whether I was there or not because those poor people had enough on their minds already. Shaking hands with me was one thing less for them to have to endure and I was certain I wouldn’t be missed.

I was wrong of course but I didn’t realise that until 2005 when my sister Jill died. She was in her mid-forties and had been suffering from cancer. She was married with two young children and even though we knew that she was close to the end, her death was a real shock to the system.

She was well known in the community through her music and her hairdressing so there was a large turnout at her funeral. I was surprised at how many of my friends and work colleagues attended the removal and the funeral service and it meant a lot that they took the time to travel and offer their support. It was really appreciated.

That changed my outlook and ever since then, I make an effort to attend funerals and sympathise with the grieving relatives because I now know how much it means. I no longer worry about what I say to them either because that doesn’t really matter. In fact, you don’t even need to say anything, just being there is what’s important.

My mother spent the last few months of her life living with me and when she was being removed from the house in 2017, two friends of mine appeared in the hallway. They had driven down from Cavan to offer their condolences and as soon as the hearse left, they turned around and made the long journey back home again. You can’t buy that kind of support and I get that now.

Unfortunately, Covid-19 has robbed many families of that support, but while we may not be able to gather in the church or attend the burial or the cremation, we found alternative ways of doing things. When we couldn’t go to the Church, we went as far as we were allowed and stood outside, socially distanced or watched it on the laptop. We did what we could to be a part of it, to show support.

When we couldn’t congregate at the graveyards, we lined the roadway and paid our respects as the hearse passed by. It was different, but it meant a lot to the families and they appreciated the effort.

It’s not the first time we’ve had to improvise where death is concerned and if you feel hard done by during this pandemic, spare a thought for those who lived through the famine. Bodies were stored in public houses when the mortuaries could no longer cope, and mass graves were used to bury the multitudes.

Approximately one million people died from starvation and disease and those bodies needed to be stored somewhere to prevent the spread infection and to protect the corpses from consumption by wild animals. Pubs were the best option because beer cellars provided a cold storage space which helped delay the decomposition at a time when there was no refrigeration. It was a time for improvisation as described in ‘Ireland Calling’, a website dedicated to all things Irish.

The famine was not a time for observing the accepted niceties of civilised behaviour. At the height of the famine, thousands were dying by the day. Those who survived had barely enough energy to carry on living, which meant that in many parts of Ireland, the usual burial practices were suspended.

The normal wakes and respectful religious ceremonies were set aside, and the dead were buried in a hurry. Many were simply placed in mass graves alongside dozens of other nameless victims. Coffins with hinged lids were often used for the service and once the ceremony was over, the coffin lid would be opened, and the body removed so the coffin could be used for another victim.

Diseases were rife, so burials were carried out as quickly as possible to reduce the chance of contagion. People often collapsed due to hunger or disease and appeared to be dead and in the atmosphere of haste, mistakes were made.

One of the most famous instances involved a boy called Tom Guerin. He was only three years old when he was buried alive in a mass grave near Skibbereen in West Cork. The details of exactly what happened are sketchy. Some reports say he was buried for two days and was only discovered when more bodies were put into the same pit.

Others say he was discovered during his burial when the gravedigger accidentally struck his legs with a spade, causing the boy to groan. This is probably the more likely scenario, but we’ll never know for sure. The boy survived but was crippled for the rest of his life because of his damaged legs.

Things are bad now, but they could be worse.