HEART BEAT:While ships can be lost at sea, hospitals and governments can also run off course, writes MAURICE NELIGAN
I KNOW we’ve had some week with elections and all that and I’ll get there soon; but first Holmes-like, I wish to mention “the Curious incident of the Glengad Trawler”.
Apparently at about dawn one morning, off the Mayo coast, a band of pirates emerged, Neptune like, from the sea, carrying handguns instead of tridents, and commandeered and sank an Irish-registered trawler.
They apparently spoke only in monosyllables and were wearing some class of balaclavas. The two crewmen of the trawler though physically unharmed were then obliged to take to the high seas on a life raft from which they were then rescued by a local trawler which had hastened to their “mayday” alert. They were brought ashore and to Mayo General Hospital in Castlebar.
Their luck was holding because the hospital was still there and had not been “reconfigured” to God knows where. In HSE speak “reconfigured” means closed and does not necessarily imply that alternative, let alone better, services have been provided elsewhere.
We are left with an intriguing mystery. Who were these people who so terrorised these fishermen and sank their boat? Did they come from some sort of mother ship, a submarine or maybe a flying saucer?
Surely they might have been better off hijacking some super tanker or cruise liner, rather than a humble fishing boat. This is particularly so given the depressed state of the native fishing industry. It is not recorded yet as to whether these unwelcome intruders had webbed feet; that might point to aliens who, having exhausted natural gas deposits on their own planet, are casting envious looks at ours.
By what can only be called coincidence, at the same time a group of protesters against the harvesting of our natural gas resources in the same area, were bearing down in an armada of kayaks upon a dredger doing preliminary work to allow the gas pipeline to be constructed.
Two Garda boat units protecting the dredger also responded to the plight of the sinking trawler and departed the immediate area. It is an intriguing mystery.
Enough of our sea mystery, although we should not forget the tourist potential; let us touch briefly on the elections.
These local and European elections, and two byelections, were widely held among the media and population at large to constitute a referendum on the performance of the incumbent government. The results made some glad, some sad and some didn’t care either way.
The people spoke loudly and clearly but as yet to no effect. The Ruling Elves cowered behind their webs of spin and pretended that their mandate had not been revoked. They met to consider the outcome and we were told that they would reorganise their party for the next elections and they promised their adherents that they would rise again.
That’s fair enough from their perspective, but in the meantime who gets to run the country and arrest our slide into national bankruptcy? Our problems have not gone away, they multiply by the day and frankly the people don’t give a damn about problems within their party and its organisation.
They do care mightily about their prospects and those of their children. They care about vanishing jobs, their pensions and savings. They care about health and education, they care about our senior citizens, our children and our disadvantaged. Calamity has awakened our people and banished the torpor of the past few unreal years.
They know that world recession has deepened our plight. They also know that our Government and its so-called regulatory authorities ignored or tolerated an economic climate in which our banks and many developers simply ran amok.
The philosophy of the infamous “tent” prevailed:
For your friends are my friends, and my friends are your friends
The more we get together, the merrier we will be.
The people are aware that as yet nobody has been called to account for the destruction of our prosperity. Is it that the ordinary citizen is to be in hock for years while the “cowboys” run free? They now know there are no easy answers. They know that there is no person, party or coalition that, through some magic formula, can set everything to rights. They know that for whoever holds the reins of government, hard times lie ahead.
They have just told you unequivocally that they don’t want you to drive the coach any more. They, by their votes, suggest that they would rather try those unaffected by the hubris, arrogance and indolence and incompetence of the past 10 years. To have your spokespeople repeatedly say that because the opposition parties hold differing viewpoints on governance matters, somehow they cannot be trusted and consequentially your band of patriotic heroes must continue in office is self-deluding nonsense.
But you’re not listening to the people are you? You haven’t for years. Once more, discredited as you are, you cling to office. As one of your least talented ministers is reputed to have said, “the worst day in government is better than the best day in opposition”.
More importantly, the perks and patronage remain with you and yours. As Sophocles in Oedipus and Tyrannus put it, “You are blind in your ears and mind as well as your eyes”.
He might well have been talking to you lot.
Maurice Neligan is a cardiac surgeon