Year: 2014 (Page 2 of 2)

Crucifixes in Council Chambers

24th April 2014 / Paul W.S. Bowler

Recently the Kerry County Council voted to hang a crucifix in the Council Chamber.

This is a link to a Radio Kerry interview with Councillor Joe Culloty who proposed this.

This is a link to my interview with Radio Kerry arguing against it.

And this is a letter I wrote to The Kerryman on the same topic.

There is an unfortunate side-effect to the decision of Kerry County Council to hang a crucifix in their chamber. Though an atheist, I’ve always been comfortable assuming the vast majority of my elected representatives will be Roman Catholic. I trusted they would put our common citizenship above our differing belief systems.

I’m now going to have to ask each council candidate what religion they practice and I’ll need to know how invested they are in that practice and if they’ll represent me to the same extent as someone from their religion.

The Council has decided to privilege one religion over a whole hosts of others, for no reason other than it is the religion of the majority. Will we next see a shrine to white skin? A shrine to heterosexuality? A shrine to the able-bodied? A shrine to people who aren’t in negative equity?

Kerry Councillors have a duty to all the people who live in Kerry. Not just the people who elect them, not just the people who look like them and certainly not just the people who pray like them.

Kerryman 24-04-14

The Confessional Seal

19th April 2014 / Paul W.S. Bowler

Cartoon 1 19-04-14

I’ve a certain sympathy for Priests but…

I worked with children in Residential Care for about ten years. I began my career around the same time that the Madonna House scandal broke. It was discovered that this institution, this refuge for those most in need of protection, was a place where the sexual abuse of children was rife. For those of us starting out in the profession of Social Care, it was a body blow to our enthusiasm and our sense of ourselves as carers and advocates for society’s most vulnerable.

It was not without some positive effects. We quickly had to rewrite the rules of engagement. No longer was it acceptable to just trust a colleague. We had to put policies and procedures in place that made the abuse of children in our care, not just unlikely, but almost impossible (almost being the operative word, nothing is foolproof).

There were some missteps. For a time we believed no child would lie about being sexually abused. When it became apparent that an emotionally damaged child was capable of using allegations of sexual abuse, we became very wary of ‘mandatory reporting.’ I’m still uncomfortable with it to be honest. Our aim became making things so safe, for both service-users and staff, that if an allegation was viewed as credible, then no obligations would be necessary. That would be a career in jeopardy, whether innocent or guilty.

This need to be safe and to be seen to be safe impacted on a great many facets of our care, the way we hugged the children (only ever side-on), how we said goodnight (one foot outside the bedroom door at all times) and even how we spoke in private with them (staff detailed to ‘inadvertently’ walk into rooms where a staff and a child were having a meeting). It was a lesson in paranoia that I learned well. So internalised that even ten years later, I am still uncomfortable around children when there are no other adults around. I even hear alarm bells watching TV programs if I see an unaccompanied adult male with children.

It is a paranoia born of negative reinforcement. The fear of losing one’s career and the dread of having an allegation hanging over your head that could not be one hundred percent disproved. To be known as a possible child-abuser, the lowest of the low. So we became very consistent in our practice. And it paid off. The children in our care were safer. The culture of insidious impunity ended.

I know I was damaged by the process, but I do not regret that. I was part of a service that was evolving. It could not aspire to perfection, but it did aspire to safety and I think it largely achieved that. Of course, like with everything, vastly increased resources (even on top of the vastly increased resources we did receive) would have made the lives of a great many children, so much better.

I embrace that damage, because it was necessary. We were undoing a culture of abuse, while caring for the victims of that abuse and simultaneously attempting to find an intellectual basis for the policies and procedures we were trying to intuitively evolve. And always, trying to create therapeutic environments in those overcrowded houses.

I lasted ten years. I’m proud of about six or seven years of that. The balance was spent unaware that I had hit the wall. If I had it all to do again, I wouldn’t. It was terrifying and emotionally scarring. And I was exposed to the depravity that lurks in our species. But it was vital work. If I live to be a hundred, I will never again be involved in such a noble task. Can there be anything as important as caring for children?

I am proud of my efforts and I am proud of my profession. I am proud, despite knowing that my profession attracts more than its fair share of men and some women whose sole purpose is to prey on children. Every profession that brings adults into contact with children, is going to be targeted by predators.

As Tom Meagher says in this wonderful piece, the perpetrators of horrible crimes are for the most part, seemingly ordinary people. High functioning individuals who blandly go about their business of destroying lives while still part of society.

The Roman Catholic Priesthood with its unnatural strictures against sex and family was obviously going to have an above average number of sexual deviants. They should not be condemned for that. I can’t condemn them for those numbers because my profession has similar numbers. Some of our sick people even had partners and children of their own.

What then is different between me and a priest? It’s a question of loyalty. There is no one in my profession, even if they are a friend of 20 years, who I wouldn’t without hesitation, throw under a bus, if I suspected or knew they had abused a child in their care. That is not some kind of professional credo. In fact it’s goes beyond a question of loyalty. It’s a duty of care. It’s a morality that always and everywhere, puts children first.

Unfortunately, the apologists for the Roman Catholic Church continually fail to understand why they are perpetually condemned for the sexual abuse of children carried out by its priests. It is not the individual abusers that are the problem. It was and is, the continued prioritisation by the Roman Catholic Church of the Roman Catholic Church over and above all other considerations. Over and above children and over the evolved morals of the twenty-first century.

I have a great deal of sympathy for the paranoid priest. He is a man I can respect. I can relate to that paranoid priest. That is a man who knows he has a job to do and that he must do it in very fraught circumstances. He will examine the policies and procedures that govern his interaction with vulnerable people. He will do all to ensure that every ‘t’ is crossed and every ‘i’ is dotted in those polices and procedures. He will ensure his parishioners are aware of the policies and procedures and he will endeavour to be very public in his adherence. Ensuring the safety of all but also ensuring the education of all. Ensuring that a standard will be set that his successors will be obliged to meet.
Thing is though, that priest no matter how conscientious, still regards himself as having the right and the duty to keep the secrets of child abusers. That pernicious arrogance, that perverted morality, makes a mockery of any child protection policies and procedures. No one would trust their child with a child abuser, that’s obvious. But how many of us would trust our children with men who do not feel obliged to bring child abusers to earthly justice?

I do not think priests should be forced to break the Confessional Seal. There are just too many people in this country who believe in the magical properties of Confession. Further, a frontal assault would just reinforce the culture of martyrhood the majority religion likes to don. We are left then, with the simple hope that this ‘perverse belief’ will in time, simply dissipate under the weight of its own ugliness.

Till then I mourn for all the children that secrecy condemns and has condemned to continued abuse and rape. I mourn for the good men who have had their sense of decency so perverted that they place a duty to their god above their duty to children. That is a wound no one has ever been made answer for.

Oh woe to woo

17th March 2014 / Paul W.S. Bowler

If the anti-fluoride people had come to me and argued that forced mass medication is a heinous imposition, I would have signed up immediately. Especially if they had used words like ‘heinous’ and ‘imposition.’ If they’d then gone on to use the word ‘Orwellian’ I’d now be flogging a calendar featuring my big bare belly and a very small fig leaf. Yes, fluoride made my willy tiny.

I’m big on saying no to being told what to do by those who have the power to tell me what to do. It’s rational to be suspicious of power. Look at what the powerful do with power, the bad bastards that they are. Of course if I’m being really reasonable I’d have to admit that I don’t like people with power because of my conflictual relationship with my father. But as I won’t accept anyone as having the power to deny me the right to base my entire belief structure on unresolved oedipal issues, I shall continue as is.

Perhaps that’s why I think that the day after the scientists prove the existence of a god, they should begin working on a way to kill it. I will still be an atheist the day after the scientists prove the existence of a god. Facts should not get in the way of a dearly held prejudice. The nation-state would fall with such clarity.

So I am, possibly, pathological in my dislike of authority. It led me to support, in principle, the referendums on Dáil Committees and judicial pay, but to vote against them because the wording was a bit too vague in the whole curtailing the power of mediocre teachers department. It’s why I’m in Fine Gael. I don’t particularly like the party, but they annoy me less than the others and no fucking way I’m not having at least a minor say in the laws that oppress, I mean, affect me.

I really should be on the side of the anti-fluoride people. No father I will not eat my greens. Yes father I accept that they may indeed be good for me, that they are rich in vitamins, minerals and fibre. And that they form the basis of any good diet. But father I simply will not be told. No father I will not go to my room, I am 39.

I’m not on the side of the anti-fluoride people simply because the enemy of atheism and secularism is not supernaturalism (well not today at least). The real enemy is woo. Not because woo is wrong. I’m a capitalist for Gandalf’s sake, I believe in all kinds of wrong stuff. If woo were simply and merely wrong, then I could politely file wooists under people who are weird but harmless, like pagans, Garth Brooks’ fans and people who don’t like Lord of the Rings.

The anti-fluoride woo is dangerous. Not dangerous in the sense that if they convince our mediocre teachers to stop adding fluoride to our water, people might die. Poorer children may suffer a deterioration in dental heath, but poor people don’t tend to matter to wooists. Wooism is very much a middle-class disease.

The danger is that reason and science will have been discounted in a major public policy decision. Nonsense populism will have won the day. Even if our mediocre teachers then decided to add fluoride to milk and salt like our European neighbours, the anti-fluoride crowd will, with inflated egos and undeserved credibility, begin looking for the next idiocy to champion.

I don’t want to suggest that the anti-fluoride brigade are as woo wrong as the homeopaths, the chemtrail weirdos, the disgraced anti-vaxers, angel healers, the Elvis is still alive, kidnapped by an alien, tin-foil hat wearing loons that inhabit the Conspiracy Theory hell-pits of the internet. I really don’t want to imply that at all. But according to Neuro-linguistic programming, just putting them all in the same paragraph is sufficient to suggest that they are all in fact, up their own fundaments, speaking through their fundaments and/or are a bunch of fundaments.

I’m not on the side of the anti-fluoride people because they represent a regression, an evolutionary cul-de-sac, an idiocracy that threatens lives. This country already has a positive surfeit of native stupidity to contend with. We use Sellotape to mis-teach teenagers about sex and I can’t be the President because I’m an atheist. That’s the only reason under the sun, that I can’t be President. Not a single thing else would stand in my way. And our bankruptcy system can trap individuals for up to eight years. Yes, I said eight years. Yeah my party brought that in. Eight fucking years. Mediocre teachers every one of them.

Then there’s our deference to authority and our lack of respect for authority. Often a dichotomy contained in the same person. What’s that about? I won’t compare the wooists to the Barbarians at Rome’s gates or the Ottomans standing before at Venice. Those would be overly dramatic references. More showing off really and possibly saying more about me than the wooists. (The allusion I’m aiming for here is floodgates. I think it works. Comments on a postcard please…)

If we allow the wooists a victory, even an empty and relatively unimportant one as this, then we may as well begin handing out the tinfoil hats now, for the idiocracy will be in the ascendancy. (That’s an astrology allusion by the way. You’re welcome) Our politicians will have surrendered to a populism so dumb and scary that a Conspiracy Theorist would think that our mediocre teachers are simply following the mob where ever it may take them, even if it’s down the rabbit hole, or up a conspiracy theorist’s fundament just to stay in power. Not realising that mediocre teachers are just that dumb.

(Just a few links to the fight against woo)

One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten and Eleven

A multiplicity of Irish Identities

13th March 2014 / Paul W.S. Bowler

“St Patrick’s Day is a universal celebration of Irishness and shallowness. With a national identity translated universally, we are left with little meaning except marketing. Irishness is now a connotation abroad, hollowed of content at home.” Gerard Howlin (The Irish Examiner)

I read this article recently. It’s a strange one as I am left wondering if I agree with the overall thesis or profoundly disagree with it. In my first read all I could discern was that old and debased saw, ‘in the good old days.’ Yes, they were the ‘good old days’ but only for a very small cohort of the population and even then they still had terrible teeth. In the ‘good old days’ Irish national identity, which was code for cowed catholic, was the stick used to beat all those who erred from the proscribed path. The mentally ill, the women who dared get pregnant in non church approved ways, actually any woman with a brain was scary, gays, lesbians, the poor, children and those perverse enough to play garrison games were all victims of this ‘good old days‘ identity.

I hold these ‘good old days’ in as much contempt as I do those who dare express any misty eyed sentiment for those foul, violent and oppressive days. On the other hand, the days when Irish identity was that bastard amalgam of 19th century nationalism and revanchist catholicism were easy on those who did not wish to question who and what they were. One could go through an entire lifetime, sated with the certainty that Irishness was this thing and not any other thing. That is easy, that is safe. That created the monoculture, the economic stagnation and political waywardness that led to a country with two dominant parties who don’t have as much as the width of a cigarette paper between them on any issue. Other than mutual acrimony of course. (And I say that as a member of one of those parties.)

“This is a country with an identity crisis so acute we are largely unaware of it. Life goes on, but out national conversation has essentially stopped and stultified.” Gerard Howlin (The Irish Examiner)

Today we don’t have an Irish culture, an Irish identity. We have a plurality of Irish cultures and Irish identities. We have about 4.5 million identities in this jurisdiction. About another 1.8 very different different identities in Northern Ireland and Gandalf knows how many other different identities across the Globe. I can’t think of anything healthier.

There are those of course who are uncomfortable with this democracy and plurality of identities and cultures. How can there be millions of Irish cultures and also just one? How can there be mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins and in-laws, but only one family?
I am atheist, thus barred from certain Public Offices, I can’t speak Irish and have no interest in doing so, I hold our Constitution in contempt, I support marriage equality, full reproductive rights for women, the decriminalisation of drugs, I wish people would be a little bit more German when it comes to parking their cars, I hold a British Passport, have a proud English woman as a mother and I think the ’16 Rising was a mistake. I am a Kerry man first, a European second and yet I remain an Irish man. There are those who think my identity disqualifies me from any claim to Irishness. To them I say, go fuck yourselves. Croziers, guns, nor even the universities get to tell me who or what I am.

If a person cannot comfortably hold many identities at once nor comfortably accommodate the plurality of identities in others, then I fear they have that limited intellect most beloved of the fascists. One can simultaneously cringe at the shamrock nonsense going on over at The White House on Paddy’s Day and still accept the economic benefit of such fawning. And one must make room for those who are genuinely touched by our Taoiseach being given access to the most powerful man on earth, so he can celebrate Irishness (or a version there of at least). There are those who still find a part of their identity in St Patrick’s Day celebrations. Who am I to criticise where they find their Irishness?

“The independent Irish state was itself the rump expression of the rump population, remaining un-emigrated in the southern part of the island” Gerard Howlin (The Irish Examiner)

This however, is a wonderful sentence. All else can be dismissed as the unfortunate sentimentality of atavist nationalism, but this is purest accuracy in a single sentence. This should be the point entire of the column.

Has there been an impact on our collective identity by being the ‘left-behind?’ Was that the basis of our earlier cruelty to the most vulnerable among us? Did we lose imagination, radicalism, vision, confidence, empathy and sympathy because the best of us left?

I’m in a bind here, because I am the product of emigration. My dad left Kerry back in the 60s. I wouldn’t exist if he hadn’t been forced to leave. I have had no negative experiences of emigration. I am comfortable with my many and varied identities. But this little country is smaller than it should be or could be. The collective identity that is 4.5 million identities, the ‘soul’ of our nation, to use the sentimental term, cannot but be marred by such stunting. That stifling, if it exists, is worth exploring.

Allergic to my Arwen?

10th March 2014 / Paul W.S. Bowler

Today my doctor told me I may be allergic to Arwen. Imagine that, allergic to my Arwen. How did this happen you may ask? Arwen has been with me since August 14, 2010. Why now? How now? Apparently there is a price to be paid for eating as if there is no price to be paid. I have managed to compromise my own immune-system by being a greedy little bollix. As I count down the months and weeks to my fortieth birthday, it appears this year will be the year I finally have to take my health more seriously than I would an occasional hobby.

I am overweight, I now have chronic rhinitis, I have a few tiny sores on my legs, which refuse to heal, reflux and acidic indigestion and I feel lethargic a lot of the time. And eight hours are not enough when until recently, seven hours sleep was plenty. Me and Arwen 10-03-14

If tests should confirm that Arwen is the cause of my eye watering, neck stiffening, shoulder tensing and facing aching fatigue then that’s tough for me, because she sleeps on my bed and has done so since she moved in, so I’m just going to have to adjust. Take my meds and thank Gandalf I can afford them.

The annoying thing was that within minutes of getting home I had thrown my entire chocolate biscuit stash in the fire (burning calories the easy way. Anyone? Anyone? Well Paula laughed) and was looking up fad diets. Oh how I love fad diets, anything that involves me not having to think for myself everyday, make decisions every day, take responsibility for my own actions, everyday. Oh please can I have someone take me by the hand and do the grown up stuff for me.

Gallingly, this need for reasonable dieting coincides with finally having mastered a few dishes I’d happily (yet nervously) serve my foodie friends. Granted one of those is steak, but oh my Odin, people who like food have no patience for less than perfect steak. It also coincides with having belatedly discovered some very good food in Tralee. And it is happening in a year where I intended eating my own weight in French food as hey, it’s my birthday.

Most importantly, it is a reminder that I am in fact now at an age where I can no longer merely complain about my weight, then go for a second and a third helping. I am now seriously courting danger. That terrifies me, but like Global Warning, my human brain cannot easily compute what may happen tomorrow, when a feta-cheese risotto is staring me in the face today.

Yet it is not a terror of death, but a terror of a slow decline given extra pace. I do not wish to spend the next 20 years back and forth to the doctor, I want to spend the next 40 years living. I do not want to spend the next 20 years with a chronic illness, obesity.

I threw my chocolate biscuits in the fire. I have paracetamol ready if I get sugar withdrawal. I am going grocery shopping tomorrow. I am trying to work out what vegetables I’ll eat, when not smothered in garlic butter. I am trying to find some vegetarian options that don’t appall me. I am trying to hold onto the fear just long enough to create a new lifestyle.

And I am hoping my blood-tests show I’m allergic to sugar rather than Arwen. Wouldn’t that be serendipity?

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

27th January 2014 / Paul W.S. Bowler

a bit spoilerish)

I’m finally getting around to reviewing The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Like An Unexpected Journey, I watched it twice, in two different cinemas over two days. First at The Odeon in Point Village and then in The Savoy on O’Connell Street. I went for the 3D version which was grand I suppose, the giant bumble bees were cool and there was one brief interaction with Smaug that really rocked. To date the only film I’ve watched that seemed genuinely enhanced by 3D had been ‘A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.’ Not really a ringing endorsement for the technology.

Anyway, the film itself. Loved it. Could find no fault with it. Some wonderful action sequences and Smaug himself was everything one would want in a fire-breathing sociopathic behemoth.

I dismissed the first movie as self-indulgent to the point of harming the franchise. Fortunately I’ve was proven utterly incorrect. That movie did great business, as has this one. While admitting I was wrong, I still am confident that this film is far superior to Unexpected Journey. Obviously as this is the second film there was a great deal less exposition required. The film didn’t have to bring nerd and non-nerd up to date, beyond a single scene recalling Gandalf’s first meeting with Thorin Oakenshield.

We get to see elves, actual elves. Now these are Sylvan Elves. A race of elves more mercurial than their Eldar cousins, but still, Elves. Legolas was there. His father, the menacing King Thranduil was there. And we got to meet non-canon character, Tauriel. A she-elf who may or may not have caught the eye of our erstwhile Prince Legolas. It is wonderful to see elves, who while still immensely powerful, long-lived and intelligent, behave without the wisdom of the Eldar. They come across as more über-human than otherworldly. But hey, Elves. I think Tauriel fits seamlessly into the narrative. Not sure about the love-interest. Are they trying to ape the bromance of Gimli and Legolas from Lord of the Rings?

Smaug was mind blowing, yet Bilbo managed to hold his own in the exchange and I mean that as a comment on performance rather than narrative. Martin Freeman could and should have been blown away (excuse the pun) by Benedict Cumberbatch’s Smaug. It is a wonderfully observed interaction. I described Martin Freeman’s Bilbo as a delight in my review of An Unexpected Journey. Here he is a delight and more. He brings a depth that tells a story about a character but also foreshadows so much of what is to come at the close of The Third Age.

Gandalf goes wholly off reservation if one is totally hung up on the book. The film tells us what the book only implies and Tolkien later confirmed in the appendices and other sources. He abandons the group to investigate a new dark power. That is a confrontation worth the admission money alone.
The dwarves are part heroic, part bumbling buffoons and many parts avaricious mercenaries, but they are never disloyal and never cowardly. (Watch out for the comic mention of Gimli from by father). Again Richard Armitage brings a tragic majesty to his Thorin. It is clear why this king of a lost kingdom (Aragornesque?) can inspire his fellow dwarves to battle a bloody fire-breathing dragon.

In short I loved this film. I loved the previous one, but this one I’d defend to a non-Ringer. Roll on the final installment. Though after that, what’s left?

Column: A thousand years from my window

23rd January 2014 / Paul W.S. Bowler

My column in The Kerryman. 22 January, 2014

I grew up in Lixnaw, which has a great deal of history. My parents’ house is 100 metres from where the Norman lords of Kerry had their castle. Thomas FitzMaurice was made Baron of Lixnaw and Kerry in the 13th Century. He founded the Franciscan Monastery in Ardfert.

Where the castle once stood, are the ruins of the later FitzMaurices’ stately home. In that big house was born Arabella FitzMaurice-Denny, who founded the first Magdalene institution for ‘fallen’ women. She had a nephew who became a Prime Minister of Britain and gave his name to Landsowne Road Stadium.

Go a hundred metres in the opposite direction and there’s Lixnaw’s GAA ground. I still remember the day the farmers of the parish arrived with tractors and trailers to draw soil dredged from the River Brick to the new pitch. On the day it opened Kerry played Limerick in hurling. I can’t remember who won, but I remember it was sunny.

Hurling has always been the first love of Lixnaw. Three Lixnaw men, Maurice Kelly, John Murphy and Maurice FitzMaurice (great-grandfather to today’s county football manager, Eamon FitzMaurice) played on the side that won Kerry’s first ever All Ireland in 1891. It may seem strange to some that Kerry’s first win was in hurling, but the real irony is that the Lixnaw men played with our fiercest rivals, Ballyduff.

A recent addition to the village is a Memorial Arch erected in memory of the Irish people who died in the Korean War. Close by is the convent school. It once included a secondary school and a school for people with learning disabilities. It’s where I cast my first vote.

Next to the convent is St Michael’s Church, built in the 1865. I may not be a Roman Catholic, but I still have strong feelings about what churches should look like and they should look like St Michael’s.

My old school is a short walk away. It looks much different from when I attended. It has been a nursery for many of Lixnaw’s hurlers these last few decades and it’s where I cast my most recent vote.

One day, when I was in I think first class, we were drawn to the sound of a train going through the village. As far as I know it was the last ever train to go through Lixnaw.
The railway station closed and it’s now a home. It has that Victorian architecture common to train stations all over Ireland. A pity I can’t walk from my house to a train station that could take me all the way to Dublin.

The village also has its ‘ghost estate’; locked behind metal fencing, a piece of new history, our monument to failure.

On the other side of the village is the Community Centre. I remember watching my uncle perched high on scaffolding as he helped to build it.

Beyond that is one of Lixnaw’s bogs, where I sometimes helped my neighbours save turf. From there one can see the bridge over to Ballyduff. It’s the third bridge in my lifetime. Hopefully this one’ll last. Across the river is Rattoo Tower. A round tower built a millennium ago to protect against the ravaging Vikings, ancestors to the Normans.

It’s an interesting experience, being able to see a thousand years from my window.

Kerry Column 01

Column: Donal Walsh’s legacy

15th January 2014 / Paul W.S. Bowler

My column in The Kerryman. 15 January, 2014

There’s this thing that happens when an inspirational figure dies. First the person is elevated to a position above mere humanity, then there’s an unseemly fight for ownership of that person’s memory. When that fight is about someone as exceptional and brave and as young as Donal Walsh was, then things get very serious.

That struggle over Donal Walsh is being waged on Twitter, Facebook, in chat-rooms and on blogs. It’s a war about how we should interpret the words and utilise the memory of Donal Walsh in our attempt to reduce suicide in this country. Unfortunately, suicide is a mental health issue that, like any other health problem, requires a lot of money to resolve.

Donal Walsh wanted to save lives. He wanted to inspire his peers to choose life over death, a choice he was being denied himself. He reacted to a spate of ‘copy-cat suicides’ by issuing a message of such strength and integrity, that he gave some of his peers reason to pause. He may have saved lives, achieving in his short life more than many will ever achieve. For this his legacy should be assured.

The trouble for me is the way his message has been taken up by the HSE and politicians. Worse, the media has failed to bring any level of investigative expertise to this issue and have allowed this purest hero to be used as a ‘poster-boy’ in what seems to me a cheap and inaccurate campaign against the scourge of depression and suicide.

Donal Walsh spoke to those of his peers who may have recklessly chosen suicide as a solution to a short-term problem. He was not speaking to those who struggle with the long-term disease called depression.

Depression is no great mystery. It’s a disease like any other. A certain percentage of the population will contract it. Some will have such mild symptoms, that they may cope without help. Others will need some intervention and yet more will need massive amounts of resources, over a long period of time, to save their lives.

Like cancer, it requires money, money and more money to combat. Medication, residential care, long-term sick leave and talk therapy are all very expensive. They are not available to everyone. And even when they are available, a recent study showed that 60% of respondents would not hire someone with a history of mental illness.

Try imagining everyone who contracted depression receiving the same level of care, support and admiration as we think someone with cancer deserves to get. It’s a pipe-dream because depression is a mental illness so it only merits sound-bytes, empty promises and damaging rhetoric about cheering up.

This dismissal of the true nature of depression means the Department of Health, the HSE and our politicians are not implicated in the avoidable deaths of those with depression who take their own lives. That’s the horrible thing being done to Donal Walsh’s memory.

He is being held up as an example to depression sufferers. They may as well be telling cancer sufferers, be as brave as Donal Walsh, just don’t expect to be looked after.

Donal Walsh deserves better than that. Sufferers of depression deserve better than that. If our politicians want to address suicide, start spending and stop telling ill people to cheer up.

Kerry Column 02

Column: Fluoride in our water

8th January 2014 / Paul W.S. Bowler

My column in The Kerryman. 8 January, 2014

There’s a long tradition of women taking their clothes off for a good cause. A thousand years ago Lady Godiva rode naked through town naked on a horse so her husband would reduce taxes. More recently there was that world famous calendar made by the Women’s Institute in Britain. They posed naked to raise money for cancer research.

Today we have Kerry woman Aisling FitzGibbon using the same tactic to draw attention to her anti-fluoridation campaign. Her efforts haven’t going unnoticed. Water fluoridation was the subject of a Private Members Bill in the Dáil. It didn’t get anywhere, but some of our elected representatives spoke out against putting fluoride in our water.

It may have been dismissed by the Government, but getting that far must still count as a remarkable success for the cause. I’m reluctant to draw further attention to this non-issue but it does raise an interesting topic; who do we trust to guide us when we don’t understand or don’t want to understand something?

For thousands of years we trusted witch-doctors and priests to make sense of all the things that confused or scared us, be it death, disease, the weather or other tribes. We knew how to hunt, gather, make rudimentary tools and find shelter. We left the serious thinking and the other worldly knowledge to a chosen few.

Things haven’t changed a great deal since then. We still allow a chosen few to do the thinking for us. The only difference now, is that we’ve much more choice regarding who we trust.

I’m not above this. I wish I was, but life’s too busy and distracting for me to carefully investigate every single decision I’m faced with on a daily basis. Most of my decisions then, eventually become matters of habit or instinct. I’d get nothing done otherwise.

What about the less common decisions? Even they can become tiresome, but when they’re about our health we do try to make some sort of sense of the overwhelming amount of information available.

What then do we do when faced by an earnest young woman, with a compelling story, who’s so convinced of her opinion that she has convinced many national politicians to join her cause?

How do we handle the occasional scientist and study which kinda looks like they might sort of justify a fear of fluoride? Who has the time to do the required reading? Who do we trust to do our thinking for us?

I trust that a scientist has two basic ways to claim something to be true. He or she must create an experiment that proves what they claim. Then they must publish the details of that experiment. If other scientists can’t replicate the results, then it’s back to the drawing board. Or they can assemble a huge amount of statistics and then after refining all the data, according to strict and transparent rules, they may venture some verifiable conclusions.

Thus far, no experiment nor any study has convinced me that the 0.7 parts per million of fluoride that’s in our water is anything but a cost-effective boost to public health.

Kerry Column 03

Column: A united Ireland?

3rd January 2014 / Paul W.S. Bowler

My column in The Kerryman. 1 January, 2014

It might just be me, or the company I keep, the television I watch or the newspapers I read, but no one seems interested in the subject of a united Ireland anymore. That might be a healthy thing. I don’t know. It’s certainly strange when we consider that up to recently, men, women and children were being murdered over this issue.

I think it should be discussed more. I know it can be an uncomfortable subject and it can provoke hatred and nonsense, but discussing Northern Ireland and wondering about a united Ireland is a good way in which we can discuss our own nation and nationhood. To imagine a united Ireland one has to examine the why and the how of a united Ireland. It means deciding on how many compromises we’d be prepared to make.

Before I go any further, let me first get my prejudices out of the way. I don’t care if there’s ever a united Ireland. Neither would I care if it was to happen tomorrow. The status of Northern Ireland has no bearing on my identity whatsoever. As long as it’s a functioning democracy, my only interest in it, is as a way of examining this nation. I’m interested in the process that would necessarily precede a united Ireland.

As a united Ireland is very unlikely in most of our lifetimes, this is all theoretical. I’d still ask that you think about the questions and examine the emotions they may provoke.

If Ireland could be unified by military means, would you support those actions? If Ireland was unified, by military or peaceful means, would you see that as a victory for Ireland and our ancestors? Is it important to your sense of Irishness that Irish people always strive for a united Ireland?

Do you care in the least about Northern Ireland beyond a wish that the people there live a peaceful and democratic life? Are both traditions up there equally as alien to you? Does the notion of taking all that strife onto our shoulders horrify you?

If a united Ireland represents a progression rather than a victory, what compromise would you make to accommodate a very large minority who have a different identity? Would you sacrifice the symbols that the people of this country take very seriously? Are the flag, the national anthem, the status of the Irish language and our relationship with the UK all on the table?

What would the flag of a united Ireland look like? Would we have three official languages? How would we construct a history curriculum that would respect the heritages of everyone in a united Ireland?

Would Northern Ireland remain as a political entity, like it is in the UK, but ruled from Dublin or would the political system of this jurisdiction be extended to include the whole island?

Can we have two public holidays, one that remembers the men of the 1916 Rising and another that commemorates the men who fought them? Will our army be the inheritors of both these traditions?

As I said, a united Ireland is not likely, but the idea of it can help us decide just what it is we value most about our own identity, here and now. I think that a worthwhile exploration and debate.

Kerry Column 04