Month: November 2023

Trish Browne comes from the seaside town of Youghal in Co. Cork. She is the youngest of a family of fourteen, ten boys and four girls, and her early life wasn’t easy. Her father died when she was only two years old, and she lost her mother to cancer twelve years later when she was only fourteen.

That didn’t hold her back though and for the last twenty-three years Trish has made her home in Cyprus where she runs her own company, Blue Surf Property.  An estate agency which is located in the heart of Protaras on the east coast of the island. It’s a thriving business.

Some credit for this must go to her mother. Mrs. Browne appreciated the value of a good education so when Trish left the Presentation Convent in Youghal, her mother sent her to Scoil na Nog, an all-Irish boarding school in Glanmire. That move traumatised the youngster who hadn’t a word of Irish and hated the place from the word go. It quickly grew on her though and she absolutely loved it in the end.

Following the death of her mother, Trish lived with various family members when she wasn’t in boarding school, so she never really had a place to call home. The siblings looked after her well, but it wasn’t the same.

After finishing primary school, she spent the next six years in Colaiste an Phiarsaig and following her leaving certificate, headed to DCU to begin communication studies. She soon became disillusioned with that though and began to have doubts about her choice of course.

She decided to take some time out and go travelling. She had been doing a little part-time bar work while attending DCU and her boss told her about a friend of his who had a bar in Cyprus. He said if she was going to travel then she would have to experience Cyprus. She took his advice and accompanied by a friend of hers, headed for the airport.

On the 28th of January 1999, she got a one-way ticket to Cyprus. Her plan was to spend some time there to begin with and then travel further afield but as soon as she arrived, she began to wonder if she had made a terrible mistake.

January was not a good time to visit the island for the first time. Everything was closed for the winter and the only thing she could see moving on the streets back then was tumbleweed. It wasn’t quite the image Trish had in her head, but she had made her bed and turning back wasn’t an option.

She had no work initially and rationed her savings as best she could. Fortunately, in those days you could live very cheaply so she survived until the tourist season started when she got a job in a local bar. By the end of the season, she had fallen in love with the country.

She enjoyed the bar work and gave it her all and at that stage she thought she would probably end up running her own pub but by the end of the following season, she had changed her mind. She knew from the time she was a teenager that she wanted to have her own business. She was ambitious and she had lots of ideas on how to make money. Many of them were daft, but she consoled herself in the fact that she was at least thinking.

She changed tack after that and went working for a travel agency for a year selling cruises to Egypt and Israel but soon got bored with it and the following season, she got a job with First Choice who owned JWT and Falcon Holidays. They had just lost a couple of holiday reps, so she was thrown in at the deep end without any training, but says it was the best learning experience she ever had.

She soon got used to problem solving and dealing with dissatisfied customers and while she was a shy person by nature, the experience gave her lots of confidence. By then, Cyprus was preparing to join the EU and the regulations around buying and selling property were easing. Property was changing hands quickly.

Giovani property developers approached Trish with an offer to join their team as a salesperson and after just a few weeks working for them, she knew this was what she wanted to do with her life. It wasn’t just about selling property. She was also selling a lifestyle and she got a buzz from it. She did that for the next seven years.

By now she was married to a Cypriot and after her maternity leave following the birth of her first son, she got the opportunity to work under the licence of another property agency, Island Homes. She worked there for another seven years until she got itchy feet and decided to open her own agency.

She rented a small office and took on three other girls and Blue Surf Property was born. Her advanced knowledge of Greek allowed her to take the real estate exam and she became the only non-Cypriot person on the island of Cyprus to hold this licence.

The business has gone from strength to strength, and she now employs a staff of eleven. After twenty-three years here, she still feels blessed to be doing what she’s doing and is grateful for the freedom it gives her to be able to spend time with the people she cares most about and having the time to enjoy life.

In her spare time, she does triathlons, organises an annual run for Autism with two thousand participants, swims regularly and loves to paddle board. The only problem she has with Cyprus is that there aren’t enough Irish people here and Barry’s Tea is hard to come by.

When I retired from An Garda Siochana after thirty-five years, I did so with an unblemished record. I know this to be a fact because they gave me a piece of paper that said so. That certificate serves no purpose other than giving me the personal satisfaction of knowing that I did OK. A little pat on the back for myself.

There was one occasion during my service though when I was mildly reprimanded. I was driving a patrol car one night and during a pursuit of a stolen car, I was involved in an accident. Just some damage to a few cars, nothing serious.

The following morning my superintendent called me to his office, asked me if I was OK and told me not to fret about the damage to the cars. That can all be repaired he said, and I shouldn’t worry about it. I was not going to be hung drawn and quartered, happy days.

Sometime after that, there was a claim for compensation submitted by a third party, and I was summoned to the super’s office once again. He told me about the claim and informed me that the investigation file in relation to the accident had been returned to him from headquarters with a new recommendation attached. 

The powers that be had reviewed the file and had now considered that I was partially responsible for the accident and as such I should be cautioned about my future driving. My super told me not to worry about the caution and he seemed a little embarrassed to be even giving it to me. He was a decent man and a good boss, so I accepted the ruling and left his office suitably chastened.

That was over thirty years ago but if it happened today, I would behave differently. I would not admit there was an accident in the first place. I wouldn’t even admit being in the patrol car and then I would tell him to relax because systems had been put in place to make sure nothing like that could ever happen again.

That would be the end of it because as far as I can see, that’s how things work these days. Nobody is accountable. There is no need to take responsibility when things go pear shaped and no need to apologise for anything either and I’ll explain why.

I wrote recently about my wife’s all-night vigil in the Mercy University Hospital and the lack of empathy shown to her. The response I got to that tale of woe left me in no doubt that her case was not an isolated one.

A few weeks later my brother-in-law was sent to the CUMH for a 6.30pm appointment and ended up sitting in a chair until the following morning. The nurses were very caring. They checked on him regularly and apologised for the delay but said there were only two doctors working the night shift in that busy department and they were run off their feet. This is common but who is accountable or responsible?

The HSE overspent by €1.1 billion this year. It’s difficult to visualise such a vast sum of money so let’s put it another way.  A billion is a thousand million or written numerically it’s 1,000,000,000 so €1.1 billion is €1,100,000,000. That’s just the deficit.

The HSE budget for 2024 is €22.5 billion or in simple language, €22,500,000,000 and the HSE boss is already predicting it won’t be enough. Don’t worry though because Minister Donnelly is working “very closely” with HSE officials to implement measures to drive the budget overspend down.

Minister Donnelly said the main driver of the budget shortfall is “price and volume levels that were not provisioned for.” In plain English, too many patients. “The number of patients presenting is higher than was anticipated. We’re seeing it in Ireland, we’re seeing it right across Europe. We’re seeing a very significant post-Covid surge, and we’re seeing healthcare inflation higher than was provisioned for as well.”

He added: “Part of this is within the control of the HSE and that’s the bit they’re working very hard on and part of it is not in control of the HSE. It’s demographics, it’s post-Covid, it’s patient volumes, and it’s prices of medicines and wage increases and so forth.”

So, there you have it. It’s nobody’s fault really, certainly not the fault of those being paid enormous salaries to manage the system. The problem would sort itself out if people just stopped getting sick and attending hospital.

RTE is another organisation in crisis and could be insolvent by next spring without proper funding, according to its director general Kevin Bakhurst. He made the claim at a hearing of the Oireachtas Public Affairs Committee.

Mr Bakhurst said that the broadcaster was in a challenging financial situation but trying to figure out who is responsible for this mess has proven to be a very difficult task, but we do know that a lot of people were being paid huge salaries with little accountability.

An Garda Siochana too in turmoil. They lack resources, their recruitment campaign is a shambles, they’re struggling with retention issues, nobody wants the job of deputy commissioner and rank and file members voted no confidence in the garda commissioner. So, who’s responsible for this mess?

Well, nobody is, apparently, because there is no problem. Minister for Justice Helen McEntee keeps reminding us everything is just tickety boo. She has regular meetings with the commissioner, and he assures her that all is well in the world so that’s that.

So, I reckon the best way to survive a calamity, is to deny there is a problem in the first place, insist that everything is fine and then just carry on as normal. Pity I didn’t know that all those years ago.

The ghost city of Varosha lies in the Famagusta District on the eastern part of the island of Cyprus. It has been unoccupied since it was abandoned in 1974 after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. In the sixties, the popular holiday resort of Vorosha was in high demand because of the wonderful climate and beautiful beaches.

It was a playground for the rich and famous, frequented by the likes Richard Burton, Liz Taylor and Brigette Bardot. Those names probably won’t mean much to anyone who hasn’t reached grandfather status but take my word for it, they were the movers and shakers in the movie business at that time.

Those once famous hotels have been idle for over forty-eight years and most of the properties have fallen into disrepair. The damaged landscape is a constant reminder of a troubled time. Many of the family homes abandoned hurriedly in the middle of the night are visible to the naked eye from viewing points along the border in neighbouring Dherynia on the southern side of the border.

It makes painful viewing for the families who fled the fighting in the belief that the absence would be temporary. They thought they would be back home soon, but that didn’t happen. The city was fenced off and the only inhabitants over the decades, apart from the local wildlife, were the Peacekeepers attached to the United Nations and the military from the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus who controlled part of it.

That changed in 2020 when, controversially, the Turkish Cypriot administration took a decision to open a section of the Varosha beachfront to attract visitors. The city is open to tourists now too, so I hopped over the border for a look and what I saw was amazing.

It was like the set from a movie about a post-apocalyptic world. Untouched for almost fifty years, the first thing that struck me was the peace and quiet. You don’t expect that in a city but then there is nothing to disturb the peace. The shops, offices, schools, hotels and garages are empty and there is no traffic.

Access to the buildings is denied as most are dilapidated and unstable. Few of the windows remain intact and there are signs everywhere advising visitors to be aware of crumbling masonry.

It’s easy to imagine what it would have been like as a bustling commercial centre in the sixties and early seventies before it all came to an abrupt halt in July 1974. That’s when Cyprus became a divided nation with two separate communities claiming loyalty to two different countries on one little island.

Cyprus is only about the size of Munster, with a population of around 1.2 million. Two thirds of the island is occupied by Greek Cypriots in the south and a third is occupied by Turkish Cypriots in the north which they refer to as the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, (TRNC).

They have two separate governments, different currencies, two independent police forces and two opposing armies, kept apart from each other by a border that runs east to west. There is also a buffer zone between the two territories that was established in the aftermath of the events of 1974 and that area is protected by the United Nations.

In July of that year, the Turkish army invaded Cyprus and to understand why, we need to look back in time. Worldabandoned.com have described the events in detail but I will give a shortened version.

In 1570, the Ottomans captured Cyprus. Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots lived side by side but after the Greek War of Independence in 1821, there were calls for a union between Greece and Cyprus after centuries of neglect and poverty under the Ottomans.

In 1878, Cyprus was “leased” to the British Empire but when the Ottoman Empire entered World War I in 1914, the British Empire formally annexed Cyprus. After the war, the Turks withdrew all claim to Cyprus, and it became a British crown colony in 1925.

On 16 August 1960, Cyprus became an independent country following an agreement between Britain, Greece and Turkey but violence soon erupted between the two sides. Turkey threatened to invade the island in 1964 to protect the Turkish minority.

On 15 July 1974, president Makarios III of Cyprus was ousted by the Greek military junta who planned to force the country into a union with Greece. In response, the Turkish army invaded the island five days later on 20 July to restore the constitutional order agreed in 1960.

The Turks captured an area from Kyrenia on the northern coast, down to the Turkish areas of the capital Nicosia. A ceasefire was quickly agreed but despite the ceasefire, a second Turkish invasion occurred on August 14 and this time, they took further territory in the northern part of the island, including Famagusta.

It was during this invasion that city of Varosha was evacuated and sealed off. The Turkish army fenced it off and refused to let anyone in. Up until then, Varosha had been an affluent, tourist area with hotels, restaurants and bars. It was popular among travellers from north and west Europe, as well as wealthy Greeks. Then it became a no-go area.

During the invasion, the majority Greek Cypriot population fled the fighting in Famagusta. Many went south to Paralimni, Dherynia and Larnaca and were helped by the British military who had kept their bases on the island from when it was a crown colony. Following the invasion, a UN Buffer Zone was created to separate the island.

180,000 Greek Cypriots had been evicted from their homes in the north and 50,000 Turkish Cypriots were displaced from the south. Now, almost 50 years later, both sides can at least go back and visit what remains of the city.

If I saw a TV show depicting a guy breaking out of a modern prison by clinging to the underside of a delivery van, I would immediately switch channels. Too far-fetched. No way in this day and age, could a prisoner escape so simply and yet that’s precisely what did happen.

A former soldier absconded from the prison kitchen at HMP Wandsworth by strapping himself to the underside of a delivery van. Daniel Abed Khalife, 21, changed out of the prison kitchen uniform into a black baseball cap, black T-shirt and dark-coloured trousers to prepare himself for life on the outside.

Unfortunately for him, his freedom was short-lived. He escaped at 7.30am on a Wednesday and was declared missing twenty minutes later. The van was stopped by police less than an hour after that but Mr. Khalife was no longer attached to it. He was arrested a few days later on Saturday and returned to prison.

A few red-faced officials were left scratching their heads in the aftermath of the escape but it’s not the first-time prison authorities got caught on the hop and it probably won’t be the last.

Alcatraz prison in San Francisco served as a federal prison from 1934 to 1963 and housed some of the most dangerous prisoners of all time. Known as The Rock, it was supposed to be impossible to escape from. Attempts were rare, but a few inmates did manage it but whether they survived the currents of the bay, or the sharks is unknown.

According to History.com there were 14 different escape attempts involving 36 inmates. The most celebrated effort took place in June 1962, when three prisoners fled the island on a raft constructed from raincoats. In the months leading up to their daring escape, the men had used homemade tools to widen the ventilation holes in the walls of their cells, which they crawled through on the night they vanished.

In their beds, they left lifelike dummy heads as decoys. Despite a lengthy, large-scale manhunt, the fugitives were never heard from again and authorities believe they likely drowned in the San Francisco Bay’s strong, cold currents. Clint Eastwood starred in a 1979 movie about that breakout called “Escape from Alcatraz.”

Of all the prisoners who attempted to flee Alcatraz, 23 were captured, six were shot and killed while trying to escape and two drowned. An additional five, including the three who broke out in 1962, remain unaccounted for and are presumed drowned.

A century earlier, on February 9, 1864, 109 Union officers tunnelled their way out of Libby Prison, a bleak, Confederate prisoner-of-war facility in Richmond, Virginia. After opening in March 1962, the prison, situated in a former tobacco warehouse, quickly became an overcrowded, disease-ridden place where prisoners were subjected to severe food shortages.

Starting in the Autumn of 1863, a group of inmates made three failed attempts to dig tunnels out of the prison. With rats crawling over them as they laboured in secret, the men finally managed to dig a fourth tunnel 50 feet long and escaped. Fifty-nine of the men eventually reached Union territory, while 48 were recaptured and two drowned.

On February 22, 2014, one of the world’s most-wanted criminals, drug trafficker Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, was arrested after outrunning law enforcement for more than a decade. Guzman, a third-grade dropout, was first arrested in 1993 and sentenced to 20 years behind bars for murder.

While locked up in a high-security prison in the Mexican state of Jalisco, he paid off the staff and continued to run his criminal enterprise. In 2001, he escaped the facility; some accounts claim Guzman was wheeled out in a laundry cart, while other sources suggest prison officials simply let him walk out.

For years afterward, he used violence, bribery and a large network of informants to help him remain a fugitive. His cartel grew into the largest supplier of illegal narcotics to America, and the U.S. government offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest.

On February 22, 2014, law enforcement agents finally tracked him down to an apartment in Mazatlán, Mexico, and arrested him. However, on July 11, 2015, Guzman, then incarcerated at the nation’s highest-security penitentiary, Altiplano beyond Mexico City, once again escaped, this time via a hole in the floor of his cell and out through a mile-long tunnel that had been secretly dug and equipped with lights and ventilation. Guzman was re-captured by Mexican authorities in 2016.

Security must have been a bit more relaxed in the eighteenth century. After joining the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, Catholic nobleman William Maxwell, 5th Earl of Nithsdale, was locked up in the Tower of London, found guilty of treason and sentenced to die. Shortly before her husband was to be executed, Lady Nithsdale went to visit him in prison in 1716, accompanied by her maid and several female friends.

The group smuggled in women’s clothing for the earl then spirited him out of the Tower of London disguised as a female. The earl fled England, this time masquerading as a servant to a Venetian ambassador and ended up in Rome. Lady Nithsdale fled Britain separately to meet her husband in Rome, where they resided in exile.

Not every escape attempt was as well thought out as that though. Kenneth Burnum, a prisoner in Hamilton County Jail in Tennessee, heard another prisoner was about to be released on bail. His plan was to pretend to be the other inmate and take his place when officers arrived to collect him.

Burnum stood up when Taylor’s name was called and filled out the release forms but when he was sent for final identity verification, officers discovered one glaring distinction between the two men. The prisoner scheduled for release was black while Burnum was white.