Month: May 2017

I’m not a DIY enthusiast. In fact, it’s fair to say that I have absolutely no interest in it. My late father was in the building game and he was always there if I needed something fixed. There are others now who fix things for me and it’s a very simple arrangement. I give them money and they fix stuff.

Some people are good with tools and some can’t drive a nail, so I think it’s reasonable to let those who know what they’re doing to get on with it. It’s horses for courses.

The other thing about DIY is that you’re wasting your time if you haven’t got the proper equipment. If you try to change a tap in the kitchen and the only tool you have in the shed is a shovel, then you’re off to a bad start. You can be pretty certain in that case that you are going to run into problems. By the same token, if you want to fix the roof then you will need something other than your garden hose.

The other thing to keep in mind is that there is no such thing as a simple job. Neither is there any job that will only take five miniutes. So, when someone tells you; “Ah, sure you’ll have it done five miniutes”, that’s the time to cut and run because it’s not going to end well.

If I hammer a nail into the wall to hang a picture, there is a good chance that I’ll hit an electric cable and half the wall will have to come down to fix it. If I dig a hole in the floor, then I’m guaranteed to hit a water pipe, flood the house and upset the foundations. At that stage, I have to call in someone to fix the chaos.

Even painting can be problematic. When your wife says that she wants the hall touched up, that’s really code for “I’m going to completely redecorate the entire house.” Then she’ll decide that the colour needs to be changed so everything will have to get at least two coats. Anyway, there is no such thing as a touch up because once you start, everything else looks shabby. The best thing to do is just leave it alone.

When the weather starts to improve, my queen turns her attention to the outdoors. I have no interest in the garden or anything that grows in it. One of the reasons that I was happy to leave my last home in the country was because of the large amount of grass, hedging, trees and shrubs that needed my attention.

When I started out in that house, the garden was very manageable. The hedge was low. So low in fact that in the early days we thought that it was deceased but we eventually encouraged it back to life. It repaid us over the years by growing to enormous proportions and nearly swallowing up the house in the process.

When we planted the trees, they were about a foot high and there were lots of them. They looked lovely at first and again they were minded, watered and spoken to until they took on a life of their own. Years later, cutting them became a major operation.

The shrubs, like everything else, became fully grown adult bushes that housed many dark secrets like bugs, thorns and other stuff that attacked human flesh. Every time I went out to cut the grass I was going to war with nature. That garden, that was supposed to be a piece of Heaven, became a living, killing, evil, spiteful piece of demonic jungle. I had to escape from it.

Now, in my current home, I have very little greenery but still no peace.

Recently, I decided that as the weather was starting to improve, I would cut the grass. The garden shed has a pvc door but it was locked of course and the key was missing. So, I went on YouTube to find out how to get through a locked pvc door without a key. No problem they said, it’s just a five miniute job. That worried me straight away.

So, the guy on YouTube did his thing and hey presto, in about thirteen seconds, the lock was in bits on the floor and the door was open. It was my turn next. I gathered the necessary equipment and prepared for an assault on the lock. I did what I was told on the video but it didn’t look as if I was going to break the thirteen second mark. In fact, it was beginning to look as if the entire shed might be demolished with the door still locked.

I grabbed the lock with the vice grips but instead of snapping off as it did in the video, it hung on for dear life. It was working against me. But I got into the zone and stuck with it and eventually it popped off. Half an hour later and the rest of the lock was in pieces and I was in.

Replacing it was supposed to be another five miniute job but that involved several trips to the hardware store, some huffing and puffing, some choice language and some skinned knuckles. By the time I was ready to cut the grass it started raining so I had to abandon it.

The moral of this story is that sometimes when you need something done, it’s better to call people who know what they’re doing. No matter what anyone tells you, there is no such thing as a quick fix. So, the next time someone suggests doing a little spring cleaning, painting, grass cutting or any other job that will only take five miniutes, tell them to get lost.

 

 

 

 

 

They say that once you admit you have a problem, you are half way towards getting it fixed. Well, I’m going to make a start by declaring, here and now, that I need professional help. I need a good psychiatrist to find out what makes me tick because there is something not quite right in my head.

I don’t normally dream too much, or maybe I do but I’m just not aware of it. But lately I have been having dreams that make absolutely no sense whatsoever and they don’t seem to follow any logic.

I’ll give you an example. The other night I dreamt that I was in my local pub having a pint with my grandson. We were both having a pint of Guinness and we were engaged in a serious conversation. Now you might think that this sounds normal enough and that it’s nice that a grandfather and grandson would go for a drink together. But Cooper isn’t three years old yet.

He was sitting on a stool next to me and he was hardly able to reach the counter, drinking a pint and chatting away and my brain didn’t think that there was anything wrong with that picture.

I’ve had lots more of these, some are too silly to even remember, but they are becoming more frequent. I have had adventures with people I don’t even know, like the actor Michael Caine. I have also performed a concert with the comedian Billy Connolly. I have never met either of these guys.

I have had another little experience too that may or may not be related.

A few years back I was living in Cyprus. I had a lovely two- bedroom apartment and it was relatively new. It was built on the edge of The Buffer Zone which is a stretch of no mans’ land that runs from east to west on the island. It separates the north of the island which is occupied by Turkish Cypriots and the south of the island which is occupied by the Greek Cypriots.

From the balcony in my apartment I had an unobstructed view of the Buffer Zone and I could also see part of the ghost city of Famagusta. Part of that city remains unoccupied since the Turkish invasion in 1974 and it is monitored by the United Nations. That resort area was once the playground of the rich and famous like Liz Taylor and Richard Burton but now lies abandoned.

One night I was sleeping in the apartment and as usual I had the bedroom door open to allow the air to circulate. Something woke me and when I opened my eyes there was a man standing in the doorway. I couldn’t make out his face but I could see the rest of him. My first thought was that I had been broken into.

I reached over for the light and jumped out of bed but there was nobody there. I checked the front door and the sliding door to the balcony and they were both locked. There was nobody else in the apartment and at that stage I was kind of spooked.

There were two ladies living in the apartment next door and we had become great friends. They were two mature ladies, Ulla from Sweden and Tove from Denmark. I wasn’t living there long when I heard a loud crash coming from their apartment one evening. It sounded to me like the kitchen units were after falling off the wall. I went next door and rang the bell. The door opened and these two astonished faces looked out at me. I asked them if they were ok and they started laughing.

They couldn’t understand how anyone would care whether they lived or died and they thought it was wonderful that someone would check up on them. They invited me in for a gin and tonic and that was the start of a great friendship.

They used to give me a hard time about my work in the Buffer Zone and being part of the UN which they had no great faith in. I used to tell them that I was very busy killing people and protecting them from all kinds of marauders. They took to calling me Mr. Bond and they still do today.

One day, I was talking to my neighbours and I told them about my visitor and I expected to get a bit of slagging. But to my surprise they told me that they had felt a presence in their apartment too.

I subsequently got talking to a local farmer and he was telling me about the history of the area. He told me that it was a very violent time during the invasion and many people died. He said that there were many bodies scattered around that area of the Buffer Zone including the place where my block of apartments now stood.

He also told me that there are people missing who are presumed to be dead but whose bodies have never been recovered.

I have thought about what happened in my apartment that night and I have tried to find a plausible explanation for what I saw. I am normally a practical person and I would be sceptical about the spirit world and ghosts and goblins. But I can’t explain what I saw.

My sister, Deb, came to stay with me for a couple of weeks with her son, Ryan, and they shared the spare room. I didn’t say anything to them about my visitor because I didn’t want to spook them. But one morning we were having a chat and Deb mentioned that she thought she saw someone standing at the foot of the bed during the night.

Maybe I’m not the only one losing it.

This time last year I wrote about the demise community policing in Ireland. I was critical of senior garda management and I suggested that politics was influencing decision making in An Garda Siochana which was not good for policing. This article was published online and it received over 55,000 hits.

I’ve mentioned it here before that, following that publication, I was advised by some of my ex colleagues, that a few senior officers were suggesting that I should be careful about what I was saying or I could find myself in the High Court. Others had apparently suggested that I should be treated as a persona non- grata because I had betrayed the Force. I had broken the code of silence.

I wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire with my piece and it hardly qualified as breaking news. I didn’t reveal anything that wasn’t already known but the response from those officers is indicative of the kind of attitude that exists in An Garda Siochana. It did makme me to wonder about the treatment being meted out to the likes of Maurice McCabe, Dave Taylor and others.

If I was being slapped down for my small outburst, what were whistleblowers having to deal with? Then I began to wonder about how many more gardai have been advised to remember the omerta?

Well, the truth is we’ll probably never know because the people who want to highlight issues have no belief in the system that was designed to listen to them. Until that changes, those who would like to speak out will, instead, continue to bite their tongues.

There was a poll taken recently of middle-ranking officers and it found that almost three-quarters of them have no faith in the system for handing over confidential information. 71% said they had no confidence in the system for making protected disclosures and 91% said they either didn’t know enough about the procedures or didn’t have any faith in them.

According to Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors president, Antoinette Cunningham, her association was never consulted in relation to a protected disclosures charter in An Garda Síochána. She said it was sad that while the Government has decided to establish a high level working group, they have left out the very people that are involved in the process on ground level.

Antoinette shouldn’t be surprised by this because garda management has a poor record when it comes to consulting with the troops on the ground. But maybe she is worrying unnecessarily though because Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald has said that it will take time for gardaí to feel confident acting as whistleblowers but the Government is working on increasing trust in the force, after the alleged treatment of Sergeant Maurice McCabe.

“It’s important that there are procedures in place that whistleblowers can trust,” said Minister Fitzgerald.

She has said that an independent review of the “wider and more fundamental issues of public concern” in the gardaí will be carried out with the appointment of the independent expert, who will have a track record in bringing about reforms in police forces in other jurisdictions.

So, we will have another expert to carry out another examination to write another report and put it alongside the others from the Garda Inspectorate, the Policing Authority and GSOC.

Professor Robert Bloom of Boston College, recently completed a research fellowship at the Trinity Long Room Hub in collaboration with the School of Law, and he has spoken about the external agencies moving the Garda Síochána to change its culture and break the ‘blue wall of silence,’ the blind allegiance to each other that exists in a police force. He is particularly interested in the closed culture which leads members of the Garda Síochána and other police forces to isolate whistle-blowers and hide wrongdoing.

A law professor for over 35 years, Professor Bloom teaches criminal procedure at Boston College Law School. His study of criminal procedure has led him to focus closely on the police. “The ‘blue wall of silence’ also exists in Ireland,” says Professor Bloom.

He has commented that it has always been a truism that progression within the force was dependent on two factors: Patronage and “team spirit”. Patronage simply means having someone of higher rank within the job or pre-eminence within a political party who can vouch for a candidate when they apply for promotion.

He is right of course but how do we change it?  Those currently serving in management positions in An Garda Siochana have been trained, promoted and contaminated by this very system that is in need of change. The majority of these people are good, competent operators who are performing to the best of their ability. There are others, less capable, who have reached their positions through the culture of ‘pull’ and ‘cronyism’ that exists within the Force.

All of them have one thing in common, they are all part of the same system. This is no fault of theirs because it is the only system available to them, one that encourages a code of silence. A system that will consign you to the back benches if you are of a mind to speak up for yourself and not one to blindly follow the party line.

Nepotism is flourishing in An Garda Siochana and political affiliations are very important too. Interviews are held as a matter of course for various positions but these are often completely irrelevant as far as picking the most suitable candidate is concerned. The ‘chosen ones’ will have been selected well in advance of any interview process.

This is the way it is. Changing the entire culture of an organisation that has operated in this way since 1922 is going to take a lot more than banal utterances from the Minister for Justice.

 

 

 

 

I bumped into an ex colleague of mine recently and it was good to see him again after being out of touch for a few years. Paul Aherne is his name and he is a Clare man who has managed to put down his roots in Kanturk.

Many years ago, while we were working together, Paul told me that he needed a day off because he had to go and dig a grave in Clare. I thought that maybe he had fallen and banged his head so I offered him a seat. I reminded him that he was already gainfully employed by the Department of Justice and that he was not a grave digger. But he insisted on going anyway.

He told me that it was customary in his part of the world for the local people to get together to dig a grave when someone in their community died. Family, friends and neighbours would take it in turns to dig a piece of the grave and then after doing their bit, they would take a sip out of a bottle of whiskey that would be placed at the head of the plot.

He told me that anybody can take a turn at the digging and that on one occasion, he saw the local postman getting involved. Postman Pat was cycling by when he saw what was going on, he threw his bike against the wall and picked up a shovel. He did some digging, had his sip of whiskey and then headed off on his rounds again.

I have never forgotten that story and when I reminded him about it, he told me that he had a little follow up tale.

Not so long ago, he went to Doon in Co. Limerick to do the same thing for another relative. He told me that fourteen people had been lined up to dig the grave and when they were finished the digging, the plan was that they were going to adjourn to a local pub for soup and sandwiches.

When over forty people turned up in the graveyard, there were some frantic calls made to the pub to increase the order for the grub. They were going to need more sandwiches. But it showed that this tradition is still alive and kicking in some parts of the country.

But it’s not just a matter of turning up and scattering earth everywhere either like a demented mole. There is a structure in place and a procedure to be followed. For instance, you are not allowed to use your own shovel and the oldest member of the family must be the first person to start the dig and the grave must be dug on the same day as the removal.

I had never heard of this practice before but it seems that it is common in certain parts of Clare, West Cork and County Limerick. But a few years ago, there was an attempt made to outlaw this tradition by Cork County Council. It’s the kind of story that makes you think you are hallucinating and Sean O’Riordan reported on the events in the Irish Examiner at the time.

The county and town councils in Cork had passed bylaws, which required all gravediggers to undergo mandatory training. The plan was that once they had completed the training course they would be included in a list of approved gravediggers. A council spokesman had said that gravedigging was a dangerous activity and it should not be undertaken by unapproved persons. He said the bylaws were adopted in line with Health and Safety Authority guidelines.

The council said, “Gravediggers in small communities who dig three or less graves a year will be considered for a 50% reimbursement on the costs of mandatory training.” The qualification cost €125 for a Safe Pass course, a further €125 for a manual handling course, and gravediggers also had to complete a €210 grave-digging and risk-assessment course, including first aid training. The regulations required grave-diggers to have appropriate immunisation and equipment, including ear defenders, mobile phones and underground cable detection tools.

Now, you might think that that was a little over the top but when you take into consideration the risks that are involved in grave digging, then you might see the point in all this. Gravediggers could get some earth in their hair or maybe a blister on their hand if they weren’t used to manual labour or maybe even a hangover if they had too much of the whiskey. So, it’s a risky business.

I’m not sure how this training was going to work exactly but I have an image of a very large sod being housed in CIT or UCC and a fully approved hole digging trainer employed to give courses on proper digging. I can’t imagine it lasting too long though because after lecture one, I’m struggling to find a topic for a follow up talk.

It would be a handy number for the lecturer though. Step one; take the shovel in both hands and stick it in the ground. Step two; remove the shovel with the dirt attached and throw the dirt away. Repeat steps one and two until you end up with a large hole.

Thankfully, we were spared all that because following a plethora of complaints, the local authority held further discussions with the Health and Safety Authority and it was decided that health and safety legislation did not apply. However, the county council said that people would, in future, dig graves “at their own risk”.

Thankfully, Cork County Council finally relented after someone sprinkled them liberally with ‘common sense dust’. This is a fantastic tradition and it adds a personal touch to a sad occasion and no doubt brings some comfort to the mourners.

Long may it continue.

 

I have travelled a bit and I am lucky to have seen some wonderful places in my time. I have been to Bandon, Carrigtwohill and Killarney in County Kerry. I have been to Whitegate several times so, you can see from this, that I am well able to get around. I have no fear when it comes to broadening my horizons, not too unlike Christopher Columbus I suppose.

The main difference between myself and Christy is that I can’t find things while he was fairly good at that sort of thing. I probably wouldn’t have made a great explorer and I’ll tell you why.

 In 1492, Columbus left Spain in the Santa Maria, along with the Pinta and the Niña to do some exploring. On his way, he arrived at a little island called La Gomera, off Tenerife, and this was his last port of call on his voyage that led to the discovery of America. Columbus had intended to reach India using a new route. He also led expeditions to Africa, the Canary Islands, the Middle East, India and China. No bother to him.

La Gomera’s bay was considered the best of all the Canary Islands as well as being the safest, and Columbus was aware of this. On La Gomera he found all the supplies and drinking water he needed to supply his ships and sailors. The friendly inhabitants and the agreeable climate suited Columbus and he visited there on a few occasions.

According to tradition, Columbus was known to say a prayer at the Church of the Assumption and next to this, just up the street is the so-called house of Columbus, which he presumably used as a base when he was there.

Having found myself on that same island recently, and having a little bit of interest in Christy as a fellow traveller, I set out to find this ‘House of Columbus’. It is next to the church I was told, can’t miss it. I found the church but I couldn’t find the house. So, I called to a little tourist information centre and spoke to a lady who directed me to a white house just up the street from the church but it was closed that day. No problem, I just wanted to see it from the outside anyway.

Off I went with my little map and my new directions and I walked up and down the street but I could not find a white house, or any other house for that matter, that made any reference to Columbus. Then I noticed some other people studying their little coloured maps and they too were walking up and down so then I didn’t feel completely stupid.

As I was wandering around aimlessly in the heat, I began to wonder how much myself and Christy really had in common after all. He could circumnavigate the world and find his way back home again with very little help. On the other hand, I couldn’t find his house on a small street on a tiny island, even with my little map. So, I did what I always do when the going gets tough, I gave up and I now know that I could never be an explorer.

It must have taken a huge amount of skill and courage to be able to achieve what he did back in those times. He had no idea what he was going to encounter on those travels or what dangers lay in wait for him. When he left home for work in the morning he didn’t finish at five and head home again. He was gone for months and maybe even years. There wasn’t much point in the wife asking him to collect a pint of milk on the way home from work.

Now, travelling has become a lot easier with the introduction of Satellite Navigation. Satellite Navigation is based on a whole bunch of satellites that transmit radio signals back and forth. The basic GPS service provides users with approximately 7.8 meter accuracy, 95% of the time, anywhere on or near the surface of the earth.

It’s complicated stuff but it works and we can only imagine what Columbus could have achieved if he had had access to a Sat Nav. Or maybe not.

Because we have these systems in our cars too, you would imagine that there should be no reason for us to get lost anymore. But that’s not always the case and it’s important to use other indicators as well as the Sat Nav. Things like road markings, warning signs and information signs still have a part to play.

Two British pensioners landed in a hospital in southern Germany after their car’s global positioning system directed them to drive into a church. While driving their Renault in the evening on a back road near the Austrian border, the navigation system instructed the couple to turn right where there was no road.

They were confused and the 76-year-old driver crashed into the side of the village church, virtually writing off the car, knocking a picture off the wall inside and damaging the building’s foundations. Total damages were some 25,000 euros. The couple, who were traveling to France, spent the evening in the hospital recuperating from minor injuries

On another occasion, a woman in Massachusetts drove her car into a bunker on a golf course. Of course, it was not her fault. Her car’s malfunctioning GPS navigational system was to blame. Her GPS had told her to turn left and this brought her into a “cornfield” and once she was in the “cornfield” she kept driving, trying to get out. She was in fact on a golf course and ended up in a bunker.

Maybe Christy was better off without one of those things after all.