HEART BEATBe the death divining swan; Let the requiem
lack his right - William Shakespeare, The Phoenix and the Turtle
Swans are in the news now and for all the wrong reasons. Firstly, a female swan (pen) was killed in Blackrock Park a few weeks ago.
A pair of swans had been living there over the past eight-nine years and were great favourites with those enjoying this well-kept amenity. In fact, going back to my childhood in this area, I always remember swans in the park. Feeding the swans, ducks, moorhens and other birds was a regular for us and later for my own children. They were a feature of our lives.
I remember the dignified pen sailing serenely across the calm water, often carrying her cygnets on her back, and deigning to accept the morsels proffered by small hands. The nesting place was a little island inaccessible from the shore, and there the family dwelt in their kingdom.
Swans are big birds and well able to take care of themselves, as anyone who has encountered an angry one can testify. They are quite territorial and, in particular, the male does not like any infringement on his patch.
Accordingly, it was with great distress that we learned that the female had been wantonly killed. The male had apparently disappeared some weeks before and then the body of the female was found. She had been decapitated, the head and body separated by some distance.
It can be no easy thing to overcome and decapitate a swan and one can only wonder at the state of mind of somebody who would do so. I have read the head was severed cleanly, as if by an instrument like a machete. I shudder to think of people wandering around carrying weapons like that, and possibly fuelled by drink or drugs.
Certainly nobody would approach an angry swan other than those possessed of some Dutch courage or extreme foolhardiness. In support of this hypothesis, the park keeper found many bottles and cans at the site the next day. Natural causes such as foxes were discounted, leaving the unpalatable and uncomfortable realisation that some person armed with a very dangerous weapon was abroad in a public place and prepared to act in such a manner.
Given what is happening on an almost daily basis within our society, this should not surprise too much, but I find it, as most right thinking people do, to be deeply depressing.
However, Natura vacuum abhorret and we already have two new swans in the park. May they have long, happy and safe lives and, in their contentment and domesticity, bring happiness and pleasure to those who come to see, admire and feed them in future generations.
This sad tale of a swan that in present day parlance, happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, has been overtaken by the discovery of avian 'flu as the cause of death of a swan found on the east coast of Scotland. The cause of mortality of other swans, sick, dying and dead, in Scotland, Northern Ireland and now in the Republic is being investigated as I write.
The import of this is clear, initially for the very important poultry industry and, consequentially, for the health of our population at large.
This is no light matter. Do we prepare meticulously for potential disaster, or do we wait and see if the threat materialises? Given the fact that our hospitals could not cope with even a small emergency; laissez faire, perhaps it will never happen, is not an acceptable attitude given the state of our medical services.
Even Prof Drumm might realise that we need more beds in the system. It is not, as he avers in his simple homily, a matter of repairing the rusted tracks so that the locomotive of the health service can run smoothly. It is more that the locomotive is shagged, the engineers useless, and that there is not enough track.
The good professor is well aware that the norm for hospital bed occupancy in developed countries is 85 per cent or less. This leaves capacity for emergencies, seasonal or otherwise, allows for a proper throughput of elective work and gives space and time to clean and maintain.
It allows space to deal with waiting lists and would obviate the necessity for expensive and apparently unaccountable white elephants like the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF).
The function of the latter, other than dealing with waiting lists that should not exist anyway, appears to be in propping up for-profit private hospitals that otherwise could not exist independently. More beds and the 85 per cent occupancy rate would also allow the doctors do what they are trained and paid to do, rather than have them sitting idly by while the beds are filled with patients from the A&E departments.
As for MRSA and hospital infections, an 85 per cent occupancy would allow the problem be tackled with a chance of improvement. Then, and only then, can the figures be compared with European hospitals, which already enjoy such occupancy rates.
Finally on this topic, it was with alarm that I read that most Garda stations contacted were unable to give the contact number 1890 252283 for those with concerns about birds with possible avian 'flu. The politician who raised the matter was denigrated by the relevant, I nearly said responsible, Minister. She accused him of trying to cause public alarm.
There is public alarm, Ministers. What are you going to do about it? Let us all in on the plans, they concern us too.
Maurice Neligan is a cardiac surgeon.