Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

While freedom of speech still exists (if only in theory) I’d like to use it to express my delight at the success in the Seanad elections of my friend David Norris. I am delighted that he will be joined there by outgoing senator Shane Ross and by newly-elected Ivana Bacik.

I am also very happy that my good friend Joe O’Reilly has also been elected. Joe has worked with tremendous energy and he really deserved to have been elected at the General Election. Beir bua a Sheosamh.

Another Cavan person was elected to the Upper House, but I will hold back on expressing my congratulations to him until such time as he makes the restaurant of which he is a partner fully accessible to people in wheel-chairs (such as myself). As I have said there are other restaurants in Cavan town which are accessible and which offer better value for money. I must also hold back my congratulations until he returns the books I once gave him on loan. Now I know the old adage about never lending a book or your wife to anyone, but one feels that if one cannot trust a member of the Upper House of the Oireachtas, who can be trusted?

Life for the people of Mogadishu continues to be more akin to hell than to, well, normality. A National Reconciliation meeting was due to be held in an attempt to get the various fighters talking around a table rather than shooting one another, but for the residents of Mogadishu life is tough. It is estimated that there are now far more weapons in the country than at any other time in the past seventeen years. It is not unknown for rockets to be fired at places where people gather, such as the main market. It is not uncommon for one of the various rebel groups to take pot-shots at the Ethiopian army, who frequently respond by spraying lethal fire at random, with no regard as to whether they might actually kill innocent civilians, which they often do. Road-blocks manned by various militias and bandits, each one demanding gratuities, are the bane of motorists’ lives. Little wonder then that some residents wish to flee to areas they perceive as safer, but which are often nothing of the sort, without any food or medical facilities.

The problem of refugees is one which is all too common in Africa and throughout the world, but Ireland would be able to provide a solution. Our Gardai Siochana would soon root out the involuntarily destitute and send them packing, especially if they dared come into this country and threaten the smug self-assuredness of racist middle-class mass goers by begging.

Brian Lenihan Jr, current Minister for Justice and former scholar of TCD expressed surprise and disappointment at a recent “passing out” ceremony at police headquarters because of the paucity of people from non-Irish backgrounds who were applying to join the police. Surely he knows that An Gardai Siochana as an institution is a hotbed of racism and prejudice and that anybody whose skin is any tinge of dark or who doesn’t speak with a Leitrim or Kerry accent is about as welcome there as a ”tague” would have been in the ranks of the old B-Specials or UDR.

Not all members of the Gardai are racist blockheads though. Some are involved in the laudable fight against people smuggling which is organised by international criminals whose modus operandi is all too transparent. They bring into the country a group of Roma gypsies or other “black bastards” whose activities absorb the Gardai who have to mount surveillance as well as video monitoring, thus leaving the field open for Irish criminals to indulge in drug-running and the settling of scores.

But I don’t want to pillory the boys in blue too much. Our national broadcasters are guilty not only of racism but of criminal naivety. On the day in which the police served members of the Roma community with deportation papers, they decided to get a comment from a spokesperson for the Romanian community in Ireland, obviously unaware of the fact that there is one hell of a difference between Roma and Romanian, and that the former have been suffering harrassment from the latter for generations. Naturally the spokesperson for the Romanian Community in Ireland was supportive of their expulsion.

If only the weather were better I might believe I was living in a banana republic.  

The Ten Commandments may not be a popular document these days. There is some dispute about numbering, but general agreement about the content. In the version used by Jews, members of the Orthodox community as well as Anglicans there is commandment number 8, while for Roman Catholics and Lutherans the ccorresponding commandment is commandment number : Thou shalt not steal.”

Amongst the many business books on my shelf is one called “House of Lies”. Its subtitle is “How Management Consultants steal your watch and then tell you the time.” I believe the word “management” should be removed: all types of consultants are engaged in a collective act of grand larceny which continues and to which no one seems to have any desire or ability to call a halt.

The idea of consultancy in theoretical terms is fine. Not all organisations can possibly have the necessary skills or  experience to solve every problem that arrises; so it is understandable that such knowledge and experience is bought in and acquired. Yet the problem is that the existence of such knowledge and experience is seldom if ever a prerequisite in the choice of consultants, especially in Ireland. My experience of consultants is confined to the Irish public sector, an area in which they seem to thrive. It is also confined to one local authority in Ireland: Cavan  County Council and specifically to the area of heritage.

I recall when I worked for Cavan County Museum the awe that was supposed to be inspired by a visit from a heritage consultant. I am an open-minded sort of guy and I made no prior judgments. The heritage consultant turned out to be a loud, brash Canadian, someone with a big attitude. He was based in London and proclaimed how much he loved coming to Ireland and how much he regretted that such visits were so infrequent.  We were treated to an in-depth description of the previous evening he had spent in Dublin in one of the city’s finest hotels, and not forgetting a visit to the Abbey Theatre. He then boasted that he had never been in Cavan before. Over a working lunch he then began to expand upon his expertise and explain to us what we should be doing. He stated: “On the way down to Cavan from that village by the lake [Virginia I suggested, he seemed somewhat put out by the interjection of someone as lowly as me] I noted that there are lots of cows in the fields, so in the museum exhibits on dairying must take pride of place.” I felt somewhat put out by this. I had been born and brought up in the county, so unless I was a complete retard I would have known the important of dairying to the local economy. What had Arthur Lough tried to do at Killashandra in the 1890s only form a dairy co-operative? But this jumped-up idiot was being paid big bucks to tell me and other inhabitants of the county what was important, as if we couldn’t possibly know ourselves. There was only one way to deal with him I felt.

Rather than inscribe with bowed heads each one of the jewels that fell from this guru’s lips, I looked at him quizzically and asked in apparently genuine bemusement:

“Cows?”

“Er … yes they were cows” he answered.

“Near Virginy?” [the local pronunciation of Virgina] He was obviously uncomfortable here. This was an unnatural break in the “me talk-you listen routine to which he was accustomed, so I decided to put him out of his misery.

“Ah, now I know” I said, clapping my hands. “That was some of the Maguire lads from Billis; they’re rehearsing for the pantomime.”

(My boss subsequently took me aside and suggested that if I wanted to take the rest of the day off he wouldn’t object. I took him up on the offer. He felt as uncomfortable about the situation as I did, but it hadn’t been his decision to bring in consultants. He later showed me some of the “reports” produced by this heritage  consultant’s company – for he was no one-man-band, and I agreed that they were rubbish and unusable.)

I had one more experience of a heritage consultant employed by Cavan County Council. The latter body had decided to help the local Catholic bishop write a book about a well-known historical site. In an awesome display of the unity of Church and State they wanted to provide him with much of the historical research, which he could then pass off as his own work. The building in question dated from the late medieval period,  an epoch of which I am a sort of expert (I’m not being conceited here; if you’ve wasted time gaining insights into a historical era it’s only natural that you occasionally wanted your ten seconds of fame.) Had either the County Council or the bishop approached me directly for information I would have given it to them free of charge. But did the Council do this? No, in time- honoured fashion they approached a Dublin-based heritage consultant to do the work. I knew the “lady” and a former colleague (actually a low-down creep who subsequently worked for her)warned me against having any dealings with her, telling me: ”You’d want to watch her. She’ll screw ya Ciaran.”

I believe she approached the creep I mentioned to do the work, but to his credit (and he hasn’t much) he told her to get lost and that I was the real expert on the topic. And so she finally approached me,  came to me. I was genuinely hurt that my local authority had not contacted me directly but did not mind giving money to a third party. I wanted to retrieve as much of this as possible. When she asked me what my terms were I replied with a figure far higher than I would normally have charged.  However, this heritage consultant  left me in no doubt that she had already decided in advance the amount I was to be paid, which was far less than I had demanded and indeed less than the work demanded. In effect I was to be paid less than she received for a half day in return for a several weeks’ work.  I provided her with work of both a quality and quantity equal to the peanuts  she was willing to pay me.

I have often had aspirations to be a consultant myself. After all, I do know a thing or two about a lot of things, and if I don’t know I generally can locate information. But that is to take a very idealistic notion of consulting. It’s not about buying in skills or experience: it’s about one great big merry-go-round, a gold-painted daisy-chain of patronage. It does indeed seem that it is about stealing people’s watches and then charging them for telling the time; in other words taking the information that already exists in an organisation and passing it off as new – and getting paid for it. But let’s ask who is ultimately being robbed here: in the public sector, whether county councils, health boards or parastatals it is public money that is being squandered, and the public are then frequently told that essential services cannot be delivered because of cut-backs.

Others who might aspire to become consultants must be aware that it is not as easy as simply calling yourself a consultant. For a start the tax people assume that you’re making oodles of cash, but you won’t unless you have the contacts to get the gigs. The best way of cementing contacts is to make sure you give a job to a son, daughter, brother, sister or fuck-buddy of a prominent politician or senior civil servant, preferably a minister. Once you get the gigs you don’t have to sing or play a note. You can, as the saying goes, “lie in bed all day.” No one will ask questions about your work’s quality, appropriateness or usefulness, and you can just keep sending off the bills. Neat.

An important part of Cavan Town’s gastronomic landscape has disappeared with the closure of the Ventuno restaurant in Bridge Street. I regret that I will not be able to taste Mo’s Pollo Cacciatore any more, for he truly had a way with sauces and combining them with chicken and pasta. The Ventuno’s Bailey’s Irish Cream cheese cake, as well as its Nata con Nueces, were truly dishes to be beheld.

The Ventuno was able to combine good food with great value for money. It was a wonderful place to go for an informal meal. It is I think a sad reflection on Cavan town that such a place was not allowed to prosper.

There is one other reason why I lament the passing of the Ventuno. It was one of the few restaurants in Cavan which was accessible to people in wheel-chairs. Wheel-chair users seem to be a sub-human life form, not worthy of consideration, by many of those providing food in Cavan town. Now I must exclude from these comments people who rent a first-floor space in which they operate a restaurant. It is not their fault if there is no lift. They don’t own the building and they generally lack the resources to provide one. Yet there are those developers who build from the ground up, or who totally redevelop a building and who don’t bother to put in a lift, or for whom access for the disabled is a low priority. In Cavan town I know of at least two places whose owners / developers have strong links with the County Council. Now this may be a coincidence but in my book coincidences only happen once; two coincidences are called a pattern.

But maybe I’m being delusional. In spite of the absence of lifts from these premises they may still be accessible. It is not, after all, up to me, a person who has a disability to denounce anywhere as inaccessible. That belongs to the  access consultants employed by Cavan County Council. I believe that these people are not disabled themselves and have no real knowledge of disability issues, as I was asked to “shadow” them during a recent accessibility audit in Cavan town and inform them of particular accessibility issues, something I was not able to do through illness. So, if they say that a place is accessible, who am I to argue!

I spent the last week of June in Cavan General Hospital, suffering from a nagging chest infection which two doses of anti-biotics had failed to dislocate. I found the experience pleasant, to the extent that a stay in hospital can be a pleasant experience. The worst thing about it was the tedium. I want to thank all the staff there for their kindness and professionalism. If I try to list everyone I know I’ll end up forgetting someone; and then again there are some whose names I never learned.

I want to thank Dr Naqvi and his team; Dr Noor; a really nice doctor from Sudan whom I met on my arrival in A & E; Louise and Elaine in physiotherapy (not forgetting Louise from Cavan), and all the nurses who had the misfortunate to have to deal with me including Rosemary, Linda, Lisa, Shirley, Trish, Cathy and the night nurses who came so quickly to my assistance when I awoke with a coughing spasm one morning at four o’clock, Brenda, Jasmi from Kerala and Reuben from Tamil Nadu who looked after me on my first night there. There was also a very nice nurse whose name I forget from Dublin who noticed from my accent that I had spent some years in the fair city. I was impressed by the food. “Hospital food” is almost an urban myth, but I put on weight while a patient and one of the highlights of my day was meal times.

I had a bed almost from the moment I was admitted, and was thus saved the indignity of spending time of a trolley. I have read of the experience of poor Gerry Brady from Lough Gowna who spent a week on a trolley following admission for Deep Vein Thrombosis. He also mentioned how some patients admitted for chest infections never saw a bed at all. This just is not good enough. We are one of the richest countries in the world, and yet parts of our health care system belong to the third world. In a country in the developing world the lack of adequate health care provision is due fundamentally to poverty. Governments have not got the funds, which may have to go to pay off loans to fat cat bankers. They try to provide as good a level of health care as they can. They haven’t a choice. We however do not face such financial constraints; the fact that people spend time on trolleys is because those managing the health service have made the choice that this is acceptable. These people are more interested in appealing to a phantom constituency of tax payers who are, in their opinion, never ill and if they are, have private health insurance. The chief protagonists in this farce are the head of the Health Service Executive, Professor Chicken Drumstick and the Minister for Health, Mary “Fatso” Harney. The Tee-shock is obviously a sympathiser too. His response to those suffering unnecessarily in the Irish health-care system was to reappoint Fatso to the very same position as Minister for Health. This was a snub to the Irish people, but one which they deserve if they continue to vote for him. (Personally I believe both Fatso and Professor Drumstick should be sacked. They inhabit a dangerous fantasy world. I wouldn’t give them a place on a FAS Community Employment Scheme.)

The response of the HSE to the case of Gerry Brady was typical. There is an underlying message in its press release, emanating from the policies of Professor Drum-stick and Minister Fatso. It never comments on individual cases, because it doesn’t recognise individuals in the system, only an undifferentiated mass of scum – the great unwashed.

According to Professor Drumstick the problems of the Irish healthcare system are caused by – sick people. If sick people (who are poor or old and who do not belong to the highest social or income levels) were removed from the equation the health-care system would be fine, the best in Europe probably. There are of course bleeding-heart types who say that the health-care system is there to deal with sick people. Nonsense! The health-care system in Ireland exists to provide nice, cushy, over-paid, super-annuated positions for senior managers and those with inflated job titles.

As the press release in response to Gerry Brady made clear the situation is made even worse by the fact that sick people don’t get sick at the one time, but more or less whenever they like. This is most unfair to healthy tax payers.  Surely sick people could co-ordinate their illnesses, say, when they congregate at dole offices. One solution might be to threaten reduction of benefits for those who do not fall ill collectively and insist on pursuing costly individualistic health problems. The HSE is actively seeking ways to combat this and may very well appoint a group of highly-paid consultants from one of the world’s top three companies to come up with solutions.

Trolleys are uncomfortable, but if people thought that they were likely to spend days on a narrow trolley in a corridor they would think twice about troubling the health-care system. What’s more, very few people would stay on a trolley. And the problem of sick people staying too long in beds has already been highlighted by Professor Drumstick.