Rachel Lavin-
In the colossal ruins of our nation, it’s hard to have faith in our government anymore. Unemployment is our biggest fear next to the looming threat of emigration, our pride is catastrophically dented and the future is bleak. Disillusionment is a word being used a lot, as is fear, anger, shame and disgust. It is true to say the faith in government in this country is following the same trend as Irish Catholicism. Compliance is hollow, belief a thing of the past and hope in restoration idealist. For Ireland, the faith is lost.
I lost my faith a long time ago. It was not the rate of inflation, nor bank bail-outs, NAMA or the IMF, Bertie or Brian. It was in fact at the height of the boom years, just when Ireland was learning (and unknowingly failing at) how to be rich.
It was, for me, two years spent down the end of a gloomy corridor, in a struggling ward, in Crumlin Children’s Hospital. It’s not the suffering from a serious illness that bothered me, that was suffering enough–facing one’s own mortality at eleven usually is. It was the things that now disturb me more than anything; the fact that when I first entered the ward, it was over-crowded with teary-eyed children and despairing parents; the fact that I had to share a room, just a withered curtain muffling the struggling breath next door; the fact I had to use a bedpan as if a geriatric patient; have my mother sleep on the floor; and find out that my best friend on the ward had not died of what she was being treated for, it was that bug they couldn’t keep out, something to do with no proper air conditioning.
I got away from that ward gratefully and promised myself never to go back, never revisit it in my memory even. In fact this article is the first time I have done so in years. Nevertheless, a sense of unfairness has followed me around ever since. Not some kind of ‘why me?’ complex for facing illness, but for feeling neglected, uncared for, forgotten about down the end of that gloomy corridor, in that struggling ward.
Earlier in the year in an interview for UT, I had a re-awakening to this unrelenting sense of despair. I spoke to a man who could never leave that ward, consultant Dr. Finn Breathnach.
I rang him up, heard his fate-making voice again, and asked him about the new problem with the hospital. It was to be built afresh, combining with Temple St. It was all his dreams come true, after years of hopeless conditions, the man, who had fundraised in Dublin’s pubs and clubs every night after work for years, was given hope. The man I had watched over the years become tired and haggard. He eventually retired, telling me years later that “I just could not break bad news anymore, see the suffering in their faces.” Retribution.
So what could be wrong? The man and thousands of children were finally being given what they deserved.
The problem was the government was building it on the Mater site. “It will be sixteen stories high in the middle of Dublin city centre,” he explained drearily. “It will cost us lives.” I ask him, as I had done so many tines over the years, “Why?” The only reason he can think of is that “coincidentally, it is inside Bertie Ahern’s constituency.”
Coincidently, parents would have to travel from the country through Dublin’s clogged maze of streets with a sick child strewn across the back seat; coincidentally, ambulances would be with-held in emergency situations; coincidentally, children would be crammed into a concrete tower with ‘a nice view’; and coincidently, any oppositions made by the doctor or Crumlin Hospital’s team of consultants were denied. My doctor’s protests were ironically alleged by the media as to be of vested interests.
Coincidently, I became completely disillusioned by such unnecessary suffering.
The infamous cement truck driven into the gates of Leinster House last September
It wasn’t just this though, my decision to give up on our government was further and further enforced with time. The RTÉ News images of the fishermen in Mayo, dragged bloody from the shoreline, a trail of indignation left in the sand, quickly trampled over of course by the JCB tyres of Corrib Gas workers. The local story of the rural farmers fighting the ESB Pylon scheme being forced through their lands, one in particular of Old Murphy, struck with dementia. On the day the high court ruled against their cause, he was found in the field clanging the Iron mast legs with an axe. And closer to home, us students seeing in person the riot guards unrelenting bloody baton, the Che Guevara spirit that we naively aspired to embody, beaten black and blue out of us.
And then a little thing called the economic recession, worse here than anywhere else, leaving Ireland to the humiliation on a world stage and a return to the economic squalor of the eighties.
Yes these are enough to turn the most patriotic against their own country. At times I wondered at democracy, national moral standing, the state that a people had fought so unrelentingly for. What Ireland had become dominated by was not the Celtic Tiger, but more the fat cats. The idea of nation went out the window. Ireland became an economy.
It is no surprise thereof that now that our economy is failing, our nation is falling apart. With that I give up on politics, ignore the election, turn off the T.V. and give up.
The election passes, Fine Gael are in and begin to try to change things. Recovery is still a long way off. Just out of curiosity sake I check the news stand the following Sunday to see the reaction to what some call the “revolutionary change.” The only acknowledgement I see is a caricature of Enda Kenny on some tabloid rag. Can nobody win? I quickly resolve to resort back to my blissful ignorance of Irish politics and government.
And then another newspaper headline catches my eye and changes everything for me. ‘Mater Hospital Plan announced unwelcome’. There is the announcement of a costly but necessary relocation of the new Children’s Hospital. There are even accusations of a hidden agenda, quickly quietened, of course, by threats of a civil action of slander. But it doesn’t matter. The country has reawakened to something. The government has opened its eyes. Time unfolds this.
As I pass by Dáil Éirinn the day of Kenny’s initiation, there are already protestors outside the gates picketing for causes I had long forgotten, repressed, given up on. I think, “Didn’t they build that already? Didn’t they end that case? Didn’t they give up?”
But here they are, still standing strong. Although there is something different this time, it is not so angry, not so hostile, not so resentful. There is an atmosphere of gentle eagerness, and residual patience, all in the anticipation of the new eyes to look upon a cause, a new voice to respond, a new soul to empathise their suffering. There is hope.
In the fight for economic recovery, the new government will also face into the recovery of morale, fairness and pride in this country. Sort through the skeletons in the Fianna Fáil cabinet, so to speak. Rectifying mistakes will no doubt be costly, changing decision, relaying plans. It will be excruciatingly expensive, most certainly getting worse before any ways better.
But this reawakens me to something more important to me than economics, it is a feeling of trust, a feeling of hope, no longer a fear that has haunted me, the fear of neglect. I become a born-again citizen.
Fine Gael aren’t perfect, that is true. But these first few baby steps (you could say ‘five’) are in the right direction.
Though my faith in government can never fully be restored, I can say that last St Patrick’s Day, walking through the throngs of tourists on Grafton St., I am reminded of a sentiment I hadn’t felt since the Paddy’s Days as a child at home.
It is the slowly re-surfacing tingling sensation of pride.
