From Bath to Cork with Baby Grace

I wonder if anyone’s read it?  It’s a memoir written by someone who knows bi-poliarity.

I found it via google alert today.

Posted on there…

I’m late returning to the fray.  Can’t pretend to have read half the comments your piece has inspired.

But I’d like to say thanks to you for saying in relation to NAMA …

"At the top, we need people who have a vision for what type of country we want to rebuild.

Many of the most delinquent former princes of the Irish boom will fall on their swords. The liquidators appointed by NAMA must make the key decisions, not the politicians. If we allow ourselves to be conned again by this government, either by allowing it to control NAMA with its own cronies or, worse still, to be forgiven at election time, we ourselves will be responsible for a truly Orwellian nightmare. "

You write the equivalent of  The Communist Manifesto, a call to arms, perhaps informed by Ghandian methods.

However, we are ruled by a shower that’s unlikely to move off the thrown.  And those who hope inherit the kingdom seems to me bereft of both virtue and impulse.  Fine Gael & Labour & Sinn Fein hang around mouthing platitudes and lacking the courage to risk revolution.  It’s as if their drawing room manners have corrupted their spirit.

Perhaps they are too well off to hazard an adventure in regime change?  Or maybe the only sort of regime change they can envisage is the substitution of one form of dismal politics for another.

Meanwhile we citizens experience what it’s like to be without anywhere to put our hope and demands.  Some sort of cul de sac eh?

In the old days, a revolutionary gang would have taken advantage of the confusion and desperation and seized power in the name of the people.  May or may not have fashioned a new order.

But we have a more complex challenge based on the absence of absolute poverty.  Perhaps this is without precedent?  

In the 1930’s there were hunger marches.  Recently we had one priest walk from Cloyne to Dublin in protest against the violence inflicted on children countenanced by his  fellow priests and protected by his bishops.  He stood up, alone, and cried out for forgiveness and regime change.  He won, didn’t he.

Enda, Eamon and Gerry have been found wanting, and their followers seems to be playing the game.  There are no leaders any more.  The people are abandoned.  What will they do?

Faced with more of the same, another confiscation of disposable income in November, they will withhold their spending.  Unwittingly and unwillingly they will suppress the economy that the government has so ably depressed.

I have no solution to offer.  Of course I agree with you that we need a clear out and new faces to at least relieve the boredom of daily disgrace.

Perhaps one TD would give up the seat and force a re-election, so that we might have some opportunity to show symbolic disgust?

Perhaps the President might resign?  Even threaten to resign?

Perhaps the coming elections will gift us such an unprecedented wipe out of FF that it will be cathartic?

I imagine we could build an alliance for step-change over say three years, but we have so many other options.

I feel like the Edvard Munch painting, The Scream.

This has been such a remarkable day in my life that I can’t let it pass without at least recording that I had a tooth pulled out by a professor, and hosted a small celebratory chocolate cake for the Wiffe.

My Facebook profile I updated a hundred times today: it charts the trials and tribulations of a  man who had his day hijacked by a molar resistant to pressure.

But it was a joy to struggle through to a small gathering with candles, and a performance of "deep in the jungle" by Grace & friends…

I’m too stressed by the pain to write more, and there’s an article for Goodbiz.ie to zap off early tomorrow to my editor…

Many people are afraid to reveal that they are vulnerable to depression. 

They don’t feel able to tell others that they are, or have been, depressed.  They keep one part of themselves hidden and secret.  They often suffer in isolation for many years.  

I think it’s hard to see a way of changing this, because it’s so complicated and sensitive. 

But I do feel it’s great when public figures admit their vulnerabilities, especially their mental health vulnerability.  Celebrities are heroes, and role models.  They might well have a love-hate relationship with such exposure…

Good news:

This weekend two celebrities spoke about their severe depression in the Sunday Independent:

Colin Farrell (filmstar) & Michael (Mickey) Graham (Boyzone).

I was particularly stuck by what Michael Graham said in his interview with Niamh Horan:

"I don’t know if this was my surrender, but I just remember one day I cried and cried like I never had before and I just couldn’t stop.

"I was at home and my stress levels had been building and building and I was fighting and fighting them inside myself. I had been saying to my wife a couple of weeks beforehand that I was really uptight and stressed. I could feel this rising [anxiety] happening inside me and I didn’t know what it was. All I knew was that the anxiousness was overtaking me and the panic attacks were beginning to return which I hadn’t had since I was a kid.

"So I began to get really frightened and wondering when everything I had ever learned [about controlling my emotions] would come into play. That day, I’m telling you, I just cried and cried and cried for hours and hours and hours on end. My wife was hugely supportive, but that was a moment of surrender and from then on I began to understand completely how this [depression] works."

"Was it a nervous breakdown?" I [Niamh Horan] ask.

"Yeah, you can call it what you want. You can put whatever label you want on it but really it is an emotional overload. [People don’t like the words ‘nervous breakdown’] because that means there’s something wrong with you," he says.

But he adds, "My wife thought it was the bravest thing I ever did. I broke a barrier and she thought it was courageous and the manliest thing she’d ever seen me do."

The whole interview is well worth reading. 

He says he kept his depression hidden from others…

"I would keep ignoring it but it would keep coming back, knocking on my window. But nobody else would have known because I was socially conditioned to keep it well hidden," he explains.

Why is this worth talking about?

If we could make it easier for people to talk about how they’re feeling emotionally on the rack, we’d shorten the depression and reduce the risk of suicide.

I have an article to write for Goodbiz.ie and I’m wondering what subject to address?

I even put out a "tweet" on twitter looking for inspiration.

It might do me good to write whatever comes into my head here, and thereby free up my thoughts.  Something might emerge from the forcefield.

Richard O’Brien is my customer, waiting for this.

Business is a general term covering the activity of inventing, designing, making, marketing, selling, transporting, billing and accounting…

I wonder if I’ve missed any core activity?  Doing business is hard work, always.  True there have  been times when there has been so much money in circulation that customers have seemed easy to find. 

Business is all about dialogue with customers.  Noticing them.  Listening to them.  See what they don’t do.  Observing and linking with them.  Becoming their friend.  Depending on them.

All the best business people know that they depend on customers.  They love their customers.  Respect them too.

Mediocre business people take advantage of their customers: they see it as a zero sum game. 

Win-Win is my game.  I’ve always loved customers, but I remember when I worked for a company within which the culture saw customers as the opposition.  The buses would be perfect if they didn’t have to go out of the garage and get mucked up by customers…

Love your customers.  That’s what I think I’ll write about.  Rather than seeing them as a pest.

Of course, customers are demanding, unreasonable, quirky…

OK, that’s sorted out the focus for the goodbiz.ie article.  In comparison with the challenge of becoming focussed, the business of writing is a doddle, I hope…

Our first time sharing the camera…

FitzGerald Park Cork this afternoon…

Then I gave her the camera, a Sony Cyber-shot 8.1 megapixels. This what she composed and shot

Tells a much better story eh?

When I read Eilis O’Hanlon’s piece in the Sunday Independent

"… Heaney crumbled in the face of a nation’s affection a long time ago.  He’s become a sort of caricature sage, un complainingly producing little nuggests of home-spun wisdom when required, the way a Christmas cracker dispenses jokes…"

I bristled.  What business has a young thing like her being given a column in the best selling Irish Sunday newspaper?  Who is she to write such caustic comment on the greatest living Irish man of letters?  The cheek of her.  She’s not worthy to wipe the snot from the end of his nose. She deserves to be locked up in stocks so we could lambaste her with dinner-party spittings.  In short I didn’t like what she wrote.

With some reluctance I read on.

She doesn’t look much older than Heaney was when he wrote Death of a Naturalist.

"… I want them[my poets] to be curmudgeonly buggers who refuse to play along withe the officially sanctioned self-deception which such public love-ins encourage…

"What would have been thrilling and wondrous last week is if Seamus Heaney has stood up in Kilmainham and denounced the whole brood of pseuds and hypocrites for not really giving a rat’s ass about poetry, or sparing a moment’s thought for it from one day to the next…

"Poets should do the literary equivalent of turning over the moneychangers’ tables in the Temple, not pull up a chair and help them count the cash…"

I have to admit that I admire this argument.  I love this critique, with its Biblical references.

"… on home turf, he’d rather be a big cuddly bear of a poet, wrapping us in words that console not confront, and, in return we’ve happily made him our Poet Laureate in a society which take pride, paradoxically, in having divested itself of such outdated symbols of cap-doffing servility…"

There’s too much here.  For example, Eilis O’Hanlon professes to know what Heaney would rather be, and this is too much for me.  I strongly doubt she’s ever met the man. She may not feel confronted by Heaney’s poetry, but that’s her problem.  She has no business ascribing her problem to the rest of us.

But, on balance, I end up admiring the cheek of her critique.

I think of Kevin Myers as a teacher, an educator, a challenger of received wisdom.

I value his contribution.  It doesn’t matter all that much to me whether I agree with him or not.  It’s sufficient for me that he goes into battle with conventional wisdom, and is afraid of no argument.  There are too few Kevin Myers in Ireland.

However, he’s let himself down this time.  He jumped on a bandwagon and taken sides with the lumpen majority.  He’s come out against the teachers and written a piece entitled ‘Teachers are paid too much for working  seven months a year’.  As someone who flows with the tide, Kevin Myers is no good to anyone.

I better declare an interest.  I was at school in Ireland and didn’t much enjoy it.  I succeeded in education despite, rather than because of, the quality of the teaching.  I’ve often found school teachers to be strangely over-confident and over-authoritative.  They are too used to talking down to people for my taste. I don’t think I’d like to be a school teacher.

[to be continued… later today…]

So many opinions have been criticising teachers that I wonder if it’s been because too many teachers’ trade unions have been in conference at the same time?

Kevin Myers launches his attack:

Myers begins his attack using terms like "wealth-creating sector" and "the real economy".  Tired clichés.    Implying that education is a different beast…  Pejorative language… Simplistic thinking, I’d say.

He goes on to urge someone to sack teachers in order to make them realise that we’re in the middle of "the greatest economic calamity this State has ever known".  His target is the job security of teachers.

We are actually short of teachers. 

Our children face being crammed into increasingly worse conditions.  It is madness to go on against job security when the real crisis is that we face not having enough teachers.

Of course, poor teachers should be improved or moved out of the ‘profession’.  But Kevin has let his mouth run away with his pen, I see.

He goes on about teachers working a "seven-month working year", as if teachers were some extraordinarily privileged lot.

But he says nothing about what teachers are expected to do:

• supervise students during lunchtime and breaks
• mark homework and prepare lessons after school hours.

If you add up all the hours that teachers work at home, what does it come to?  I don’t know but I think we need to take all this into consideration.

I’ve looked at the OECD reports on education. 

What Irish teachers do is not very different from other countries, like Belgium and France.  If Irish teachers have better working conditions than some other countries, I don’t think it’s wise to dismantle these conditions: it may be that Irish people value education and hold their teachers in a relatively high status position.

But Myers makes a strong point that 23% of Irish school leavers are functionally illiterate.  This is indeed bad and dangerous: there will be few jobs for functionally illiterate people soon.  We better do something about this.

However, this problem will not be solved within the education system.  If only it was a simple matter of improving teaching methods.  And we all know this already.  Illiteracy is a social problem, and demands a multi-dimensional approach.  A national task force, with its leadership selected by rigorous and transparent methods is called for.

We need more  respect for education throughout the community. 

We won’t achieve this by circulating hyperbolic and scatter-gun attacks on teachers. Focussed and probing inquiry yes. 

At the end of his article Myers writes of teachers …

" … the most important group of people in any society: for it is teachers who create, and who must therefore embody, the true civic culture of any civilisation…"

Surely the most interesting question is ‘How come teachers have been given Batt O’Keefe as minister for education?’

A gentleman who has demonstrated not a shred of education, nor a trace of understanding for the value of education so far, I’d say. A close personal friend of Mr Cowen seems to be his most obvious qualification. [I see Mr Cowen was guest at Mr O’Keefe’s daughter’s wedding recently.]

Kevin Myers on a bandwagon is a bore.  I’d like to challenge him to be more interesting.

Maman Poulet got it first, I think…

I was talking to my great friend Nina who lives in Swansea a few minutes ago.

We talked about the prospect of her coming over to Cork by ferry.  I checked the latest status of the campaign to bring back the service.

I left this comment on the website…

Thank you."

This afternoon I sat in the English Market waiting for a friend, reading some advertising.

The Cork World Book Fest ‘09 (together with its typo) is coming soon.

Wednesday 22 - Saturday 25 April, presented by by Cork City Council Libraries & Triskel, with the support of Arts Council of Ireland, Alliance Francaise Cork Ireland, International Education Services & MLC and media partners Evening Echo & Cork 96fm.

It looks pretty good.  It’s just my luck that I’ll be out of Cork from 24-26 April.

I might be able to get to "Confessions of a Mobile Library" @ Central Library on Wed.22 April:  poets Dermot Bolger & Thomas McCarthy with singer-songwriters Noel Shine & Mary Greene, with Noel Crowley as MC.  That’s free @7pm.

Otherwise, the big hitters’ event is Jonathan Dimbleby in Conversation with Mark Little @ Triskel @ 8.30pm for 8 euro: it’ll be Dimbleby on Russia and Little on ‘the new America’.

Lots of negotiations at home if I’m to get to one or both.

Thursday 23 April is World Book Day - I thought that was  back in March.  Today I found out that day was designated as World Book & Copyright Day by UNESCO in 1995.

Shakespeare & Cervantes both died on 23 April.  The first World Book Fest was held in Cork in 2005 when Cork was European Capital of Culture.

Looking over the rest of the programme, my eye is captured by the notion of a Teen Day - a range of events for creative teenagers @ Central Library on Friday 24 April.

Whoever’s leading Cork City Library seems to me to be doing a really good job.  Thank you.