Two shocking deaths raise disturbing questions this week about the neglect of older people. But is society to blame? Kathy Sheridanreports
It was a week when the best advice to anyone over the age of 55 might have been to ignore all media. On Wednesday, The Irish Timesreported on the horrifying deaths of Evelyn Joel and Mary McLaughlin, one a 58-year-old bed-bound woman found in a malnourished state in her daughter's house in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, the other a 62-year-old Ballymena woman whose body lay undiscovered for several weeks over Christmas. The same edition carried reports of sexual assaults on a 73-year-old Co Tyrone woman and on a Co Galway woman in her 80s.
As more than 100 locals and two dozen journalists gathered outside the home of Evelyn Joel's 31-year-old daughter, Eleanor, on Wednesday, a neighbour commented that if they had known what was going on behind those doors, they would have knocked them down. By evening, there were reports of stones being thrown and a sense that things were getting out of control. On Thursday, as Evelyn Joel's siblings gave an emotional press conference and two official inquiries were put in train, her daughter left the house with her partner and two small children.
In Ballymena, the spotlight was also falling on a daughter in her 30s, this one the only child of Mary McLaughlin, whose death three to four weeks before her body was discovered had worked the town into a frenzy of speculation and finger-pointing.
Mary McLaughlin's lonely fate was discovered last Monday after neighbours reported that she hadn't been seen for several weeks and police broke the door down. They found her body in the living room, where she had apparently rolled off the sofa.
Her beloved pair of Pomeranian dogs had survived, apparently by drinking water from a toilet.
She had been living alone for many years in a house in Shetland Gardens, part of a large, rundown, 1960s council estate known as Ballykeel Two, on the edge of Ballymena.
Ballykeel's loyalist credentials are driven home by a UFF mural and the fading red, white and blue paint on the kerbs. Only a handful of the 300 families living there now are Catholic and one councillor expressed surprise that a woman with a name such as McLaughlin (ie Catholic/nationalist) was living there.
According to locals, Mary was married at some point, but no one had seen her husband for decades. In fact, they had divorced and he had remarried but was killed in a car accident some months ago.
No one can remember her having a job. Nor was she a regular churchgoer, or "gospel greedy" as another local put it. Her nearest Catholic church was the Church of Our Lady in Harryville (the target of sustained loyalist protests over the years), "which would have been a fair old trek on foot". She didn't appear on the visiting list of the Harryville priests, because as Fr Paul Symonds explained, she wasn't housebound. And she was only 62.
In fact, she was quite active, often seen out walking one or other of her beloved Pomeranian dogs (the two fought so she had to walk them separately).
"She was a very nice wee person, very friendly when you met her," said a community activist on the estate.
One of the men who raised the alarm, Jim Blair, said "the little lady" was very popular with the local children.
"Every time she went to the shop, she brought the wee ones down sweets. The kids loved her to bits," he said. "I have known her for years and she was a really well-loved lady around here."
But, according to a local, Mary was also inclined to withdraw into herself: "She kept her nets on her window all the time . . . You never knew whether she was in the house or out of the house."
When the community activist wanted to give her one of the personal alarms being distributed by the Housing Executive, she knew that Mary was a woman "who doesn't open the door" so she looked out for her on the street and gave it to her there.
SO, BY ALL accounts, Mary McLaughlin was not a neglected woman. Apart from the attentions of this activist and her neighbours, she was "well-known to the Society of St Vincent de Paul, who called regularly", said Fr Symonds, "although they probably presumed she had been away over Christmas".
Her daughter also looked out for her. After some time in hospital, Mary was taken home to her daughter's house, but after a time she wanted to get back to her dogs in Ballykeel, and decided to spend Christmas there instead of with her daughter and family as she usually did.
Fr Symonds describes her daughter as "a lovely person" with "a lovely husband and two sons . . . A very private, very quiet woman, so distressed about her mother's death and feeling rather hurt about the implications of what has been written in the media".
"This was not neglect . . . There was a pattern of cutting herself off from the family for weeks or months - as happens in other families."
The seeds of Mary McLaughlin's tragedy seemed to lie in this habit of retreating behind her front door for long periods. "She'd stay in her house for weeks on end," says a neighbour. It is quietly agreed that Mary had a drink problem. "She was a house drinker; you'd never see her go into pubs. And you'd never see her out when she was drinking."
Fr Symonds did not gloss over this aspect of Mary McLaughlin's life at her funeral Mass.
"We all make mistakes, we all make wrong choices which hurt ourselves and those around us, often those we love most," he said in his sermon. "We all struggle with flaws of character and human weaknesses, both physical and moral - and Mary was no exception. She had her blind spots, her addictions, her areas of bondage . . . It's easy to dwell on the shortcomings of any human being and, sadly, too many people take pleasure in doing just that - but of course it's never the whole story."
He went on to emphasise "the kind and gentle soul who was especially loved by children".
ON THE ISSUE of whether the wider society failed Mary McLaughlin, the immediate response of local councillors - under the impression, apparently, that she was an elderly, housebound woman as opposed to a relatively active 62-year-old - was to demand that something should be done to keep a check on the elderly residents of the borough.
"Where were her carers or home help and people who visited her? . . . I want to know what system is in place to prevent this sort of thing happening again," said one.
But the community activist in Ballykeel is adamant that there was nothing anyone could have done.
"I couldn't blame anybody. It's so hard to know - unless you're very friendly with someone - whether they're going away for Christmas or what they're doing," said the activist, a woman older than Mary who has a large family of her own around her. "I'm only a volunteer worker, I do my best for the community, but I'm not a welfare worker. I'm only a wee person living here and I don't at all profess to go round knocking on people's doors and asking how they are. I keep myself to myself a good lot, trying to keep the estate tidy and clean and trying to help people who have problems with housing."
In the Portakabin offices of the Ballymena Over Fifties Forum, five minutes' walk from Ballymena town centre, Anna Boyd runs a voluntary telephone care and alert service for over-50s who are alone, housebound or isolated.
"Nobody could have helped Mary McLaughlin," said Boyd. "But if she had been in the service, she would not have lain there for three weeks. I don't see what could have been done for her apart from that. She didn't need home help or support. She was an independent woman. There is nothing you can do for that situation."
Volunteers for the Good Morning service - which has counterparts all over the North and at least one in the Republic - arrange to telephone clients twice a week at pre- arranged times, usually for a chat and to give information but also to remind people of important appointments they might have. If no one answers at the arranged time, the caller tries twice more at 10-minute intervals, and ifthere is still no reply, a back-up person is contacted, such as a neighbour who will go round to check that all is well.
But as Boyd points out, the age group they are targeting are "very independent . . . very private people".
A questionnaire seeking basic information on illnesses and medication is sometimes met with suspicion.
"They ask questions like 'do you keep files' or 'who gets into [has access to] this computer?' or 'how much is it going to cost me to call you?'," says Boyd. "And then they'll say 'I'm not saying anything'. It's difficult to get them to come into new schemes. They'd say 'I'm not entitled to this' or 'I can manage on my pension'."
There are only 15 clients on the books at present and Boyd is clearly frustrated at the lack of response.
There are examples of places in the North where the telephone service - funded by grants - has been hugely successful, such as Ballysillan, outside Belfast, where it has 400 clients.
The unwillingness or inability to access services is something all too familiar to Sr Peggy McArdle, now running the An Siol Community Development Project in Stoneybatter in inner-city Dublin. In the past five years, developing and co-ordinating services for the elderly, she noted that while the services were reasonably good (though it may be that she is being diplomatic here, given that Age Action Ireland describes them as "patchy"and nothing like as good as they are in the North) people who were isolated or housebound were not availing of them. So for the past year, she has been visiting vulnerable people, befriending them, building up a relationship so that they gradually "work up the confidence to avail of the services".
She quotes, for example, one old man whom she visited : "He looked out through the letterbox and said: 'I'm not going to let you in today - will you give me three days to get the place ready?' "
He is the kind of person that she would hope to persuade to come down to the centre for his dinner rather than have it delivered to him - this, ultimately, is how to prevent the headline tragedies of people dying alone and lying undiscovered. But it takes time and patience and commitment.
In a survey for An Siol (conducted by 10 elderly people for publication next month) among elderly people in Stoneybatter, the recurring theme was the yearning for social activity and social interaction. A request from residents to have a Christmas dinner on Christmas Day was met this year by three groups - Care Local, the San Egidio volunteers and Sr Peggy's outreach group - who provided dinner, gifts and entertainment for 30 people who had nowhere to go and delivered dinner to another 10.
By way of answer to those who believe that society as a whole has ceased to care about its most vulnerable, she notes admiringly that the San Egidio volunteers are all professional young people, that the Care Local group are "very fine young people" who co-ordinate volunteers to go on visits. She also points out that she received "too many offers" of help on Christmas Day.
"No matter what people say about society, there is a spirit of goodwill out there and maybe we just need to tap into that . . . On the whole, people are willing. I have found that in many cases there is a good community spirit," she says. "Some of the people I'd be concerned about and would ask neighbours to keep an eye on them - they are only too happy to do it."
NONETHELESS, AS EVEN the greatest optimists acknowledge, people get left out.
"There is a cult of privacy, with which we're all inured . . . that we must respect each other's rights, and that we have a right to lead the kind of life we want to, and if they want to kill themselves that's their business and we better not intrude," says Paul Murray, of Age Action Ireland. "But what we always say to people at Christmas : 'Better intrude and be embarrassed, rather than regret you hadn't'."
There is also the question of legality, he adds. "People might ring us up and say they suspect Mrs Mulligan is being abused - but how do we gain entry ?" Rather than the "blunderbuss" of legality, it's usually through the "cuteness" of the public health nurse or a parish priest that someone finally gets into that house.
"If you haven't talked to Mrs Mulligan for years, the way in is to talk to the public health nurse or a guard, people who have the right to receive the information," says Murray.
Like others involved in this sector, Murray describes this week's cases as "unusual".
"The Wexford case is one of the worst I remember," he says. "We don't really know the facts yet, but what we would say is that people in communities have an obligation to watch out for each other. There might have been a failure to read the signals, or an undue concern for privacy."
He also raises the concept of "true consent".
"We are entitled to refuse help, of course," he says. "But is that a true consent? What is a true refusal? Where does it begin and end? Where does compos mentis begin and end? We've been dealing with a case of financial abuse of an elderly person; the victim is compos mentis but is vulnerable to being persuaded . . . There have been mutterings for a while that the High Court should have the power to intervene. Sometimes it isn't as black and white as being compos mentis."
In an aging society, this is an issue that we should all be grappling with, urgently. There are currently some 463,000 people aged over 65 in this country. The projections are that this will double to 1.1 million by 2036.
The past year, as Murray has pointed out, was the year when we finally realised how badly we treat our elderly.
"Sometimes we forget that what we're trying to build is a community, not an economy," he says. "In all the rush, what opportunity have people got to talk to Mrs Mulligan?"
On the other hand, he says, "we all like to look back to a nostalgic past, but now we know what that nostalgic world was like for many children . . . And then we remember what it was for old people. We remember the granny in the corner and 'wasn't it lovely?' It's all painted in a rosy way - it wasn't all lovely, was it? We forget there was a daughter-in-law. So we can idealise the past, which makes it difficult to measure the present."