Month: September 2019

It seems that children as young as nine are causing problems for the mobile Luas security teams combating antisocial behaviour. The company said that children between the ages of nine and 15 can be the most troublesome group and they’re accused of being loud and fearless, with no understanding that their behaviour is upsetting fellow travellers.

Transdev, who run the Luas light rail system in Dublin, said that crime and antisocial behaviour on trams has decreased in the past two years but they remain concerned about racist and other forms of abuse directed toward its staff.

That’s a pity because travelling on public transport in this country has always been considered safe and it would be a pity if that was to change.

Young people often come in for criticism and sometimes that can be justified, especially when they are causing trouble. They regularly get the blame for anti-social behaviour, noise and everything else that interferes with our quality of life.

They sometimes wear their trousers halfway down their backsides showing off their underpants. How this is fashionable, desirable or even practical, is completely beyond me and I have no idea why they think that anyone wants to look at their jocks. But then, I’m not young anymore so what do I know?

It’s not right to tar them all with the same breath though; the majority are only younger versions of us, trying to enjoy themselves. They rarely get the credit they deserve for the positive contributions they make to society. Many of them are actively involved in community life but that’s not the first thing we think of when we meet a group of them.

When we see young people gathered together, we feel a bit intimidated. We take evasive action and cross to the other side of the street. We automatically assume that they have only one agenda, which includes making life uncomfortable for the rest of us.

We’ve all been guilty of jumping to conclusions and we are quick to point the finger of suspicion based on nothing more than the way a person is dressed. We regularly judge people on where they live or how they speak, just like I did on one occasion in Dublin when I had reason to use the Luas.

It was a Saturday evening and I was travelling, with my wife, to the Plaza Hotel in Tallaght from Liberty Hall so I picked up the Luas in Abbey Street.

The Luas was packed at that hour of the evening and standing room was at a premium. Four teenage lads got on in the city centre. I would guess that they were about fifteen or sixteen years old and they just about managed to find a standing space near the door, close to where I was sitting with my wife. There was nothing unusual about their appearance, but I just noticed them.

Because of my previous occupation I suppose, I was automatically conscious of my wife’s handbag. She had it on her lap in front of her and I was thinking that if one of these guys grabbed it as the door opened and ran off, then that would be the end of that.

I was mentally going through my pockets trying to remember which one my wallet was in and where my phone was. I had already marked these kids as potential threats without any evidence whatsoever.

You often find when it comes to groups, that the smallest guy is usually the loudest and that was true in this case. The small one was full of chat while his three buddies appeared to be very quiet.

The small guy spotted a girl who was sitting down. She was well hidden behind a crowd of people standing between the two of them and they looked to be about the same age. She was with some other girls and she had a guitar case with her.

As the Luas progressed through the various stops, the crowd of bodies swelled even more until there was a wall of people separating the teenagers. They couldn’t see each other but they still carried on a conversation over the sea of people without any eye contact. The result was hilarious.

They spoke to each other as if they were the only two people in the carriage and as if they had known each other all their lives. She asked him at one stage what he looked like and he described himself as being tall, blond and blue eyed. He was in fact no more than five foot two with dark hair. He tried to get her to play the guitar and they discussed favourite bands and music. They discovered they had some friends in common.

While this was going on, he took the time to welcome all newcomers to the tram as they got on at the various stops. Not in a smart or insulting way but in a pleasant manner.  As people got off, he thanked them for travelling with him on the Luas and he hoped that they had had an enjoyable journey. Everyone smiled at him.

This went on for half an hour or so and throughout that entire time I didn’t hear one wrong word from any of them. He was simply having fun and everyone within earshot was enjoying his antics.

When we got off at the end of the line in Tallaght, he said goodbye to everyone and headed off. I was sorry that the show had come to an end and I felt guilty for my previous suspicions. I have no idea who they were, but it was a pleasure to have shared their company if only for a brief period.

Dublin is still producing nice characters and they’re not all wrecking the place.

Most of us have heard of Lebanon and we might even know enough to associate it with the flag that has a cedar tree in the middle of it. But beyond that, I suspect, most of us know little about the country even though the Irish have a long association with it.

You’ll find it in Western Asia, sandwiched between Syria on one side and Israel on the other. It has a troubled history and Irish Defence Forces, including both the army and navy, have been going there, on and off, since 1978 as part of a United Nations Peacekeeping Force.

Lebanon has featured prominently in the lives of Irish armed forces personnel and their families for decades. It’s affectionately referred to as ‘The Leb’ by the troops but it hasn’t always been plain sailing for those serving there. They’ve had their share of tragedy.     

In 1980, a UN patrol was ambushed, and three soldiers were kidnapped and tortured. The three of them were shot, two were killed while the third soldier survived. In 1989, three young Irish soldiers were blown up when they went over a landmine and in 1987 an Irish Soldier was killed when an Israeli tank shell hit his UN post. 47 Irish personnel have died in total while on service there, including a number from Cork.

Some found it difficult to return to normal life as a result of their experience. One of those who struggled after serving in Lebanon, is a retired soldier by the name of Chris Donovan and he told his story to Ryan Tubridy on the radio recently.

He was only nineteen years old when he made his first trip to Lebanon with the army. He told of a horrific incident he witnessed and even now, many years later, he has difficulty telling it. He saw a girl being murdered.

He was on duty one day when he saw a young girl about fifteen years old, picking fruit. He knew the girl and her family because they were living locally, and he saw them regularly. They were in poor circumstances and the soldiers used to help the family out by giving them some of their food.

Suddenly, a man who was also known to the military, walked up behind the girl, produced a pistol and shot her dead. He immediately dropped the gun and ran through the victim’s house and down a hill where he was collected by others and driven away. He dropped the gun because he knew that the UN Forces couldn’t shoot an unarmed man.

He gave a vivid account of what it was like to be on duty there and how they were living on their nerves because they never knew where the next assault was going to come from. He explained how this heightened sense of awareness was always with him and he found it difficult to relax when he came home. He was always tense.

On one occasion while he was home on leave, a friend of his asked him to go with him to see the film ‘Saving Private Ryan’. His friend never turned up, but he decided to go in himself anyway. In the course of the film there was a scene involving heavy gun fire and he was reminded of an incident back in Lebanon.

The sound of the bullets hitting metal got the better of him and he began to shake. He couldn’t stand, so he crawled out of the cinema on his hands and knees and started to cry. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. He gathered himself together, went across the road to a pub for a drink, and that was the start of a downward spiral for him.

He drank heavily and survived two suicide attempts before finally leaving the army. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and thankfully, received treatment and is now on the way to recovery. His case isn’t unusual because at the end of the show, there were others who sent in messages of support, saying that they had had similar experiences.

That stands to reason since the UN has been deployed in South Lebanon for 40 years and was regularly caught in the middle of a vicious conflict between Israel and their allies, the South Lebanon Army on one side and the Shia Muslim guerrilla group Hezbollah on the other. UN troops are no strangers to conflict and they’re still there, watching over the Blue Line.

And just in case you thought this was all historical, it was only a few months ago that Irish peacekeeping troops had to take shelter in bunkers after their area of operations in south Lebanon was struck by Israeli mortar fire. They were caught up in a firefight between the Israeli army and the Hezbollah faction.

Most of the 450-strong battalion took cover in the bunkers as mortars and artillery shells fell close to their positions but all personnel were safe. So, it is still going on.

The Irish have developed a well-earned reputation over the years and are well regarded by the Lebanese people. They have forged strong links with the country and apart from their peace keeping efforts, their humanitarian activities haven’t gone unnoticed either. There are many stories of how military personnel supported local communities.

As a mark of respect to the 47 who died in Lebanon, their colleagues in the Cobh branch of O.N.E (Organisation of National Ex-Servicemen) in association with The Irish Lebanese Cultural Foundation, planted a Lebanon Cedar tree in the grounds of St. Benedict’s Priory in Cobh, Co Cork on September 28^th 2019.

The planting was conducted by Mr. Guy Jones, Chairman of I.L.C.F and the tree will stand as a reminder of the connection between our two countries.

Every year around this time, as the kids go back to school, we have a national moan about the weight of children’s school bags. We complain about the damage being inflicted on young backs and how they’ll suffer later in life from carrying them to school. But how far do they really carry them?

It’s difficult to drive past any school in the morning without getting caught up in traffic. The roads are clogged up with cars because the little darlings, and the not so little ones in secondary school, can’t get there on their own two feet. They’ve lost the ability to put one foot in front of the other.

When I was going to school in the sixties, cars weren’t as plentiful, so parents only collected their kids if the weather was bad or if they were living a long way from the school. But even those children who lived outside the town limits usually walked or used a bike.

We regularly walked home for lunch and back again after, and the only fast food outlets we had were chippers and they only opened at night for the guys coming out of the pubs. Shops didn’t have deli counters either and even if they had, we didn’t have the money. On a good day, as a treat, we got a few pence to buy some Chester cake.

When the weather was cold, our mothers wrapped us up in layers and when it was raining, they gave us a hat. As soon as we were old enough, we got a bicycle, if we were lucky, and in the wintertime when it got dark early, we used our lamps.

In those days, the school yard was full of bikes. We raced each other on them, crashed occasionally and fell off regularly. We put some disinfectant on the cuts and if they were bad enough, we got a plaster and a lecture about being careful in future. It was very common to have a passenger sitting on the crossbar to get a ‘crosser’ home.

We also had bicycle clips that went around the ankles to prevent the legs of the trousers getting dirty from the chain. In the absence of clips, you just stuck the pants inside the socks which was just as effective.

Of course, we often got wet on the way into school, but every classroom had big iron heating pipes running along the walls near the floor and we sat on these until we dried off.  At least the backside would be dry, and the rest would dry naturally as the day wore on. Strangely enough, it didn’t kill any of us, but this would be too much for modern mammies to cope with. There were a few other things they might have struggled with too.

We were all making ‘go-carts’ in those days out of pram wheels with a few pieces of timber attached and a bit of rope tied to the front axil to steer them. You pulled the rope attached to the left or right wheel depending on which direction you wanted to go. These things could build a lot of speed and the only way to stop them was to drag your feet along the road.

I had a close call on one of them when I was about ten. I was going down a hill near my house and I was gathering momentum. When I rounded the corner, I saw an ice cream delivery van turning in the road. Unfortunately, I was going too fast and couldn’t stop. There was nowhere else for me to go so I ended up crashing into it as he was broadside on the road. I ended up underneath it, cutting my body on various bits and pieces on the underside of the van.

The go-cart disintegrated and I didn’t fare too well either. I was in a bit of a heap. The poor van driver must have got an awful fright, but I persuaded him I was fine, and I ran in home. When I went into the bathroom and peeled off my clothes, I discovered there were lots of cuts and scratches but nothing fatal.

My main concern was that my parents would find out when they got home. I figured that if I put on a long-sleeve shirt and didn’t try to move around too much, I could probably get away with it. I didn’t count on the van driver being such a decent man though. He had seen me going in home, so he knew where I lived, and sometime later that evening, he knocked on the door to find out if I was OK.

That was the first my parents had heard about the incident and of course when the clothes were taken off me, the full extent of the injuries became evident. The remains of the go-cart ended up in the bin and I was put off the road for the foreseeable future.  

Those days are gone now because the roads are too busy for go carts and kids prefer to play with their phones. I can’t imagine that in 2019, that van would come back to the scene of the crime either to check up on my welfare. The prospect of him being hit with a claim for compensation would keep him well away from the area.

Childhood obesity is probably more of an issue than heavy schoolbags and healthy eating policies have been introduced in schools to tackle that issue by promoting a healthy diet. But maybe walking would help too.

We didn’t have Garmin or Fitbit watches in the sixties, but if we had, the step counting mechanism wouldn’t have been able to keep up. We wore out lots of shoes, unlike today.

A major restructuring programme for An Garda Siochana has just been announced by Garda Commissioner Drew Harris. On the face of it, it looks ambitious, but we’ll have to see it fleshed out before a proper determination can be made. With every new plan, the divide between the gardai and the community seems to grow wider. Maybe this will be different.

The ‘Modernisation and Renewal Programme ‘2016-2021’ as announced by the former Garda Commissioner, Noirin O’Sullivan, was also hailed as an attempt to propel An Garda Siochana into modernity. I had concerns about certain aspects of that programme too and I thought that much of what it contained, was nothing more than what had been promised previously.

I suggested at the time, that it was an opportunity for the organisation to get its act together and there were many good people within the Force just looking for leadership. I also suggested that if it wasn’t a genuine effort to change, we would be back here in another few years, with the launch of yet another programme for renewal to replace the current one.

I didn’t think we would be here this soon though, but I’m not surprised either. Back then, the core message of that plan was conflicted. It promised one thing but delivered another. On the one hand it claimed to be all about the community; “We are in and of the community. Community policing is key and core to what we do”. Only it wasn’t really.

In 2007, I was involved in designing ‘The National Model of Community Policing’. The organisation was committed to the community and this Model was going to be the blueprint for future engagement. But the ink was hardly dry on that plan, when it was scrapped due to the lack of resources. The organisation had other priorities and commitments, so the community would have to wait.

Way back in 1994, 27 years ago, I was told by a senior officer, that community policing was a luxury we couldn’t afford. The demands for resources from other sections of An Garda Siochana were more urgent and needed to be addressed before any consideration could be given to the softer side of policing. The community would have to wait.

That attitude prevailed for most of my time in community policing and that was the guts of twenty years. Community policing was a difficult job at the best of times, but it wasn’t made easier by having to constantly fight with management for an end to the constant abstraction of community policing officers from their duties. They were always needed to fill gaps elsewhere in the service because of the shortage of manpower. The community would have to wait.

Now, Commissioner Harris wants An Garda Síochána to be better placed to deliver Community Policing, with the support of communities, right across Ireland. I’m not sure if he intends setting up specific community policing teams to achieve that or if he means that all officers will be engaging with the public; we’ll have to wait and see.

There is a difference though, between policing the community and community policing. Policing the community is a general term for the functions carried out regularly by a police force whereas community policing is achieved through dedicated teams working together, with the specific purpose of developing community engagement.

The latter can’t function without support and his decision to give Chief Superintendents more power, to make them more autonomous, could upset that particular apple cart.

Historically, there has been little buy in to the community policing philosophy by many in senior management positions. Apart from this being common knowledge within the organisation, it was also identified by the Garda Inspectorate. This meant community policing was often relegated to the bottom rung of the ladder when it came to identifying priorities in policing plans.

A more autonomous chief superintendent with little interest in that philosophy, will continue to prioritise other demands at the expense of community policing, unless he or she has sufficient resources and lack of resources is always going to be an issue.

In the previous plan, former Commissioner Noirin O’Sullivan and the then Minister for Justice, Frances Fitzgerald, dismissed concerns that rural communities would see a depleted service. The communities would not suffer they said, even when it was obvious that they would. And they did.

Commissioner Harris has also dismissed those same concerns, insisting instead that under his plan, it would be the exact opposite with 1,800 more Garda members deployed to the front line. Some of those having been released from clerical duties.

That sounds positive but on the flip side, approximately 700 members will retire in the next few years and 150 gardai will be promoted to the rank of sergeant while others will move into plain clothes and specialised positions. They will all have to be replaced. When you spread the remainder of the 1,800 across the rest of the country, they won’t go far.

Civilianisation of clerical positions is not a new idea either. When I was stationed in Blackrock Garda Station in Dublin in 1980, I took up a temporary position as a clerk in the district office. I was advised not to get too comfortable because civilians would soon be doing my job. That was forty years ago.

The Modernisation and Renewal Programme 2016-2021 stated, “We will enhance our model of community policing to deliver the style and type of policing that shows our commitment to making communities safer. We will establish Community Policing Teams (CPTs) in every District.”

It’s easy to establish CPTs but it’s a different matter to support and resource those teams to enable them to function. That hasn’t happened yet, but community policing continues to be the main focus of every plan.

On paper anyway.

You probably think you know the neighbours pretty well. You pop round for the odd cup of coffee and they make you feel very comfortable, and you do the same for them when the shoe is on the other foot. And that’s how it should be.

Be careful though, because things might not always be what they seem. Especially if those living next door have a thing about shovels and like working in the dark. In that case it might be worth having a closer look at their nocturnal habits.

Ben Johnson wrote a story about two charming characters called William Burke and William Hare. They were originally from Northern Ireland but they moved to Scotland separately, to find work in the 1800’s. I don’t know if they knew each other while they were living in Ireland but they ended up living on the same street in Edinburgh and soon became friends.

The two men were heavy drinkers and their lives were chaotic. They earned their living as resurrectionists which was a very fancy title to describe guys who basically worked as grave robbers. Their job was to exhume recently buried bodies and bring them to various medical schools, where they would be dissected and studied by students of anatomy. They were paid for each corpse they delivered.

Strictly speaking, medical and anatomical schools were the only institutions that were legally allowed to dissect bodies, or cadavers, and they could only operate on the bodies of criminals who died having been executed.

In the 1600’s and 1700’s, execution was commonly used to dispose of criminals so there were plenty of bodies. As the years went by though, executions became less popular and that created a problem for Burke and Hare.

Medical schools paid well for cadavers so there was good money to be made. To compensate for the lack of earnings, they started robbing bodies from the graves of ordinary citizens, but they ran into difficulties here too.

Because grave robbing was becoming so common, relatives took it in turn to stand watch over the recently dug graves of their dearly departed, especially for the first few days after the burial. The early days after death were critical because medical schools wouldn’t accept bodies that were decomposing.

Burke and Hare were far from finished though. They took things to a new level when they ran short of bodies by creating their own supply line. They started killing people with the sole intention of providing remains for medical research to make a profit.

By this time, Hare was living with a widow and they were running a boarding house. In 1827 one of Hare’s tenants, an elderly army pensioner, died of natural causes while still owing £4.00 in rent. To cover the man’s outstanding debt, the pair took his body and sold it to the medical school at Edinburgh University.

There they met Professor Robert Knox, a popular anatomy lecturer, who paid them seven pounds and ten shillings for the body which was a considerable amount of money. Lead weights went into the coffin for burial instead.

Encouraged by how easy it was to turn a profit, the pair struck again in early 1828 when another tenant became ill. They got fed up with waiting for him to die, so they decided to help him on his way. They fed him with whisky and then suffocated him by covering his mouth and nose while they held him down. The technique they used was suffocation by leaning on the chest and that became known as “Burking.”

When they ran out of tenants, they decided to entice victims to the lodging house, preying on Edinburgh’s poorest communities who were less likely to be missed or recognised. In total Burke and Hare are said to have murdered at least 16 people for between seven to ten pounds apiece, although the real total could well be a lot higher.

Burke and Hare soon became greedy and nobody was safe. An elderly grandmother was killed with an overdose of painkillers and Hare murdered her blind young grandson by breaking the boy’s back across his knee.

The police eventually got involved and following an investigation, William Burke was convicted and hanged in front of a crowd of over 25,000 in 1829 and, fittingly perhaps, after being put on public display, his body was donated to medical science.

Hare cut a deal and gave evidence against Burke and so avoided the hangman’s noose. He was released in February 1829 and fled across the border into England. No one knows what happened to him, but it was rumoured that he was thrown into a lime quarry by an angry mob and lived out his days as a blind beggar on the streets of London.

You could be excused for thinking that this kind of behaviour was consigned to the history books and that you and your loved ones could rest in peace for all eternity without having to worry about having your bones dug up and sold to the highest bidder. Not so.

In 1998, Anthony Noel Kelly, an English aristocrat was jailed for nine months in the UK for what a judge termed the revolting theft of human remains from the Royal College of Surgeons. Kelly was the nephew of the Duke of Norfolk and he was convicted of using body parts to make sculptures and according to the judge, he had affronted every reasonable concept of decent behaviour.

His partner in crime was a former undertaker’s assistant and embalmer who worked at the college and he smuggled the parts out of the institution during the dead of night. The pair were both found guilty of smuggling human anatomical specimens between 1991 and 1994. Not so long ago.

There might still be others.