An Irish woman’s social, political and domestic commentary
I like this article in today’s ST. If furrin readers can’t access the link let me know and I’ll mail you a copy.
 Update: here’s a follow up interview. It’s frustrating because how can we judge whether or not she did the right thing without knowing why the marriage broke up? And she’s happy now but will she still be in 10 years? Or even 5?
I got a glimpse into the mind of a vandal last week and it wasn’t pretty. I felt the overwhelming sense of alienation, the bitter resentment, the urge to exact revenge and the willingness to inflict damage. It gives me no pleasure to report that the mind was my own.ÂÂ
The object of my disaffection was the new M4 motorway between Kilcock and Kinnegad. My feelings of violence were aimed specifically at the road and not any individuals.
I live near Enfield, the site of the main interchange on the new motorway. We residents tried to be reasonable during its furiously paced construction.ÂÂ
Oh, all right, so there were days when our benign toleration escalated into hysteria. There was that shrieking phone call to the project engineer when our cul-de-sac was closed without permit or notice. And an abusive e-mail when the footpaths to the village remained in rubble for months as all resources were directed at the motorway itself. But I never considered direct action until the day the double buggy overturned.ÂÂ
I’d been trying to negotiate the 24 potholes not far from my front gate. They are on that stretch of laneway that crosses a small stream, which was often the centre of our childhood adventures. The stream now serves as drainage for the motorway. To prepare it for its new purpose, the lovely Land Commission walls that had stood for nearly 70 years were smashed. The road surface collapsed under the weight of the machines, leaving potholes in their wake.ÂÂ
Even as they matured into craters we assumed that one day the motorway people would come back and fill them in. I tried not to let the damage get to me, because this is the countryside and there will always be potholes. Then they grew so large that the buggy couldn’t fit between them any more and my agitation increased.ÂÂ
One front and one back wheel would sink in separate holes. I am small and the buggy is heavy. Usually, I could bear down and with a good shove and the occasional grunt rescue the journey. But on the day in question the hole was too deep and my arms too weak.ÂÂ
So there we were: two children screaming as they and the pram lay sideways on the road and me, desperately, trying to lift the whole lot. With nobody around to help it was a case of inward panic, outward calmness and holding back the tears of frustration.ÂÂ
As I took a deep breath and searched for the physical strength to rescue my party, I heard the cars whizzing by at €2.40 a time. The motorists, I thought, are being well looked after. I, on the other hand, was a nothing, a mother with a double buggy, a bottom feeder in the greater scheme of things. One of the non-people ignored by men in suits who build big roads and sell big cars to each other.ÂÂ
Now that the blasted road has been opened, Eurolink, the operator, can sit back and collect its money, even though the fallout from the project remains unresolved. There is no imperative to fill potholes or repair gates. The company is getting its revenue; what does it care? That was when the red mist descended and I thought: “God, I would love to mess up their road.†That was when I found myself thinking thoughts similar to those who get their kicks from keying cars, smashing windows and daubing public places with graffiti. If you are surrounded by it, can’t afford it, and nobody wants you to have it anyway, stealing it or breaking it starts to look reasonable.ÂÂ
As I engaged in my destructive fantasies, I imagined myself breaking one of the unmanned toll booth barriers, thereby depriving the owners of revenue. Walking alongside the highway, I furtively examined the toll plaza for security cameras. Then I realised I was on the road to insanity and walked away.ÂÂ
As I did so, I came across another reason for getting mad — the 6ft concrete fencing posts left on the overpass beside my home. These are perfect ammunition for those lunatics who have recently taken to dropping lumps of concrete onto the traffic below.ÂÂ
The presence of this material jarred with statements made by Eurolink. Last week the company said it was “horrified†that people had been throwing concrete at cars and hoped those responsible would be caught “before someone is hurtâ€Â. It also claimed that all construction material had been removed from the overpasses.ÂÂ
There are at least 100 posts on that bridge as I write, any one of which could be used as a weapon. Perhaps before somebody is actually hurt, the company might remove the materials that are proving so convenient for the person, drugged or deranged, who is engaging in this practice.ÂÂ
I know that the new road is a fine piece of infrastructure. It will reduce the torture for those driving west on bank holiday Fridays and home again on Mondays. It will probably reduce road deaths, since Leinster Bridge, on the old N4 near Enfield, usually claimed a few lives each year.ÂÂ
But could somebody remind the shiny-faced managing director of Eurolink who appeared on television last week that the work is not complete. Is it too much to ask that the same frenetic pace of activity that saw the motorway open ahead of schedule now be applied to repair the damage left in its wake? You see, despite my capacity for hysteria, I can actually restrain myself. But not for ever.ÂÂ
Gosh, where to start.
In fact ah,drew my attention to this post on Crooks and Liars how about a great row beteen Letterman and Bill O’Reilly. I downloaded the 2 minute video but then opted for the transcript on Far Left, which also points out the casual lies which O’Reilly tells. Pity Letterman’s people hadn’t checked out some of O’Reilly’s arguments with bloglike ruthlessness!
Matt Cooper and the listeners seem to love this stuff. Here’s me on the show on Tuesday thrashing this website. Fast forward to 50 minutes in the 5pm hour. THEN tune in tonight, Friday, also 5.50pm. They’ve gone and bloody tracked down the cleaning lady and we go head-to-head! My perpetual cold is at work again. Hopefully those sinuses will be clear by Friday.
Udpate:  I have been cancelled! Fly lady refuses to debate me on air! Cool.
Cool. I am the answer to a question in In Fact, Ah’s 2005 quiz. I feel extremely validated and happy about this.
Hey, Damien has Irish blog awards. How cool. Must read a lot tonight and suggest nominations. Spread the word! The more the merrier.
I was in here idling on the internet and let the f*cking mangoes burn that were supposed to be stewing for the sweet potato and mango puree for the child. f*ck f*ck f*ck. They were 1.99 each or something. And 3 of them. damndamndamn.
Hi, I kinda like his column today. I reprint in full for those without a subscription
The release of State papers each year usually triggers a plethora of fascinating stories about life as it was 30, 40 or 50 years ago.
What it should also do is to remind us of our utter inability to understand even the relatively recent past.
Take, for example, the revelation that President Douglas Hyde sent his secretary to the German envoy in Dublin to offer his condolences upon the death of Herr Hitler in that unfortunate incident in Berlin. The presidential protocol records: “No message of sympathy sent as the capital of Germany, Berlin, was under siege, and no successor had been appointed. Decision was not to send the President to the funeral or to send a wreath for a tomb or grave. No religious service to be held.”
Let me give you that again: “Decision was not to send the President to the funeral. . .” This is so surreal that it is quite impossible for us today to connect at any point with the mind of someone who could write it. It is rather like the protocol book of the President of Malawi soberly and seriously noting that a decision had been taken not to send him on a state visit to Saturn’s rings, and that there were no plans – for the moment anyway – for him to go on a tour of the hulk of the Titanic.
In other words, the mind of 1945 is one we simply do not and cannot understand. That being the case, we should not rush to judge it; for we have no common rules, no shared common sense or understanding of the real, the possible. But we do not have to go back 60 years to find that mentalities alter so totally that individuals themselves can no longer remember how they felt, or could explain those feelings.
What person who defended the criminalisation of male homosexual acts in the 1970s and 1980s would justify it today? Could those who agreed with the State’s prohibition of condoms repeat their arguments in 2006, and really believe them? Yet those bans were part of the political consensus which crossed party lines, and which apparently appealed to the majority of the Irish people, who, as a matter of passionate conscience, would not let other Irish people follow their own consciences.
This today is quite astounding, and utterly incomprehensible: for of all intellectual faculties, conscience is the most dependent on contemporary ethos – and once lost, is perhaps also the most irrecoverable. Thus in 1975, the Department of Foreign Affairs was anxiously monitoring the campaigns of US journalists who were criticising repressive Irish policies on homosexuals and condoms; who could have imagined then that, 30 years later, condoms would be on sale on supermarket counters, homosexual unions would soon be recognised by the State, and women would unashamedly be buying vibrators over open counters in a large department store in O’Connell Street?
Thus L.P. Hartley’s oft-quoted opening line in The Go-Between – “The past is another country: they do things differently there” – now misses the point. Because you can go another country, learn its ways, its language, its habits, its ethos, its taboos. But the past is kept remote by an impenetrable force-field of time. We see merely vague spectres, as through a glass darkly. That force-field prevents us even remembering or understanding our own thoughts, motives, desires.
And as for those of other people – such as Liam Cosgrave when he voted against his own Bill to permit contraceptives to married couples in the 1970s, or those government officials who in 1945 actually discussed whether or not old Douglas Hyde should attend Hitler’s funeral – why, these are utterly inexplicable phenomena. We are as able to empathise with the motives and the instincts of these decent, honourable men as we are with a herd of migrating wildebeest.
For as we learn, we forget what we knew. More to the point, we even forget that we knew. We re-create ignorance from a landscape of what was knowledge, vindicating Donald Rumsfeld’s extremely shrewd observations on the nature of knowledge, (though much-mocked by fools): “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
So in addition to the unknown unknowns – the tsunami leaping from its seabed, the aircraft flying into the Twin Towers – we also have the forgotten knowns. We have the once-knowns that we know we no longer know, and more deadly still, the once-knowns we no longer know that we once knew.
I know that I once knew the Latin Mass by heart, and do so no longer; but this is a deficiency I can repair. However, I can do nothing whatever about that all-destructive ignorance which has concealed even the deed of forgetting.
Done to scale, this is how civilisations die. This is how the consciously Irish, Catholic civilisation which infused this country long before the State was founded, and went into the making of the laws and the culture of post-independence Ireland, has suddenly begun to perish. There is clear continuity between 1945 and 1975, but very little indeed between 1975 and today. And by 2035, there will be none whatever between that future Ireland and the 20th century Irish State from which it grew.
My esteemed uncle, Peter Brady (Cavan Man of the Year 2004, I think) writes the Kilnaleck news in the Anglo-Celt newspaper. We always enjoy the international and cultural flavour he adds to the weekly announcements of events in a rural village in Cavan.
Here’s his column of Dec 8th (subs reqd) and the follow up on the 22nd. There are some phrases (in my italics) which have an edge which makes us laugh.
Dec 8th
Lights are shining
In good time for the festivities the Christmas lights are shining in Kilnaleck. It is generally agreed that the town has a good street lighting system but the new Christmas lights first installed some years ago adds greatly to the general appearance and feel good factor of Christmas. Meanwhile it must not be forgotten that the installation, running and dismantling of a lighting system every year is a costly operation. People are therefore requested to be generous in supporting the Junior Chamber of Commerce raffle, the proceeds of which foot the bill every Christmas.
Pakistan earthquake
Many local people who have devoted much of their time and personal resources to helping to alleviate suffering caused by natural disasters are amazed at the low key response from the national media, the political establishment and even the churches to the devastation caused by the recent earthquake in Pakistan.
In fairness to the Catholic diocese of Kilmore it must be said that last weeks church collection was a gesture in the right direction, but in the general scheme of things it was a drop in the ocean compared to the outpouring of concern for the tsunami disaster. One angry contributor to last weeks collection wondered in exasperation to this column how the London and Dublin media could, over the past two months, devote so much space to the Battle of the Somme, Roy Keane and George Best and at the same time ignore the horrendous death and suffering in this former British colony. [ I suspect the author and the angry contributor might have been one and the same]
On the bright side there was admiration for the ordinary people of Sligo who following a local appeal, filled no less than eight articulated trucks with blankets and clothes for the stricken areas.
Deaths
As so often happens in the lead up to Christmas, while most of the population celebrate, this year again many families are left to mourn the loss of loved ones. On last Thursday in the parish of Ballymachugh two local men were laid to rest. Edward (Neddie) O’Reilly of Aughakilmore was buried in Ballynarry. He was a popular local man whose main relaxation lay in listening to Irish traditional music and playing the bodhran. Deepest sympathy goes to his brother Tommy and extended family.
On the same day, the Gaffney family of Freeduff, mourned at the funeral Mass in Ballynarry and burial in Carrick of their loved member, Peter. A member of a highly respected family, he was brother of the late Jimmy and long time player, member and official of the Ballymachugh G.A.A. Club. His funeral Mass was celebrated by his nephew Fr. Peter Gaffney assisted by Fr. Frank Gray, and Fr. Jack Boylan. Sympathy is extended to his brother Joe, sisters Mrs. Mary Agnes Heslin, Castletown, Finea, Mrs. Kathleen Hand, Mullinalaghta and large extended family.
On Sunday one of Kilnaleck’s most gentle and popular citizens passed to her reward. Mrs. Kathleen McDermott of Church Road died after a short illness and was laid to rest in Knockbride West after Mass in St. Patrick’s, Kilnaleck. She is mourned by her son Jim, one grandson, one brother and one sister, to all of whom and her wide circle of friends in Kilnaleck, sincere sympathy is extended.
Water Rates due
The committee of the Ballymachugh Group Water Scheme is appealing to those recipients who have not yet paid their water rates to please do so immediately. Facing expenditure on improvement works of .75 million euro the committee is alarmed that, so far, only something in excess of 40% of customers have come forward.
Women’s Resource
On Tuesday, December 13th at 8.30 pm. in Realtog, Breda O’Reilly from the “Flower Basket†will give a demonstration on Christmas arrangements. These will be raffled on the night to which everyone is welcome.
Christmas Carol Service
There will be a gala performance of Christmas carol singing in Drumkilly Church on Sunday, December 18th at 8 p.m. in aid of Brian Boylan’s Irish Emigrant Fund. The performance will be given by the combined choirs of the parish of Crosserlough. The support of all people of goodwill will be appreciated.
Dec 22nd 2005
Impressive Christmas Concert
The newly refurbished St. Joseph’s Church, Drumkilly, was the venue on Sunday night last for a stunning performance of Christmas liturgical music and song performed in tandem with individual contributions by the four choirs in the parish, Crosserlough, Drumkilly, Kildrumferton and Kilnaleck.
The programme ranging from the classical to the popular and incorporating the spoken word in several interludes, was ecumenical, multilingual and international. The presence of Kildrumferton made it ecumenical, the singing of Don Oiche Ud i mBeithil made it multilingual and in recognition of the huge number of immigrants from Eastern Europe who now live in the area, the singing of a Polish hymn made it international. The evening finished in the true spirit of Christmas with a collection in aid of Brian Boylan’s London Emigrant Fund raising no less than €2,000.
Night out for the Crescent
On Monday night last the Kilnaleck Sheltered Homes Committee treated their guests in St. Patrick’s Crescent to a Christmas night out in a local hostelry. As the festivities proceeded and the guests stepped forward to render their party pieces in song, dance and recitation an observer remarked that this could be a tradition of rural Ireland that television and the international pop music industry could destroy. [ surely not the same observer as last week; i.e. the columnist himself? 
]
It was felt that a generation brought up on Eminem and Michael Jackson might not be as inclined to render a few “Come All Yiz†as their predecessors were at the end of the evening there was high praise for Mrs. Josephine O’Reilly from Ballymachugh who, with well tuned guitar and sweet voice led the singing.
Farming worries
In this intensive farming area, there is considerable anxiety about the whole future of farming following the outcome of the W.T.O. negotiations in Hong Kong. Worst of all is the contribution that the removal of farm subsidies will help “poor African farmersâ€Â. It seems far more likely that our food in the future – well treated with preservatives will arrive in ships through the ports of Britain from the huge multinational ranches of South America, Australia and New Zealand. Small farmers in Africa, like small farmers everywhere will be pushed aside.
Recent Deaths
The sad sequence of deaths in the Christmas period continues to dampen the spirit of families in the area.
On Thursday last Martha Jane Muchanan of Mountnugent and formerly of Carrickacroy, passed to her reward after a long life. She was laid to rest after Service in Kildrumferton cemetery on Monday. Sincere sympathy is extended to her sons, daughters, sister, brother, and large family circle.
On Friday at Virginia Health Centre the death occurred also after a long life, of Mrs. Mary O’Reilly of Corlateerin. She was laid to rest after Mass before a huge congregation in St. Mary’s, Crosserlough on Sunday last. The sincere sympathy of the community goes out to her sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and large circles of relations and friends.
Help for Pakistan
There was certainly an immediate response to the recent complaint in this column that the crisis caused by the Pakistani earthquake had been ignored by the national media. At two Irish nights last week – one in the “Pub†and one in Brady’s – impromptu collections raised the impressive figure of €1,000. The money has been given to the diocesan Trocaire organiser, Fr. Johnny Cusack, for immediate transmission to Pakistan.
Realtóg Centre
Sincere thanks to all who supported their December Car Boot Sale and raffles. Both were a tremendous success. Congratulations to all prize winners. Prizes have gone as far as Chicago and New York. Guess Cake Weight: Winner Mr. Cecil Taaffee, Mullingar, Co. Westmeath. Cake weight 83/4 lbs. Well done Cecil.
Well done, Peter. Great stuff.
P O’Neill has been reading the state papers….here’s a nice story about Dev’s funeral
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