01.29.06
Posted in Feminism at 3:32 pm by Sarah
Like many of my middle-class and increasingly middle-aged peers, I have smoked the occasional joint. So when Michael McDowell said last week that “everybody who smokes a joint in a social context is participating on the fringe of a world where gangsters are shooting each others’ heads off”, I had to examine my conscience. So my apparently victimless act is not victimless after all.Last week, too, the garda commissioner proposed that possession of small amounts of cannabis would be the subject of a caution from a superintendent rather than a prosecution through the courts.Â
The Department of Justice denies that McDowell told the gardai to drop the plan. But the justice minister did tell the commissioner that it would not “sit comfortably” with him. Clearly the commissioner doesn’t like his ministers sitting uncomfortably. The proposal disappeared on Tuesday.
If McDowell is to be logically consistent, and wants the rest of us to be morally consistent, then he did the right thing. It’s either a crime or it’s not. This position I can respect.
So what is the dope-smoking population who don’t see themselves as criminals to do? It would help if everybody stopped being so coy about their personal use. How can we have an intelligent debate about a common habit if everyone has to pretend they don’t do it? The joke about politicians not inhaling has worn thin. We have grown used to the concept that consenting adults can pretty much do what they want in the bedroom once they are not affecting anyone else; the same logic applies to rolling a joint at home.
If the worst thing about cannabis is the involvement with criminals, then take them out of the equation. Forget about downgrading possession from a mortal to a venal sin. They did it in England and are thinking of changing their minds. The way forward is not decriminalisation but commercialisation. Brand it, market it and sell it from a licensed premises to over-18s. Tax the hell out of it. The quality would improve immensely and the price wouldn’t go up much. The costs of marketing would simply replace the percentage going on bribes, and losses through seizures. To completely remove the criminal element, this must be done on a global scale.
This may sound glib or stupid, but not if you think about it. Apart from its arbitrary illegality, where is the actual harm in taking cannabis? Yes, it is a drug, by which we mean a chemical either naturally or artificially cultivated. There are pleasurable side effects, which is why people take it. It makes you feel relaxed and a bit giggly, with the occasional attack of the munchies. For some people, it just makes them feel sleepy. With no quality control system, the most likely risk is from whatever it’s been mixed with or from the tobacco in the joint.
There are negative effects. There may be a link between schizophrenia and heavy dope smoking. A small minority of users can become overly dependent, and not want to get out of bed in the morning. But it’s not addictive like harder drugs or commonly prescribed medications.
On the upside, it has medical benefits. It is fully established that cannabis is effective in the treatment of multiple sclerosis, among other conditions.
If the very thought of legalising cannabis frightens you, but you’re not sure why, compare it to alcohol. There are many differences between drink and cannabis; social acceptability being the main one. On a personal level, how many families do you know that have been destroyed by alcohol? Plenty, I’d say. How many do you know ruined by cannabis dependency? I can’t think of one.
For young men aged between 15 and 29, alcohol contributes to nearly half of all deaths from motor vehicle accidents; one third of poisonings, drownings, homicides and falls; and one fifth of suicides. For young women, alcohol contributes to about one in three of all deaths from poisonings, drownings and homicides, and one in five deaths from motor vehicle accidents and falls.
As the second task force on alcohol report says: “Alcohol-related harm happens to those who don’t drink; drink small amounts but in a risky situation; those who drink to excess sometimes; and those who regularly abuse alcohol.” In 2003, a conservative estimate put the cost of alcohol to Irish society at €2.65 billion. Yet in that same society, people who don’t drink are considered odd.
Every night hundreds of people get smashed, end up in A&E, fight, drive drunk, get an ulcer, and then show up late for work because they’re hungover. But if I rolled a joint, which is likely to make me passive rather than violent, and sleepy rather than teary, I’m the one breaking the law.
If alcohol was invented tomorrow, any right-thinking person would immediately call for its prohibition. They tried that in America between 1920 and 1933 and it was a total failure. Why? Consumption dropped at the start, which was the goal of prohibition. But it soon picked up again, except this time the quality had deteriorated and it became more dangerous to consume.
Acquiring alcohol brought otherwise decent citizens into contact with criminal gangs who organised and flourished. The justice system was swamped. No measurable gains were made in work productivity or reduced absenteeism. Contact with dealers led some people into contact with other drugs such as cocaine or heroin. And the government lost important revenue from its taxation. The whole thing was a disaster.
Now substitute the word cannabis for alcohol, and you have a picture of what’s happening in western society. The ban on cannabis is purely cultural. Alcohol has disastrous effects on our society, but we take the view that it is up to the individual to monitor his or her own use. We rely on the government to educate, regulate and treat those who fall by the wayside.
The negative effects of cannabis are significantly less than alcohol and yet we refuse to take the same approach. Instead, western democracies play around with changing classifications.
People turn to drugs legal, illegal and prescribed because they are bored, unhappy, helpless, lonely and, in many cases, poor. Let’s spend the money helping them instead of wasting it by arresting harmless folk like me.
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01.27.06
Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 7:52 pm by Sarah
One year ago tonight I was sitting in front of the computer with the child in bed and the husband at his soccer awards. Then this happened. Tonight I am back in front of the computer, with 2 children in bed and husband is at his soccer awards. Oh, I think I’ll be talking about it on Newstalk at 9am on Monday morning – in the context of Dad’s in the labour ward.
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01.24.06
Posted in Feminism at 7:33 pm by Sarah
Extraordinary stuff from the courts today. The first I heard was that Wayne O’Donoghue had been given 4 years and I thought, that’s ok. It was all a terrible mistake. THEN much later I finally tuned in to the contents of Majella Holohan’s victim impact statement and the allegations she made about certain details of the case.
Its all over the radio, although most peculiarly the Irish Times website won’t elaborate..I have no idea why the radio can discuss it and the Irish Times can’t.
 (Update; they’ve posted it now:
“She also questioned why Robert was in Wayne O’Donoghue’s bedroom at 7.20am on the morning of his death when he was supposedly at a sleepover with a friend.
Why had images had been deleted from his mobile phone; why were his finger-prints wiped clean; why did Robert ring 999 later that morning, she asked.
She said there had been no forensic evidence that stones had hit the car and questioned why there were no fingerprints found on her son’s mobile phone.
“Whatever happens here today, even if we do move home, even if we do leave the country, there is no place to hide from this nightmare. This is the situation we face every day,” she said.
Ms Holohan also claimed semen had been found on her dead son’s body.
Speaking on the steps of Ennis courthouse, O’Donoghue’s solicitor, Frank Buttimer, said his client totally denied that he was responsible for the semen found.
“Wayne denies any impropriety of any kind whatsoever with regard to that. I repeat, all relevant evidence was led by the prosecution in this particular trial. The trial was conducted quite properly.”
If what she says is true, then why wasn’t it introduced in evidence? If its not true, how can she be allowed to stand up in court after the case is over and say it when the defence can’t rebut? If it is true, how can she still be allowed to say it if for some reason it is inadmissable? I mean I know he’s just been convicted of manslaughter but since accidental manslaughter is a far cry from sexual assault and murder, then is it libel? O’Donoghue had a fair amount of sympathy but now everyone will think he’s a sex offender.
I also have a sneaking suspicion I wrote some posts last years complaining bitterly about people who assumed that Holohan’s murder was the work of a sex offender. If her allegations are true, then I have some humble pie to eat.
I don’t get it.
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01.23.06
Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 5:05 pm by Sarah
A welcome dinner party invitation was issued and gratefully accepted for Saturday night. We brought the usual tokens with a quirky touch to the hosts; a bottle of red wine, one half dozen of our lovely free range eggs and a bottle of champagne. Determined to make the most of a rare night out I put the Champagne in the fridge in plenty of time so it was well chilled and ready for me to drink. We arrived, made our presentation and when inevitably asked what I would like to drink I requested said Champagne. It wasn’t half bad and I felt the bubbly effects before I’d even the finished the glass. Perfect. Until a certain someone told me the next day that its bad form to bring champagne already chilled since it assumes an expectation of drinking it there and then (eh, yeah) and therefore insults the host by presuming that he won’t have the appropriate range of refreshments.
Particularly in the case of wine ( I suppose white) it is very bad since the host may have gone to some trouble to select wines for the dinner. When I defended my BYO style act my precious acquintance remarked that we weren’t students anymore and would I have brought a six pack and bottle opener with me as well? Put in this light, I felt a little fear that he may have had a point BUT I argued that an exception could certainly be made for champagne. Thoughts anyone?
ÂÂ
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01.22.06
Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 12:15 pm by Sarah
Don’t you just love the blame game about dirty hospitals? The consultants blame the unions. The unions blame the managers. The managers blame the minister. Last week the health minister blamed the filthy visitors. Next thing you know, someone will blame the patients themselves. Do they have to bleed so much? It’s so inconvenient.All is not lost. Jeanette Byrne of Patients Together last week announced a solution to hospital cleaning, 100% guaranteed. She’s seen it work repeatedly in hospitals. The best part of her discovery is that it is entirely in Mary Harney’s hands to effect. No negotiations with unions; no battle with vested interests. I don’t think it even costs anything.
All Harney has to do is . . . visit a hospital. The results are immediate. Buckets filled with vomit are emptied. Excrement is washed off doors. Lavatories are bleached. Wards are spruced up in expectation of the royal visit.
So if Harney could leave her important meetings and spend three days a week touring our country’s hospitals, they’d all be pristine.
Remember Helen Lucy Burke in her heyday, visiting hotels and writing censorious reviews? She’d remove pillowcases to see what lay beneath. She’d pull out wardrobes to check when someone had last vacuumed. She’d run her gloved finger along skirting boards, and under lavatory seats. Mattresses were dragged off beds.
Such was the terror of a visit from HLB that some hotels kept a photograph of her behind the reception desk. I am told she is diminutive, but she definitely sounds scary.
Harney is not a scary person, but by virtue of her office she instils the same fear. I am confident she could achieve great results. Given her high profile, identification by stealth is not required. People keep lamenting for the days when the matrons were in charge. Mary can be the uber-matron. Once she gets within a few miles of a hospital, the texts will start flying into the big wigs. “Minister on deck. Quick, where’s the bleach?†Despite, or perhaps because of, the simple brilliance of this plan, it won’t happen. We must look to other solutions. Do more audits, appoint more bureaucrats, spend more money. But it’s all pointless. Nothing will work because what is really required is a cultural shift of enormous magnitude. Cleaning is dirty work. Until cleaning becomes a noble profession we will never have clean hospitals.
It’s not just that cleaning has low status. Cleaning has no status. Nowadays it’s only done by poor labourers or rich neurotics. In some circles you’d be called a “Monica†for cleaning, a reference to the overfastidious character from Friends.
You have to be either down on your luck or insane to admit to certain types of zealous cleaning. If you’re caught with the toothbrush at the bath, you can try claiming to have PMT. In response, you’ll be given evening primrose oil and expected to snap out of it.
Strange, really, because cleaning is physically hard, requires technical knowledge and preserves both health and life itself. Until you’ve got down on your hands and knees and scrubbed a floor, who would believe the hard physical labour required to clean? And though it may appear unskilled, this is not the case at all. How many people have destroyed good clothes by laundering them incorrectly? Or used the wrong chemicals on surfaces? Or forgotten to check the sneaky little places where dirt congregates? Some people wash the bottom of the door before the top and then water streaks down and ruins what they just cleaned. When you don’t clean properly at home you can poison your family. When you don’t clean properly in the hospital you can kill patients.
So why is it considered the lowest form of work? Because it’s traditionally women’s work.
The crushing realisation that dawned on the second-wave feminists was that women would never be valued until their work was valued. The boredom and loneliness of cleaning their homes and caring for other people was bad enough. But nobody was going to say thanks and nobody was going to pay them. The only hope for equal status was equal money and therefore equal work. So women took on men’s work and paid other poorer women to do the cleaning for them. Then comedy writers on TV shows invented characters who were mad because they cleaned too much.
The same thing that happened in our homes happened in the hospitals. Up to five years ago “damp dustingâ€Â, which helps prevent MRSA, was the basic task of all student nurses. But just like the men at home, the men who ran the hospitals refused to place a value on the grubby work of cleaning. For years, nurses were refused decent pay rises on the basis that their qualifications were inferior to other medical staff who had attended expensive universities. You didn’t need Leaving Cert points to care or to clean, so it wasn’t worth paying for.
So the nurses did what the housewives did, and who can blame them? If the only thing the system appreciates is a university degree, then we’ll do one. Oh, and you can forget about the cleaning. Today, when nursing graduates arrive on wards from colleges, cleaning no longer appears on the list of their required objectives.
People expect cleaning to be a low-cost exercise. In most hospitals the cleaners are only present at certain hours and the suspicion is that the cheapest tender gets the job. When someone does decide to pay top dollar, the results are obvious. St James’s accident and emergency unit, the largest in the country, pays for 24-hour cleaning. It scored second highest in the national hospital hygiene audit published in October. When wards are only cleaned between 9am and 5pm, a spill occurring at 5.05pm doesn’t get cleaned until the next day.
But it’s easier to blame the public than to pay.
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01.20.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:17 am by Sarah
Sometimes you think (well, I think) the sooner I settle on my broadcasting career the better. I was so frustrated listening to Ryan Tubridy give Naomi Wolf a soft fluffy interview this morning and hear him fall right into several traps. He made loaded statements about feminism, value judgements, asked one closed question after another, never asked the real questions. It was all isn’t true? don’t you think? and not one Why? What? How? that might open her up a bit.
I actually rang in and asked that he ask her “What influence did your father’s 12 lessons have on your marriage?” He read out some comments at the end and started the question. Then he saw the word “marriage” at the end and you could hear the screech of brakes. He subsituted the phrase “whole life” for marriage. PR people must have given orders before hand. But there are very easy ways around those embargoes. Most frustrating experience. Anyway, I’ve emailed him.�
Ryan
I am raging you didn’t ask Naomi about her father’s influence on her marriage. Anyone who read the
extracts from her book and the accompanying interviews in which it is pointed out that her marriage ended at the same time ends up being really frustrated. She refuses to say why the marriage ended out of respect for her husband BUT after writing a book all about her father telling her to listen to herself and find solitude and be happy by being true to herself, it does lead one to assume that she walked out. And
therefore does she have the right to flog this book as the secret to happiness? She’s happy; but is the family she may or may not have left behind happy? Is it only rich people who can leave for their holiday
homes when the going gets rough be happy? Will she still be happy in 10 years when she’s 50 and can’t get dates any more?
Can she just come on the radio and sell a book about the secret to happiness without being challenged on any of it?
There was a mine there, to be, well mined, by you. Very very frustrating not to hear the questions being asked, never mind answered.
sigh.
Sarah Carey
� Update: A response.
Thank you for contacting The Tubridy Show.� As you can appreciate, we receive a huge volume of correspondence and it’s not always possible to answer each one individually.If you want to find out more about the programme or are inquiring about items featured on the show you may like to visit our website at www.rte.ie/radio1/thetubridyshow
This is not very promising. How about something like:
“Dear Sarah, Thank you so much for your email. You are absolutely right. I am a terrible interviewer. It is clear that you have more talent in your right finger nail than I do despite my 10 years of grooming in RTE. I will offer my resignation today on the condition that you are offered my job.
Yours in shame
� Ryan.
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01.18.06
Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 7:42 pm by Sarah
Gerry is right. It is time for a new post.
How about, isn’t it amazing how stress can manifest itself so physically? Something stressful happened to me last weekend. Until this morning I thought I was managing just fine. My stomach was in a knot, my fists were clenched, I was gritting my teeth, but I persuaded myself that the stressful thing wasn’t really that stressful. Eventually I shouted at my husband this morning, burst into tears, apologised, and then the pain in my tummy went.
Here’s another thing. Sometimes, maybe every month to 6 weeks or so , this really horrible thing happens to me. I wake up, but I’ve been dreaming so I’m still paralysed – you know the way when you are dreaming you can’t move so you don’t act your dreams. Sometime my husband’s arm will be around me and the weight feels like it is completely crushing me. But I can’t speak or shout out and I can’t breathe. I lay there struggling for what feels like minutes desperately trying to both breathe and speak. Eventually, just before I burst, I manage to explode and I ROAR out gasping for air and shouting at him. The poor man who has been sound asleep gets the fright of his life and scurries over to the far side of the bed convinced, that yes, he did marry the scariest woman in Ireland. I take a few deep breaths and go back to sleep.
Does this happen to anyone else?
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01.10.06
Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 9:48 pm by Sarah
I resisted at first. When I saw it in Arnotts at 20% off which still made it €100 euro I said no, I am poor. This is a luxury.
Then when killing time I saw it again in Brown Thomas. This time it had 30% off AND it was with its stand. Well, I couldn’t go by it a second time, could I? I mean, I’d had to borrow one from my mother at Christmas. And I have all the plates and cups and saucers from my wedding. So I bought it. €110 euro for the two. It’s magnificent. And really, when you get to the stage where you are so broke, you kind of reach a point where it doesn’t make a difference anymore if you are 50 or 500 or 5000 overdrawn. So you might as well have the beautiful Wedgwood cornucopia sauceboat.
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Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 2:38 pm by Sarah
It seems that our boy Conor developed his talent for unfortunate remarks from his Auntie Mary. But no humiliating apology from her. She was fabulous on Irish radio yesterday (RTE here and The Last Word, here – click on first hour of Monday ) I think she’s around 50 minutes in) defending her “they worked like blacks remarks”. As you know, I am no FnFer, but really, she’s inspiring.
From today’s IT
“Speaking on RTÉ radio yesterday morning, however, Mrs O’Rourke defended her use of the phrase. “It was meant in a complimentary fashion, praising the hard work of my team and indirectly myself,” she said during an interview on Today with Pat Kenny.
“There was absolutely no offence meant. It is a well known phrase in Ireland, but perhaps in a different Ireland it’s no longer relevant. Perhaps I should say ‘like Trojans’ but then would you be upsetting the Greeks or something, I don’t know.”
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Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 12:22 pm by Sarah
Well whadyaknow? 9am yesterday morning a truck comes down the road and stones are flung in the potholes. Today a flurry of activity. A digger and a flatbed are removing the fencing posts. Another truckload of stones is dispatched to restore an entrance into a field. Several jeeps have been up and down inspecting progress. What a pity big companies only take action when embarrassed into it, instead of doing it because we are humans who deserve to be treated with respect…
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