Posts By William Wall

01-02-2013 11-45-41

The McAleese Report on the Magdalene Laundries (2013)

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Yesterday the McAleese report on the Magdalene Laundries was published. Like many others, I expected that the report would be a whitewash. Why did I expect that?

Martin McAleese is the husband of former President of Ireland, Mary McAleese. She was chosen for election by reactionary forces who sought to undo the advances achieved during the presidency of Mary Robinson, who was seen by them as a left-wing president who sought to advance dangerous causes such as feminism (she had been a highly successful feminist lawyer before her election). For an interesting insight into the selection process within Fianna Fáil read this article.

During her tenure she made many appearances at Catholic Church events. Her most controversial moment came, typically enough, when she took communion in an Anglican Church of Ireland cathedral. That her only controversial action should be theological is characteristic of her presidency which was marked by outward expressions of piety.

In 2010, then President McAleese gave the opening lecture at a conference of the right-wing Italian Catholic movement Comunione e Liberazione in Rimini, Italy. This is how The Italian correspondent of The Irish Times described that organisation:

“Founded in 1954 by Italian Monsignor Luigi Giussani, Comunione e Liberazione (CL) is, to some extent, an Italian version of the influential Spanish lay movement, Opus Dei, although it has no formal connections with Opus Dei. Throughout its history, it has received both public and tacit support from at least three popes – Paul VI, John Paul II and the current pope, Benedict XVI.

The current papal household is run by consecrated members (Memores Domini) of CL. Generally perceived as right-wing, conservative and integrationalist, CL has often been politically active in Italy. In the 1970s, the movement played a prominent part in failed campaigns to prevent the legalisation of both abortion and divorce. CL has always counted important shakers and makers among its public supporters, including most notably the seven-times prime minister Giulio Andreotti.”

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Reilly’s Jew: What ‘austerity’ really means #1

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In Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish there is a phrase that fascinates me: ‘a small penal mechanism’.

‘At the heart of all disciplinary systems functions a small penal mechanism’, he says.

The sentence came to mind recently when I heard that the Irish government was introducing a €75 charge for each round of chemotherapy. The charge is nicely judged: it will only apply to those cancer patients who are not poor enough to qualify for a medical card (free treatment) but are too poor to be able to afford private medical insurance. They have, perhaps, given up insurance in these times of austerity in order to feed their kids, and now faced with the terrifying prospect of cancer they must reassess the situation. It is a game of exquisite torture.

I’m reliably informed that chemotherapy can involve anything from a handful of rounds to dozens or even hundreds.
What does this particular form of ‘austerity’ tell us about the people imposing the charge?Minister Dr James Reilly – the man who closes down public nursing home beds while simultaneously being a shareholder in a private nursing home, the man who was listed in Stubbs Gazette recently as an undischarged debtor in relation to a €1.9 million debt on a nursing home – has cast around in his health budget of €1407,8000,000 (or €1.4 bn) and found a group of people who will try to pay up no matter what because the alternative is unthinkable.

What’s more, they’ll never be on the streets protesting. The big man (and Reilly is big) picked a fight with the sick child.

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Savita Halappanavar and the Doctor’s Plague

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When my sister was born my mother began to haemorrhage badly and was in danger of bleeding to death. My father and my aunt (a nurse who qualified in England) pleaded with the doctor to carry out a hysterectomy – then the only treatment. He refused on the grounds that a hysterectomy would prevent her having future children. In effect it would be a form of contraception. When my father threatened to take him to court he held out both hands and said, ‘Mr Wall, these hands were blessed by the Pope’. Nevertheless, under threat of legal action, he buried his conscientious objections and did the deed and saved my mother’s life. This was more than fifty years ago.

The recent denial, in similar circumstances, of appropriate treatment to Savita Halappanavar by staff at University Hospital Galway and her subsequent death from septicaemia has caused much controversy here and abroad, not least in her home country where the India Times ran a headline that said: ‘Ireland Murders Pregnant Indian Dentist’. It is, I think, a fair accusation.

There are a few things I would like to say on the matter.

Firstly, what Savita Halappanavar died of – septicaemia – used to be called ‘puerperal fever’ and puerperal fever was nicknamed the ‘doctor’s plague’. It resulted from the increasing tendency to medicalise childbirth from the 15th century onwards. By contrast, incidence of puerperal fever was much lower for traditional births where midwives attended women in their own homes. In other words, for many centuries it was more dangerous to give birth in a hospital than at home. Puerperal fever achieved it’s ‘plague’ status because of the presence of large numbers of women giving birth at the same time in a factory-type situation – and, significantly, the handling of their bodies by men, namely doctors. It was not a plague that affected doctor’s but one that they created. In that sense it was truly ‘the doctor’s plague’.

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& the state of California executes

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& the state of California executes

 

a man who wrote children’s books

twenty four years on death row

during the twelve minutes

 

it took to find a vein in his

left arm

he joked with them

 

the warden of San Quentin

said everything depends on the veins

& how accessible they are

 

& also it was a high-pressure

assignment for the nurse

getting the needle in before so many people

 

the man was strapped into a dentist’s chair

in a room that was painted sea-green

green is a relaxing colour

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James Connolly or The 100th Object in the Irish Times ‘History of Ireland’ series

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The Irish Times has been running a series of articles called ‘A history of Ireland in 100 Objects’ and they’ve announced that the public will be asked to choose the final object in the series.

I would like to propose, as the 100th object and one which encapsulates the entire history of modern Ireland since independence, the miniature figurine of James Connolly on sale in the shop of the National Museum of Ireland.

This figurine of the great communist revolutionary is categorised under the ‘Soldiers of Ireland’ list, mainly of people who fought and/or died for Ireland. The list includes The Papal Zouaves who fought so bravely for the Pope against Garibaldi’s red-shirts; General Richard Mulcahy, who signed the order that led to the execution for possession of firearms of 77 former comrades who were imprisoned during the civil war; Dublin Fusiliers who fought so bravely for the British Empire and Churchill’s dream of breaking the Turkish hold of the Dardanelles; and Patrick Pearse leader of the nationalist Irish Volunteers who fought so bravely for a Catholic Irish-speaking Ireland. Along with them is a colourful figure of a captain of the Bank of Ireland Yeomanry. I have no idea if the Bank of Ireland Yeomanry fought for Ireland, but they no doubt played their part in the class war. I’m surprised the Bank of Ireland doesn’t still have a militia, but I suppose it has the police and the politicians and the European Union on its side.

At least Connolly wouldn’t be completely alone in this mass of bourgeois reactionaries and tools of religion: Countess Markievicz was a socialist too, and makes her appearance in Citizen Army uniform as a ‘Solider of Ireland’. As well as being the first woman elected to the British House of Commons she was Connolly’s friend – though our nationalist histories would rather think of her as a hysterical escapee from the madhouse that was Ireland’s gentry. WB Yeats, of course, did his best to propagate that myth.

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From the East End to the West: The Political Journey of an Irish Londoner

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Like many families that lived around harbours, my mother’s went to sea. At least three generations of them. And most of them went to sea in Royal Navy ships. On top of that, the Great Depression, coupled with De Valera’s Economic War drove all of my mother’s siblings to England, one way or the other. The two girls went nursing. The three boys joined the navy. Four of them never came back; one went down with the Neptune in a mine-field off North Africa, three of them married and settled and were quite content to stay there, apart from holidays ‘at home’. The fifth came home to die.

This is the story of generations of working class people and poor farmers and labourers in every country of the world since the industrial revolution. I heard the same stories in Naples. In one of the opening scenes of Il Postino the actor Massimo Troisi looks in disbelief at a postcard from America, unable to accept the relative affluence of his cousins there. It could have been shot in Connemara. Recently a Nigerian taxi-driver in London described his home place in exactly the same terms that my uncles used.

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