Month: April 2024

Jane is a student at Trinity College Dublin, where she is in her second year, studying, of all things, English. Writing in the Irish Examiner recently she asked a few questions about the way we deal with the English language on social media.

“What’s the deal with all these full stops in texts? We’re just texting; why do you need to act like we’re negotiating a contract? What’s the need for all this formality? Quite frankly, the full stops feel a little aggressive. It’s just so blunt. Such a definite end to a text message. It makes me feel like I’m back in school again, and I’ve served my time.” 

“Sure, when it comes from someone over the age of 30, I’ll take their full stop with a pinch of salt. I assume they just don’t know that those went out of fashion around the same time as MySpace and capris. But if one of my friends were to hit me with a ‘Hello.’ over text, I’d start sweating. Essentially, a text like that is grounds for me to assume that I am involved in a serious argument with said friend. That’s just not how we text.”

Well, as someone who recently qualified for free travel and sadly misses the Ford Capri, it’s safe to assume Jane and I see things differently. I learned not too long ago that the thumbs up emoji and the smiley face were gone out of fashion, and nobody told me. My friends still use these but then we’re old.

Another thing I discovered accidently is that if you send a thumbs-up emoji to an iPhone from a poor man’s regular smart phone, it translates to a question mark. I found this out when a friend was trying to arrange a meeting and suggested a time and place. He was confused when he kept receiving question marks from me, so he repeated the message a couple of times before he realised, I was still operating in the Dark Ages. Nobody was offended though.

Now things are getting even more complicated because Jane and her buddies want to eliminate punctuation from text messages completely. Punctuation is causing millennials and Gen Z people a lot of stress and it’s wasting valuable time for them on social media, so they want to sabotage it.

Jane says, “There’s a fairly strict rubric that all Gen Zer’s follow when they’re texting. Instead of using full stops, we tend to send multiple short messages. Each message is a bit like a sentence, but with poor structure. We’re not looking for a Nobel Prize in literature here. Clear, quick communication. Remove all full stops from phone keyboards. We can expand from there.” 

Another columnist wrote, “Older people – do you realise that ending a sentence with a full stop comes across as sort of abrupt and unfriendly to younger people in an email/chat? Genuinely curious.”

Well, no I didn’t and if it comes across that way let me suggest you need to get over yourselves because I have no intention of corrupting the English language to suit your sensitive nature. Genuinely.

Emma Day, a freelance journalist and a lecturer in journalism in the UK took this antipathy towards the full stop a step further. She wrote that a full stop at the end of a sentence on WhatsApp, social media or text message is an unfriendly sign of aggression.

She stated that the Generation Z people who grew up with smartphones, the internet and social media, find the full stop intimidating when used in written messages.

These are the same people who can identify as a glow worm if it takes their fancy, throw paint at priceless art on a whim, glue their tongues to a motorway and cancel anyone who offends their sensibilities, which is very simply done by the way because they are easily offended.

They want to dismantle the English language because they feel threatened by an aggressive dot. “It’s upsetting” they say so let’s dump it. Constructing a sentence properly with the appropriate punctuation is too much trouble so their solution is to write badly instead.

The real reason behind this of course is pure laziness. It’s as easy to construct a sentence correctly as it is to butcher it but what do I know? I was born in the fifties.

I like to use the English language as it was intended and as I was taught and I’m not going to change. Punctuation has an important role to play and without it, understanding the written word would be more difficult. Bad grammar doesn’t help either but unfortunately, that’s becoming more common.  

‘I seen’ and ‘I done’ are in everyday use now and seem to be considered acceptable. Unless the writer has a medical condition that precludes them from understanding the difference, then that’s laziness too and nothing less.

My mother didn’t have much formal education, but she was a big reader. She also had a love of the English language, and she encouraged me to read from a very young age. Thanks to her, I have been a book worm all my life and reading has given me endless pleasure.

She used to love spelling difficult words too and often challenged me. To this day when I write an article, I usually run it through spell check and if it detects an incorrectly spelled word, I am annoyed with myself. That is something Gen Z-ers and millennials won’t understand.

Punctuation exists for a reason that is seemingly lost on the younger generation. When one employer pointed out to a Gen Z-er that their email was grammatically incorrect, and asked if they had checked the spelling they replied, “Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?”

It’s not limiting, it’s just sad.

We are very lenient in this country when it comes to dealing with serial offenders. Anyone can mess up and fair enough, if it’s your first offence and it’s out of character, then you probably deserve a second chance, except it’s a serious crime obviously. But how many chances should you get and at what stage should the judicial system say, enough is enough?

The Irish Examiner reported recently that a man who admitted filming himself carrying out “vile” sex acts on an infant boy, and who then shared the video footage with others on social media, was jailed for six years with the final two years suspended.

He had 133 previous convictions, and pleaded guilty to knowingly possessing child pornography, knowingly producing child pornography, knowingly distributing child pornography; defilement of a child; and using communication technology to facilitate the sexual exploitation of a child.

The judge said he had to impose an immediate custodial sentence, and he described Marshall’s behaviour as “appalling, vile, egregious, and despicable”.

The mother of the child told the court of the shock to her, her family and friends. The abuse of her son had destroyed her mental health, and she had self-harmed because of what happened her son.

There are many victims in this story including the child, the immediate family, extended family and friends. The offender had 133 previous convictions, so God only knows the extent of the destruction he has left in his wake over the years. This one guy has caused extensive harm and on the face of it, you’d have to wonder why a person with that kind of record should even be in a position to interfere with anyone beyond the walls of a prison in the first place.

It seems shocking that a serial offender should be walking the streets but it’s not unusual. It’s quite common actually for persistent offenders with a large number of previous convictions to be out and about. You only have to look at Liam Heylen’s court reports in the Irish Examiner to see how common it is. Here’s a selection:

A man convicted of engaging in threatening behaviour for the 48th time insisted he was not a violent person. He pleaded guilty at Cork District Court where it was revealed he had a total of 228 previous convictions, including 15 for burglary, 62 for being so intoxicated that he was a danger and 47 for threatening conduct.

A 61-year-old man who exposed himself on the city’s main street had 185 previous convictions, including 76 for being drunk and a danger and 28 for engaging in threatening or abusive behaviour.

A drunken man threatened a member of An Garda Síochána that he would rape him and his mother and also called him “a dead pig.” He also spat at gardaí and attempted to strike the garda and grab him by the neck. His previous convictions included 28 for being drunk and a danger, and 15 for engaging in threatening behaviour, one for obstruction, two for assault, and one for assault causing harm.

Another guy pleaded guilty to a number of thefts from shops against a background of extensive criminal convictions. He had 338 previous convictions and 58 of those were for theft.

A tourist in a café in Cork city centre had her bag with personal belongings stolen and the 40-year-old culprit had over 100 previous convictions related to theft, larceny and burglary and more than 100 more for other offences.

A 48-year-old man stood over another man and struck his face repeatedly with a broken bottle in Cork city centre. The injured party required 25 stitches to his face and the accused had over 150 previous convictions.

A Cork man with 216 previous convictions was charged with interfering with a car. His previous convictions included 58 for being drunk and a danger, 45 for engaging in threatening behaviour, 25 for theft, 17 for burglary, one for interfering with a car, and 13 for causing criminal damage.

There are numerous repeat offenders appearing in court on a daily basis with lists of convictions as long as your arm. They’re habitual criminals and it’s not as if they didn’t get chances. They got plenty in the course of their offending because our judicial system is designed in such a way that custodial sentences are only imposed as a last resort. 

But even when they do end up in jail it seems the cycle can’t be broken. Figures released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) a few years ago showed that 45.8%, almost half, of prisoners re-offend within three years of being released from prison. The CSO figures also showed that young people are more likely to reoffend, with three quarters of those aged 21 years or under re-offending.

Overall, men (47%) were more likely to re-offend than women (36%). A study of prison releases in 2012 showed half of those released in Ireland who re-offended, did so within six months of release, while a further one in five re-offended within a year.

It’s been said that prison doesn’t work. There has been a lot of research into the penal system and some of it has shown that long stretches have little impact on crime. Some will argue that mixing with other criminal elements while incarcerated will only further educate younger offenders in the ways of the underworld.

It’s expensive too. It currently costs somewhere in the region of €80,000 to keep a prisoner locked up for a year and even at that, we’re running out of prison space. If we could lock them all up, research tells us that it’s a waste of time anyway.

I don’t know what the answer is but until we find a solution, we’ll continue to have a lot of disturbed people living among us.

The Irish Examiner reported that nearly thirty road safety advocacy bodies have declared no confidence in the Road Safety Authority (RSA) after a spate of deaths in the first three months of 2024. Multiple organisations from across the country, have lost confidence in the RSA and say it is no longer fit for purpose.

There have been 61 deaths on Irish roads this year, 16 more than had been recorded at the same stage in 2023, itself the worst year for fatalities on Irish roads in a decade.

The advocates said the RSA bears responsibility for the implementation of the Road Safety Strategy 2021-2030, “the primary aim of which is to reduce the number of deaths and serious injuries on Irish roads by 50% by 2030”.

They said data available to road safety researchers is insufficient or outdated. Historic road collision data is not being made available to road safety auditors, and the RSA is not providing up-to-date data which can be used to make the roads safer. I suggest it’s not being shared with the general population either and it should be.

If you listen to the traffic reports on the radio every morning you will hear of disruptions due to accidents. There’s hardly a morning goes by without delays on the M50 alone because of tips and this is where the RSA could be making a difference. Every accident has a cause and if these were highlighted, then maybe drivers might learn something.

I investigated many traffic accidents in the course of my 35 plus years in An Garda Siochana, from the minor fender benders to the more serious collisions involving death and or injury. Nothing unusual about that – it comes with the territory. Most police officers employed on outdoor duty will have to deal with those at some point in their career.

If they’re lucky, they might never have to call to a house to deliver the news to a family that their loved one is not coming home. That is one of the most difficult things a police officer has to do but unfortunately as the number of deaths on our roads continues to rise, it’s a job that many more gardai will have to face.

Many of these accidents could have been avoided but as long as you have humans in charge of machines that can travel at speed, there will be accidents. Human error is an important piece of this puzzle and needs to be addressed.

In spite of all the road safety campaigns, garda traffic management plans, enforcement of the various pieces of new legislation, improved safety features in cars, better signage of black spots and the introduction of anti-skid surfaces, the carnage continues.

Demands for more laws and more garda enforcement have come hot and heavy. One campaigner recently even suggested that the gardai needed to put “the fear of God” into drivers.

Another one said, “It’s early days yet but if the Government and Garda Commissioner don’t act ASAP, we will see a repeat of last year’s figures and maybe even more. The issues that have to be addressed are not being addressed.”

Justice Minister Helen McEntee said 2023 had been a “difficult year” on Irish roads and she was working with Gardaí to improve road safety. 

Minister of State for Transport Jack Chambers has promised a new Road Safety Bill will be introduced into the Oireachtas early this year to amend the penalty points system, reduce certain speed limits, amend the rules on testing for intoxicants to provide for drug testing to align with current rules on alcohol testing.

Legislation is necessary of course and so is enforcement but unless you have a garda stationed at 100-meter intervals on every single road in the country, that alone won’t be enough.

Denis Cusack, director of the Medical Bureau of Road Safety and a Dublin-based coroner, said a huge factor in the recent increase in road deaths was a “deterioration” in driving behaviour. He’s right of course. It’s driver behaviour that needs to change because the choices we make when driving will impact other road users, often with fatal consequences.

Every driver assumes responsibility for their actions once they get behind the wheel. Minister McEntee, Minister Chambers, the RSA and the gardai all have a role to play but responsibility for dangerous and bad driving has to be placed squarely where it belongs, on the shoulders of drivers.

We can’t expect everyone else to fix it and until we deal with human behaviour, we’re going nowhere. Throwing more legislation at the problem and calling for more gardai isn’t working so let’s try something different. Education for example.

I never came across a car that ended up on its roof while it was being driven normally and within the speed limit. I have never seen a car leave the road of its own accord in normal conditions and end up in a field or a river either. Cars tend not to do that unless there are other factors at play.

Young people think they are invincible. Many of them believe that driving at speed is what marks them as experts. The faster the car goes, the better the driver they are. The reality is completely different of course and the only way to change that attitude is through education.

Today’s children are tomorrow’s drivers so let’s teach them how to do it properly, starting in primary school and continuing right up to leaving certificate. Teach them about driving safely, being courteous and the importance of concentration. Highlight the causes of accidents and show how they can be avoided.

That will pay dividends in the long term. The only problem is though, it will take time to achieve results and we know how officialdom doesn’t like long term strategies.

Once we pass the age of sixty, I reckon most of us can expect to become more involved in the world of medicine. That’s often the time when various bits and pieces of our body claim revenge for the hardship we put it through in our youth. In my case I was motoring along quite nicely until I hit that milestone, then the wheels fell off. It’s been the same for many of my friends. There are exceptions too of course.

My mother-in-law lived to be a hundred and for most of her life she was as fit as a flea. It was only in her last few years that she required medical attention. She was one of the lucky ones but for the rest of us, the ageing process will bring about some unwanted side effects.

We will experience new things about our bodies. Aches, pains and creaks appear in places that heretofore behaved themselves. Mostly we get by with a few pills and potions but occasionally we need the help of the professionals, and they can often introduce us to a world of pain.

At that age you can expect to get to know your GP pretty well and the chances are you will meet some new consultants too. You know hospital visits are becoming more regular when your car can find its own way there. I’ve had my share of that over the last few years but for the time being anyway, hopefully, that’s behind me. Thanks to the wonders of modern medicine and the professionals who practice it.

I’m a glass half full type of person generally and I’ve tried to handle my various ailments with positivity and good humour. That helps and they say it’s important too in terms of recovery.

The first question I asked after each surgery was how long it would be before I could expect to be up and about again? As soon as they gave me an approximate date, I booked a flight to my favourite holiday spot and that became my target. I stuck rigidly to whatever exercise programme was designed to get me back on my feet to give me the best shot at making the flight.

It’s important to have something to aim for. I remember reading a book thirty or forty years ago written by Viktor Frankl called ‘Man’s Search for Meaning.’ He was an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who invented the theory of logotherapy which suggested that if you had a ‘why’ to live, you could survive any ‘how’.

That philosophy will get you through a lot but only if you have the mental capacity to work it out for yourself which is one of the reasons I hate the idea getting any form of dementia. It’s difficult to remain positive if your mind is broken. Hard to reason things out for yourself if your brain isn’t functioning properly and that’s becoming more of a threat these days.

Because we’re living longer, dementia is becoming more common and according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), there are currently more than 55 million people suffering from dementia worldwide, over 60% of whom live in low-and middle-income countries. They project that figure could be as high as 139 million by 2050. That’s a frightening statistic.

In 2019, dementia cost economies globally 1.3 trillion US dollars, approximately 50% of these costs are attributable to care provided by informal carers (e.g. family members and close friends). It’s particularly tough on women who are disproportionately affected by dementia, both directly and indirectly. Women experience higher disability-adjusted life years and mortality due to dementia, but also provide 70% of care hours for people living with dementia.

I checked the Mayo Clinic to see what exactly dementia is and what, if anything, we can do to help avoid it. The word “dementia” is an umbrella term used to describe a set of symptoms, including impairment in memory, reasoning, judgment, language and other thinking skills. It usually begins gradually, worsens over time and impairs a person’s abilities in work, social interactions and relationships.

Often, memory loss that disrupts your life is one of the first or more-recognizable signs of dementia. Other early signs might include asking the same questions repeatedly, forgetting common words when speaking, mixing words up — saying “bed” instead of “table,” for example. Taking longer to complete familiar tasks, such as following a recipe.

Misplacing items in inappropriate places, such as putting a wallet in a kitchen drawer. Getting lost while walking or driving in a familiar area, having changes in mood or behaviour for no apparent reason.

We all forget things at times. Can’t find the car keys or forget the name of a person you just met. Some degree of memory problems, as well as a modest decline in other thinking skills, is a fairly common part of aging. There’s a difference, however, between normal changes in memory and memory loss associated with Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders.

So, what can we do to keep our brains healthy? Peta Bee is a journalist who writes about health and wellbeing, and she wrote a piece in the Irish Examiner recently about priming your brain for longevity. She says a decline in brainpower is not an inevitable part of ageing and studies show it’s possible to future-proof your cognitive function through a combination of everyday healthy lifestyle habits.

With good habits over the years, you can mitigate the decline. Physical exercise and a healthy diet are important obviously and so is anything that gets you thinking. That includes brain apps, reading, solving puzzles such as crosswords and sudoku and the younger you start to bolster your brain, the better but it’s never too late to start.

That’s good news at least. Now, where was I?

I don’t like going to the dentist. I have this dread that during the drilling process he will hit a nerve and send me through the ceiling. I suspect many people of my vintage harbour the same fear based on difficult experiences we had in the 1960’s when dentistry was practised at a different level to what we know today.

It’s an irrational fear though because in all the years I’ve sat in a dentist’s chair since then, none has ever hit a nerve which is perfectly understandable given their skill and the availability of anaesthetic, but my brain is hotwired to expect a dose of agony as soon as I open my mouth.

The process involved in an extraction, or a filling is minor compared to invasive surgery on the body like, a heart bypass, a transplant or even removing an appendix. Yet, we are generally more relaxed entering an operating theatre than we are a dental surgery. Confident at least that we won’t feel any pain until the surgery is over.

The only thing that concerns me prior to surgery is that I get the right dose of anaesthetic. I don’t fancy the idea of waking up half-way through and it seems I’m not alone in that. Apparently topping the list of preoperative anxieties among patients is the fear that they won’t be anesthetized enough, waking up mid-surgery with their bodies open, unable to move and feeling everything.

But that fear may not be so irrational after all because medicaldaily.com reported back in 2014 that renditions of these incidents, called anaesthesia awareness, occur in about 300 people per year in the UK and Ireland.

Researchers from the UK’s Royal College of Anaesthetists and the Association of Anaesthetists looked into occurrences throughout the UK and Ireland. They found that one out of every 19,000 operations — other estimates put that number at one in 1,000 — resulted in an incidence of anaesthesia awareness of the Royal United Hospital, according to the BBC.

In those cases, patients were given general anaesthesia consisting of a concoction of various drugs and anaesthesia awareness occurred when one of the drugs wasn’t administered in as strong a dose as the others. Fortunately, the majority of patients only awoke for a brief period of time, either before surgery or once it was completed.

The Guardian published an article about the experiences of some of those who woke up during a procedure and Anne Lord still remembers vividly her experience under anaesthetic. She was rushed to Llandough hospital in Cardiff for an operation to remove a growth in her colon 20 years ago.

She woke up and heard shouting. “I told whoever was screaming to shut up and was told that I was the person screaming,” said Lord. “I had managed to get my foot out of the stirrups and kicked the surgeon in the chest and he went flying across the room on his wheeled stool.

I thought I was dreaming but apparently not. I had already had three times the normal amount of anaesthetic. I had counted to 10 on the first two injections and to nine on the last. It is a family thing as my late mother was resistant and one of my sons is also.”

Lord did not suffer any long-term psychological damage but rather revels in the anecdote which has become a dinner party staple over the years. She is not alone in being conscious while undergoing surgery.

James Wheatley, 34, did not feel pain when he was having his wisdom teeth removed under general anaesthetic, but was acutely aware of strong sensations. “At some point during the operation I became aware and could feel the movements of the surgeon in my mouth,” he said.

“There was no pain, but I could hear and feel the drilling, sawing and cracking reverberating through my skull as if a very powerful and noisy electric toothbrush was in direct contact with my bones.”

“I did manage to start groaning and I think I moved my head a little. I heard someone say ‘OK, we’ll give you some more medicine’ and then I was out again for the remainder of the operation.”

Another guy told of his experience in the mid-’90s. “I woke up during knee surgery. Like, just fully snapped awake and sat up. All of these wide-eyed masked faces just turned and stared at me. I looked down at my clamped open leg, looked at one of the masked faces that everyone seemed to be deferring to, and said, ‘I don’t think I want to be awake for this.’ They put me back under.”

Some redheaded patients have claimed to have woken up during medical procedures because they reckon redheads need more anaesthetic than other people. Howstuffworks reported that a 2002 study conducted by researchers at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, proved what anaesthesiologists have believed for some time, that redheads are more difficult to knock out.

Researchers chose 20 test subjects, all women aged 19 to 40. Ten were redheads and ten were brunettes. The researchers chose only women to cut out any possibility of gender playing a role in the study.

All 20 women were given desflurane, a common gas anaesthesia. After the anaesthesia took effect, the researchers gave each woman electric shocks, using a voltage which a conscious person would have found “intolerable.” If the subject could feel the pain, the researchers increased the dosage of desflurane and continued to administer shocks until they got no response.

The researchers’ findings showed that redheads do require more anaesthesia. In fact, they need an average of 20 percent more. So, there you have it. We always knew they had a reputation for being fiery, but we now know that gingers are more difficult to pacify as well.