Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

A view of the world from an Irish hole

Tag: HSE

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The Cult of Personality in Cavan

Cults of personality are usually associated with despotic regimes. The freedom and wealth of the people usually stand in inversed proportion to the ego of their leader…The cult of Personality can take bizarre forms, as in Turkmenistan under the rule of the Turkmenbashi himself, Saparmarad Niyazov who had a statue erected of himself atop a plinth which moved full circle every twenty-four hours; one of the three television stations actually carried an image of the Turkmenbashi in the far right-hand corner. Less extreme, but still ridiculous manifestations of the egos of the political establishment involved the naming of airports after the president, as in Kenya during the rule of Daniel arap Moi, or the plastering of the leader’s portrait on every available wallspace..  I remember Alexei Sayles going on a televised visit to Syria during the reign of Hafez al-Assad, where he noted with his unique sense of irony, that the President’s image was to be seen on each corner and shop window. This reminded him of the publicity that might attend a performance by an artist or comedian when the ticket sales  had gone really badly and the promoters sought to boost the eventual crowds by a barrage of advertising in the hope of fending off a flop

It is usual in most parts of the democratic world to wait until someone is dead a decent time before they are commemorated by having a building, a road, or a fountain named after them. Cavan town is an exception where it is accepted that egotistical nobodies can be commemorated before they have gone the way of all flesh. I refer to an area near Drumalee Cross which I pass on my daily “fun run” which proudly bears the moniker Cullivan Court. As the building is partly owned by one Gabriel Cullivan, formerly a town clerk of the town, I assume that it has been named in his honour, and not that of the well-known and much-loved architect , the late Phil Cullivan. This is like an annex of Wall Street being renamed Boesky Boulevard or Madoff Parade. While such dreadful and unseemly self-promotion may appear tasteless, it must be remembered that Mr Cullivan, as a former employee of that shower of vindictive cowards Cavan County Council, can do what he likes – he has done it in the past – and should anyone demur, one of the sycophantic elected members of the council would propose a motion of “tanks to Mr Cullivan for his sterlin’ work” on behalf of himself and the people of Cavan over the years.

I need hardly mention that one of Cullivan Court’s biggest tenants is none other than the HSE – another crowd of arrogant, incompetent  anda superannuated shites. All that is needed there is the erection of a pillar surmounted by a statue of Mr Cullivan, maybe sporting the green leprechaun suit he wore  at the opening of the County Museum fifteen years’ ago and which was commented upon with so much mirth and derision by the then County Arts Officer, Ms Catriona O’Reilly. (I know that the present County Arts Officer is also  called Ms Catriona O’Reilly but she is altogether a different person from the one I referred to.

I expect these comments will meet with a frisson of disapproval, maybe even a threat of legal action, but my response is Bring it on baby! Some of them may even say that I shouldn’t be going so far on my fun run. Am I not confined to a wheelchair, and should I not come to terms with my disability like other cripples in the county by accepting my permanent inferiority to Cavan County Council, its employee and their families (more or less the same thing) by awaiting the grant of a council house?

 

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Mary Harney sings up our health service

Health minister Mary Harney has responded to concerns about pending health cuts by saying what a wonderful public health system this government presides over and how the government is attempting to improve it still further in spite of budgetary constraints.

 Cut the bull Mary. You don’t believe it and all of your colleagues know it’s crap. The next time any of you have as much as a pain in your big toes you will not seek treatment in a public ward, but will instead go private. You will attempt to cover your hypocrisy by saying that because of your responsible jobs you cannot afford to be away from your desks for long and so must seek the quickest form of treatment available. As for ordinary people, they an just queue and suffer.

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The dystunctional Health Service Executive

The conference of Irish hospital consultants held in Limerick has heard the HSE described as dysfunctional. I can think of other adjectives. Possibly the most apposite is that of evil. The HSE, together with other government departments, is the embodiment of what Professor Hannah Arendtr described as the banality of evil”. Most HSE operatives live fairly uneventful and unremarkable lives. They live in neighbourhoods and go to and return from work with alarming regularity. But how many people realise that they are living beside monsters? OK, not monsters in the Saddam Hussein sense of the word but people who nevertheless feel no qualms about inflicting pain or hardship on the least fortunate in society by their actions. But then,. Maybe, they are monsters too.

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Child abuse in Ireland

Historically the greatest institutional child abusers were the Catholic Church.  This was carried out with the connivance of the Irish police and the various local health boards. This had thankfully sharply declined.

 Sadly child abuse, of a physical, sexual and emotional nature still continues and shows no signs of diminishing. Nowadays it happens with the knowledge and even participation of government bodies, probably the greatest of which is the Health Service Executive (HSE), who sometimes return children who have escaped from abuse in the UK to the very locations and environments where the abuse initially took place. \In this they are assisted by the Irish courts and legal system.

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Lea’s Cross report gagging order

It is very hard to listen to news reports on RTE without a feeling of deep disgust. I have just heard about the understandable anger of the brother and sister of a man with Alzheimer’s Disease and Down’s Syndrome who died less than a fortnight after being transferred to the Leas Cross Nursing Home. It has taken until now for the Health Service Executive to finalise a report, but before it is handed over to the man’s family the HSE want them to sign a confidentiality clause – a gagging order – that would prevent them publicising its contents.

 This is 2010. What though is the difference between this outrageous demand and the similar gagging order that the former bishop of Kilmore wished to impose on the victims of clerical sexual abuse in 1975 – thirty five years’ ago? The calls on Cardinal Sean Brady to resign because he was associated with that shameful episode have been loud. Surely the demands for the resignation of the Minister for Health Matry Harney, who presides at the pinnacle of the HSE, must be louder. m (It is an open secret though that the HSE has long been out of the minister’s control. In fact it has never been under any effective control but operates as a state within a state.

 The substandard care at Leas Cross came to light not through the health service’s own investigations, which were at most perfunctory. The clamour of the relatives of those who had suffered in that dreadful institution were brushed aside. They were only acted upon when the scandal of Leas Cross was exposed by RTE’s Prime Time program.

 As my mother died suffering from Alzheimer’s I am affected by this. Honestly it makes me feel sick that in this great country of ours someone can die due and those responsible seek to hide their culpability. That doesn’t happen in free countries; it’s the stuff of dictatorship worthy of Argentina after the Dirty War.

 We may very well live in a post-Christian society in Ireland, but let’s remember one thing. The vast majority of senior management in government institutions were educated in Catholic secondary schools, which so jealously guarded their Catholic ethos. It didn’t seem to produce more Christian or caring citizens – maybe that was because so many of the clerical teachers were busy abusing their pupils.

 To be honest, I think that the senior management of the HSE, or anyone who supports this gagging order, should be taken out and shot. In fact, I think a bullet would be too good for such miserable scum.

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Proposed prescription charges – a double whammy

As a recipient of a means-tested benefit I am looking forward to having the miserable pittance on which I survive cut still further. And now I learn that the minister for Health plans to introduce a per item prescription charge for medical cards. Since my diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis I have been prescribed a Beta-Inferon preparation which so far has regulated, though not eliminated, relapses. But I am going to be penalised. This government, not content with spitting in my face by reducing my blind pension, seeks to harass me and many others. Does the minister think that I am misusing the medicines I receive? In that it improves my quality of life and keeps me alive, I suppose I am misusing them according to her perverted lights. The bitch really has a brass neck to pontificate on such a subject. The really frustrating thing is that thyi9s prescription charge will help to pay for the minister’s five-star champagne lifestyle as well as pay the salaries of some HSE employees so that they can continue their criminal activities.

 Where might I ask are the Unions? Are they so selfishly myopic? Are they only interested in the lot of their members? And as for the Party of Slime who sit at the cabinet table with these bastards they have shown themselves up for what they are.

 This criminal government should be – must be – overthrown BY ANY MEANS – before it can do any more harm to the Irish people.

 I suppose I can expect a visit from the Gardai for the above statement – maybe at 1,30 in the morning.

 

 

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After dark

Francisco Macias Nguema

Mad uncle Frank

Francisco Macias Nguema, was Equatorial Guinea’s first president. In the eleven years he held the post he was responsible for the deaths of 50,000 people, as well as sending thousands of others into exile. Before his overthrow and murder by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema (who is still in power) the country had earned the unwelcome epithet of “the Dachau of Africa”. Amnesty International’s annual report were full of the heinous acts of human rights violations carried out by Macias, not t mention the crimes against humanity to be laid at his successor’s door. He oversaw one of the most bizarre personality cults in history – so bizarre because it was so unmerited. He adored bestowing grandiose titles on himself, yet he was barely literate. It is said he failed the colonial exams to become an office clerk three times and was only successful on the fourth because of some positive discrimination. He was given to violent swings of personality and received treatment in Spain and the United States for unspecified psychiatric problems; towards the latter years of his life he had acquired some unidentifiable disease

A friendly dictator

Not really like his uncle?

which may have been AIDS-related.

His hold on power was maintained through fear, not only of his loyal thugs but of Macias personally. He deliberately cultivated the belief that his father had been a witch doctor and sorcerer, and that he had inherited many of these gifts. He was rumoured to have drunk the blood of some of his political opponents, and he kept a large stockpile of human skulls at his presidential compound, alongside all of the country’s foreign currency reserves and medical supplies. Macias loved the dark and detested light; a Spanish airline pilot was arrested and tortured when he accidentally shone his ‘plane’s headlights on Macias’ jet as it sat on the airport tarmac one night. In 1977 a visiting researcher was told that “… you may be against Macias while the sun shines, but after dark you have to be for him,” Even when overthrown and sentenced to death, no locals could be found to man the firing squad, and the task had to be performed by Moroccan soldiers.

Macias  Nguema’s preference for the dark reminds me of the activities of a solicitor employed by the Irish health Service Executive, who is sadly well-known to her victims, and who seems to delight in working in the hours of night, well after “The Bard’’s witching hour. Does she feel that her victim are more cowed by the inky blackness, and less able to put up a defence to her machinations when they are awoken suddenly by the headlights of the garda cars ferrying her to the scene of her nocturnal sacrifices? or is there a yet more sinister reason for this, tied up perhaps with practice of the dark arts?

While the sun shines it is easy to be against Ms Helen (or is it Ellinor?) Stone, but after dark …

I wonder what she’s doing for Halloween?

 

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A leaner, healthier Ireland

Minister for health and obesity Mary Hernia has warned that the coming year will see even greater cuts in health spending. These will of course, translate into even poorer services in the health sector but will help to usher in a new dawn not only for the health service but for Ireland generally.

 While few if any hospitals will be closed they will be downsized radically in the interests of efficiency. As a consequence they may have to shed most if not all of their medical functions. They will thus be staffed entirely by HSE administrative staff. There won’t be visiting hours because, hopefully, there won’t be any patients to visit.

Minister Hernia has said that the Irish people now realise that the biggest problem facing the health services is sick people. “They get sick at awkward times, and expect to be cared for at the tax payer’s expense.” The minister added, “As a country we face some tough decisions and this government will not shite away from taking them.” Giving examples of the type of decisions she means the minister outlined the savings in not giving costly medical care to old people,cripples, the unemployed and the work shy, who should be left to die. ”Yes it’s tough, but it’s the type of decision we must take if we are ever to get back to economic good health.”

 A study undertaken by some of Ireland’s best-paid economists had found more over than many people who think they’re sick aren’t really sick at all.

 Welcoming the increase in emigration figures the minister said that emigration of Irish healthcare workers was good news as it showed Ireland’s generosity as a nation. These were men and women who had been trained at Ireland’s expense, but instead of selfishly expecting them to work here and treat our sick people we were donating them to the wider world.

 A new scheme to replace expensive medical personnel takes a leaf out of the book of China. Hundreds of “barefoot” doctors are to be appointed throughout Ireland. These will be people on FAS community employment schemes who will receive a week-long crash course in medical essentials but who will not require any pay in addition to their weekly welfare benefits. The minister was particularly delighted with this scheme as it showed the power of “joined-up” government, though she quick not to take credit for the idea herself. “Actually it was Brian’s”. More advanced medical help, if needed, is to be provided by volunteers from Medecins Sans Frontieres.

 These measures will lead not only to a leaner, healthier health service but also to a leaner, healthier Ireland, populated by a super-race of athletic Irish men and women paying little of their hard-earned cash in taxes. “It’s a win-win situation which definitely brings us much closer to Buchenwald than Berlin.”

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Darkness visible

There’s husbandry in heaven -
Their candles are all out..

I want to tell you a story; let me assure you that every word of it is true, no matter how fantastic it may appear.

 Recently Rosie and myself have had a couple staying with us who have been attempting to liberate their son from care, into which he was delivered on the flimsiest of reasons. One of the couple established a website in which he attempted to publicise their plight and that of other families in similar situations.

 Last Thursday, Ms Helen McGovern, solicitor for the Health Service Executive, succeeded in extracting a High Court injunction against the website. The manner in which this injunction was subsequently delivered beggars belief in a free society. At approximately 1.30 am on the following morning all of the residents of the house were awoken by the arrival of Ms McGovern, accompanied by no less than four gardai. Ms McGovern obviously does her best work after dark, but I cannot for the life of me see why they had to be served at such an ungodly hour. I also fail to see why she had to be accompanied by such a large force of police. Did they believe that the couple were going to “make a run for it”? or that they would be offered physical resistance? One of the garda squad cars had come all the way from Navan with Ms McGovern. Most people know that sadly, Co. Meath is awash with illegal drugs. The gardai respond as well as they can, though they are often hampered by insufficient resources. On the morning of Friday, September 18th, their ability to fight not only the drugs problem but crime in general was severely hampered by allocating one squad car with two gardai to accompany Ms McGovern’s nocturnal frolic. The forces assigned for this visit were equivalent to those for a raid, yet this group presented the unedifying spectacle of skulking  through the blackened Cavan countryside asking for directions. Obviously the Gartda Siochana haven’t heard of GPS yet.

 Luckily I wasn’t in residence at Putiaghan Upper that night. I would have been terrified to be disturbed by the headlights of police cars. The whole thing would have reminded me too much of a scene from Alan Parker’s film Mississippi Burning. Both Rosie and myself are law-abiding people, without so much as a parking ticket to our names, so to be treated in this shameful manner by the police is intolerable. My first reaction upon hearing the front door being knocked in the middle of the night would have been to seek the protection of the gardai by telephone. Imagine how I would have felt on learning that those who were disturbing my peace, those who were frightening me, were the very people towards whom I looked for protection, I feel that my customary civility towards the Civic Guards would have been stretched to breaking point.

 On the following evening, at approximately 10.30 pm our peace was again disturbed by a Process Server delivering additional court documents. Why can documents only be delivered at night? The Process Server, who seemed genuinely embarrassed, explained that the late hour was caused by the delay in preparing the documents. This preparation had been so rushed that they hadn’t been filled in properly or signed.

 The serving of the papers at such an unorthodox manner on the morning of the 18th, accompanied by such a large contingent of police, was a clear and deliberate attempt to intimidate the couple and my partner Rosie. Ms McGovern’s visit was no act of charity; she will indeed seek and no doubt receive handsome payment of expenses for her after hours’ exertions by the HSE. How can the HSE don the poor mouth, citing lack of money when cutting back vital and essential services, but yet they have money to burn on such non-vital expenses? Is it not true that at a time when we are told we must swallow “tough” decisions regarding public spending, which will cause genuine hardship, our public servants and those whom they employ can waste as much money as they can?

 I wish to stress that everything I have said above is factually correct. When (or if) Ms McGovern reads it I am sure she will be enraged, and as a well-connected member of the judiciary she will possibly seek to gag me by undertaking legal action against me. She may labour under the mistaken belief that I can be frightened into silence, as was her intention in visiting our house at such an inappropriate hour. But if the truth hurts don’t blame me. Furthermore I believe all the comments made to be fair in the circumstances. The above statements are not motivated by malice, but by a desire to expose abusive behaviour by the executive, including an abuse of judicial process, I am also conscious that in writing the above I have not made myself many friends amongst those who seek to dominate our lives. Let me remind everyone that we still live in a free society – just.  Amongst the freedoms we take for granted are not just freedom of speech, but the freedom to enjoy an undisturbed night’s sleep.

 

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Blueshirts in Cavan

Cavan people must be tickled pink that the Blueshirts oops Fine Gael party decided to hold a meeting of its parliamentary coven in Co. Cavan, and in of all places the SAS Radisson hotel be God.

 Their choice of venue is significant. The building was formerly Farnham House, the headquarters of the largest, most tyrannical and possibly most bigoted family amongst Cavan’s landed gentry.

 The Farnhams were originally called Maxwell, and they were among the second wave of mongrel foxes to grab land in Ulster. It is hardly significant that the land surrounding Farnham House is still amongst the best in the county.

 Their tenants were forced to pay exorbitant rents. During the Great Famine inability to pay was never accepted as a valid excuse and usually resulted in immediate eviction. The Lord Farnham of the time, it is true, showed no religious favouritism towards Protestant or Catholic in such soulless dealings.

 But the money robbed from their tenants did not go on the gaming tables of London. Oh no, much of it went to build Farnham House, which, in spite of extensive renovations, is still a cold and forbidding place. The Farnhams were avid partisans of the “Second Reformation” in Co. Cavan – attempts by Protestant evangelical societies finances by people like the Farnhams and the gullible praying classes of England to bribe the Irish peasantry to forego the religion of Rome for that of Canterbury.

 While one of the Lords Farnham died a horrible death in the Abergele rail disaster of August, 1868 the spirit of religious intolerance continued at Farnham. In 1896 Lord Farnham’s agent T.R. Blackley recommended to the lord that the vacant posts of under-steward and gardener be filled by “English Protestants”. This would have precluded amongst others the historian Lord Acton and Edward Elgar, composer of that anthem of tub-thumping and nauseating imperialism “Land of Hope and Glory” from employment at Farnham. Both were members of English society par excellence but both sadly were Roman Catholics.

 It is in the bosom of such exclusivity that the latter-day Blueshirts have assembled. They could have staged a re-enactment of the frightful “human hunts” which took plaee at Farnham, and whose lurid details were told to me by Cavan-town publican Linus McDonal, as in many ways this epitomised the current traversty of a democratic system we have. Young girls were stripped naked and made to wander through Farnham’s grounds while  packs of savage, baying dogs were set upon them so that they were forced to climb into one of the ground’s many trees from where they were rescued by “gentlemen” on horseback – n return for sexual favours. These gentlemen were often descendants and close relatives of members of te Anglican clergy. The hapless girls might have been saved, but at the price of being fucked.

Sadly bad weather prevented a march past by Fine Gael volunteers who are setting off on their battle to assure Ireland of a place in a Christian Europe. However there was a special trooping and blessing of the colours – a yellow banner urging a “YES” vote in the forthcoming and completely undemocratic re-run of the Lisbon Treaty referendum.

 Now the Blueshirts / Fine Gael are very big on jobs, so Enda Kenny and senior Blueshirts then went on a tour of sites in the county employing relatives of Fine Gael councillors such as Cavan town’s courthouse, town hall and hospital. I have learned that Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny was forced, through pressure of time, to turn an invitation from Councillor John Scott of Belturbet to visit his son in Cavan County Museum.

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