From Bath to Cork with Baby Grace

I’ve just been moved to tears, listening to John McCormack. It wasn’t his recording of Il mio tesoro, with that extraordinary breath control and melifluous pitch. Nor his Killarney.

My uncle Hugh was a trained singer, a tenor, whose wonderful voice embarassed me before I came to admire it. My father, Frank, used to listen to McCormack on the gramaphone. How I used to hate those long lines of melody. Now I could listen to McCormack for hours.

It was another John McCormack that cracked me up today. CEO of Irish Cancer Society being interviewed after leading a deputation to Mary Harney, Minister for Health.

He had been lobbying the government to set up a publicly funded cervical screening service. I was shocked. There is no such service over here. Coming back from UK, I’ve assumed such a basic service existed here in some form.

Imagine, no service inviting women to have a smeer test. No letters following by a phonecall if you don’t turn up. No serious public policy delivering one of medicine’s greatest achievements. Cervical cancer is so preventible. It costs more to treat women after they get it than it would cost to have such a service. Imagine having to lobby for it in this day and age in Ireland.

What has been going on in this country? Don’t people learn anything from UK experience? Don’t women want to live? Don’t men want their mothers & wives to survive? Is an Irish woman’s life not worth it?

Irish women should be ashamed of themselves. How have they tolerated such a disgrace? How have they allowed public policy to be so blind? Do they have a death wish?

Irish men are disgraceful. Do they not value their women as mates, as lovers, as mothers, as human beings? Do they not value all the free ironing? The free cooking, the dusting? The tax relief?

I want to prick the whole fucking lot of them.

All you out there thinking of moving back to Ireland, or moving here for a better quality of life, be sure to factor this in: women’s lives here are cheap. It might have something to do with the fact that they are so easily reproduced. What does it matter that we lose a few hundred here or there; they are only women after all. They are only the ones that tend to live longest, that tend to look after the elderly. All that women’s work, we need to get on with real business, don’t we?

I heard John Mc Cormack rail against the fact that the Irish Cancer Society hadn’t been able to get Mary Harney to commit to a date for the service to begin. Look at the Society’s website. It’s horrific.

All that rubbish about Ireland being a ‘christian’ country, a humane place: it all a smokescreen for illness.

There has been a deep-seated illness at the heart of Ireland. Its symptoms include young women dying needlessly.

I suppose I could not talk like this in polite company. They can ban magic mushrooms overnight (rightly so, I think) but when it comes to serious stuff, impotence abounds. Do they talk about this over dinner at all?

A plague on all their houses. What have I brought my daughter back to?

If you feel I am being ‘unfair’, let me know. Otherwise do something about it.

Che gelida manina, from La Boheme, sung by himself is calming me. Hopefully it won’t dull my ire.

My importance to the world is relatively small. On the other
hand, my importance to myself is tremendous. I am all I have
to work with, to play with, to suffer and to enjoy. It is not
the eyes of others that I am wary of, but of my own. I do not
intend to let myself down more than I can possibly help, and
I find that the fewer illusions I have about myself or the
world around me, the better company I am for myself.

*** Noel Coward (1899-1973) British Writer ***

I have Dave Gurteen to thank for finding this quote. Dave sends out a quote of the day from his wonderful website and monthly newsletter.

If you are interested in the art of conversation, the role of dialogue, sharing knowledge or even creativity, you might like to dip into his monthly newsletter. It is a treasure grove.

On 31 August 2005, I began a Word document into which I cut and pasted quotes that got through to me. I delete the vast majority. About once a week I put a new one into my collection. This collection reveals somethings important about me.

(1) I am an anal retentive. I hoard.

(2) I love insight. When a phrase or epigram speaks to me, I come to life.

(3) Aphorisms turn me inside out.

(4) I wish I could write the way I feel.

I tried to meet Dave Gurteen to thank him for this influence. I found out he was in London, at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), attending a lecture on storytelling by a man who used to work at the World Bank. Having agreed to meet Dave there, I reasised when I went into the crowded lecture theatre that I hadn’t a clue what he looked like.

There wasn’t time to go round asking 400 people whether they were Dave Gurteen. I decided I might know him by his question. So I waited for the audience participation part hoping people would either introduce themselves or drop in an advert for their website.

The rest is history. We never met. I went home to Bath.

That’s how I got to have Dave Gurteen for a virtual friend. It’s like 84 Charing Cross Road, without one half of the correspondence.

I see that some bloggers have a place where you can click on to find out what their passions are. I’d like to have a place where I could put my collection of Quotes.

I love to share.
I love to ensnare.
Beware.

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The Rule of Law in Ireland

Brehon Law, that’s what we were told the Irish clans observed. At school I got the impression that the clans lived by a law, that they were law abiding.

I was too young to see that this didn’t quite fit with anther bit of information: they were always warring with each other.

The English have a long legal tradition based on Common Law. They brought this to Ireland.

But the Irish have never been a compliant tribe. They’ve had a wary relationship with the law. They do not obey laws unquestioningly.

There is a lot of trouble over law in Ireland. The legal profession spends a lot of energy, and earns a nice living, seeking out and exploiting legal loopholes. Many drunk drivers have been saved from conviction because of technicalities. Often individual Gardai have had to give complicated evidence in court even though the person charged with drunk driving has been way over the limit.

It may be that the Irish are not much good at drafting laws. Alternatively that they may be so good that they unconsciously draft laws that are so open to legal challenge that they are unfit for their purpose.

Recently when there was a trial of a student who killed a young boy, there was a huge amount of public interest in legal technicalities:

What is a victim impact statement?

What is admissible in evidence?

What is the role of the Court of Criminal Appeal?

The debate surrounding the trial was a public education in how the Irish legal system works, or doesn’t work.

The Irish were fascinated. This doesn’t mean they are law abiding.

But one of the main opinion writers in the Irish Times, John Waters, in a piece called “Media now delivering ‘justice’” on 30 January, made a complete eejit of himself when he wrote:

“… Since O’Donoghue has had no opportunity of facing the charges of which he is now in effect convicted by public opinion, the injustice towards him must (my emphasis) be seen as matching that suffered by the family of his victim…”

The family had a son killed. The killer was labelled a child abuser by public opinion. You can compare both and say that they match? What drivel. In my opinion, any intelligent person can see that you can’t compare these two entirely different experiences. John Waters should be ashamed of himself for such sloppy writing. Usually he is a much better thinker.