Month: March 2020

Many years ago, I spent some time going to Chernobyl affected areas of Belarus and Western Russia delivering truckloads of humanitarian aid. In the aftermath of the nuclear disaster, Belarus took the brunt of the fallout and many hospitals, schools and remote villages needed supplies.

They wanted clean food, clothes and medical supplies and as usual, the people of Ireland answered the call and gathered aid in huge quantities. It went on for years and the aid was delivered by volunteers in trucks, vans and ambulances in large convoys.

Most of the villages we visited were poor and in remote areas. Emptying those trucks by hand was hard work and it was all done manually because there were no forklifts. At the end of each day, we were ready for the bed even if it was only a cramped space in the back of an ambulance. On a good day we might get to sleep on the floor of a day care centre.

Our grub was basic and cooked on gas rings wherever we pulled in for the night. Usually a secluded part of a village or a bit of wasteland in the middle of nowhere. We ate lots of tinned food and when we got fed up of that, we ate more of it. It was tough going but good fun and rewarding too.

The convoys varied in size and we could have anything from sixty to a hundred people on a trip. It was a logistical challenge getting sizeable convoys from one side of Europe to the other, but it was also a challenge dealing with the various personalities. This was especially true when the pressure came on, which it invariably did.

After a week of broken sleep, hard work, eating from tins and washing with baby wipes, it was understandable that there would be some grumbling as nerves began to fray. It was like the Corona Virus. We knew it was coming but we couldn’t stop it.

We always tried to prepare volunteers for what lay ahead. We did our best to gear them up for the conditions they would experience along the way and the delays they would face at borders and customs within Belarus.

That was always a big issue for new volunteers because they couldn’t understand why they were being held up by the very people they were trying to help. It was frustrating for everyone, but it was a communist regime and we had to work with it. Getting annoyed with officialdom would only make life even more difficult so biting the tongue was important.

It affected the mood of volunteers though. Starting out on day one, everyone was full of the joys of Spring, anxious about what lay ahead but excited at the same time and ready for road. The first week was spent making slow progress across Europe until we reached the Poland/Belarus border and the beginning of the real delays.

By then, we would have had a week of rough sleeping and early starts and for some, driving on the right-hand side of the road was a new experience that they found stressful. It was noticeable that the mood of some of the volunteers deteriorated as the conditions did.

As hunger, fatigue and stress took hold, we were regularly challenged by those who insisted they could do better. It was par for the course and we were used to it, but it was sometimes difficult to take. We were giving up our free time too and it wasn’t just two weeks for us. We spent most of the year preparing for these trips.

I’m reminded of those days now as we go through this Corona Virus nightmare. Stress causes people to behave differently. I’ve seen it before. During my time in An Garda Siochana I saw sane, sensible people crumble after a minor traffic accident. I once had a priest screaming obscenities at me because he was caught in traffic and needed to get to a funeral.

We need to manage the current stress and keep things in perspective. This current crisis will pass and when it’s over we will have time to reflect on how we behaved and how our actions affected others. We saw in the initial stages of the pandemic how panic buying became an issue.

Toilet roll was clearing out of supermarkets faster than they could stock the shelves and face masks sold out. Hand sanitisers were going fast too even though soap was just as good. Food was being stockpiled despite being told there would be no shortage.

The advice from the experts was to practice social distancing and keep the hands washed but many didn’t listen. 

What really surprised me though, was the response to Leo Varadkar’s address to the nation. He spoke to us as the leader of our country and got lambasted for it. It was hailed as a political gimmick.

I’m not a member of any political party and I’m not a big fan of the current Taoiseach but I was impressed with his speech. It was an important message aimed at allaying fear and reassuring the nation.

That speech wasn’t about the presenter but the content. It was important for everyone, especially the older more vulnerable members of the community, to hear that message. They were frightened and needed a calm voice. Leo gave it.

Following the broadcast, he was accused of trying to take political advantage out of a disaster. But I think those people kind of lost the point. It was about trying to restore some calm in a bad situation and trying to get those who were losing their heads to pull themselves together.

I sympathised with him. It’s difficult to manage people when they’re stressed, and I know that from experience.

I read recently that a fierce dispute has broken out between two islands in the Canaries over their ancient whistling language. La Gomera’s whistling language, which enabled shepherds to communicate across its volcanic canyons long before the invention of the mobile phone, was recognised by Unesco in 2009.

The neighbouring island of El Hierro wants a similar status for its own whistling language but the people of La Gomera say it’s a mere derivative of its own and should not be granted official recognition.

This dispute would probably have gone over my head but for the fact while on a trip to Tenerife with my wife Gaye, we were advised to visit the island of La Gomera, one of the smaller islands in the Canary group.

Christopher Columbus had stayed there on one of his many expeditions and we thought it would be worth going for a look. So, we did.

We began with spin on a ferry. That took about an hour and when we arrived on the island, we took a coach tour. I don’t normally like organised tours, I prefer to do my own thing, but we went anyway.

La Gomera is one of Spain’s Canary Islands with a population of only 22,000 people. It is the second smallest of the seven main islands in this group, and on a clear day you can see Morocco.

The island is full of mountains, hills and valleys and once you leave the port and start to head inland, you can see all these isolated houses dotted throughout the valleys with terraces cut into the hills where they grow their fruit and vegetables.

It is pretty remote and some of these homes don’t even have electricity, but they do have something unique and wonderful.

They have the Silbo Gomero, a whistling language that has been used on the island of La Gomera for as long as anyone can remember. It is an articulate language used to communicate over long distances and is much more effective than shouting. According to our guide, this language is now a compulsory subject in schools on the island.

The whistles can be distinguished according to pitch and whether they are interrupted or continuous. When they tell you beforehand what they are about to say, and then they whistle it, you can almost hear the words in the whistling.

It’s very technical stuff but with practice, whistlers can hold a proper conversation. The sound can travel up to 3.2km, which is much further, and requires less effort, than roaring your head off.

Being able to whistle wasn’t just a matter of pleasure, it was an obligation, a necessity. If you couldn’t do it, then the alternative was to face a difficult trek through thick undergrowth just to tell Anita to bring in the washing before the rain came.

Because the houses are so far removed from each other, whistling was a much better option than walking.

The language is now under the protection of UNESCO, being recognized as the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. There are some other whistling languages in the world too and they can be found on the Greek island of Evia, in the town of Kuskoy, eastern Turkey, in the French Pyrenees and in some parts of Africa. Maybe on some building sites in Ireland too.

But the whistling language of La Gomera is the only one that has been studied so extensively. It is being used by the largest community of speakers and is possibly the only one that is learned in school as an actual subject.

Whistling began to decline in the 1960s, when economic difficulties forced locals to emigrate, mainly to neighbouring Tenerife. The growing road network and later, the development of the mobile phone, deprived Silbo of its practical function. By the 1970s and 80s, there were only a few whistlers left.

The Silbo Gomero has been passed on, from one generation to another for centuries, usually within the family. Now it is done through formal education in the schools of La Gomera, due to measures taken by the Government of the Canary Islands.

Today, the Silbo is mostly heard in schools and in the restaurants that provide whistling demonstrations for tourists. It is crucial to the island’s tourism industry and we were treated to one of these demonstrations by two members of staff when we stopped for lunch.

One staff member took various items from some of the tourists and swopped them around and gave them to other diners. When he was finished, he called the other staff member into the dining room and he then gave instructions to her by whistling.

It was very impressive, and he seemed to be able to explain what each item was and who the real owner was. She located the various items and returned them to the original owners.

It was a good show and everyone enjoyed it, but it’s not all sweetness and light. Some of the whistlers are in competition with each other for the attention of tourists, and some have even fallen out and are no longer on speaking terms. Or maybe whistling terms would be more appropriate.

But it is also true that there are many whistlers on the island willing to share their stories with anyone who wants to listen.

Officially, they say that the Silbo Gomero is understood by almost all islanders and practised by the vast majority, particularly the elderly and the young. It is also used during festivities, ceremonies and religious occasions.

Maybe that’s true and it would be a terrible loss if it was to disappear. Having said that, the only place I heard any evidence of the whistling language was in the restaurant for the tourists but maybe it is more widely used.

Last month I came across an item in a newspaper about an event taking place on October 15^th this year. It’s Global Handwashing Day!

According to the promotional material, the Global Handwashing Day theme will focus on the links between handwashing and food, including food hygiene and nutrition. I thought honouring it with a global event was silly so, I wrote a piece about it and filed it away for October.

Then out of the blue, along came the Corona Virus. We know very little about this illness apart from the fact that it’s spreading across the Planet like wildfire. Some think that toilet paper in an antidote and supermarkets in certain places are running out because customers are stockpiling.

But the experts are now telling us that the most important weapon in our armoury against this virus is soap and water. The humble bar of soap has become our latest super-hero.

So, as handwashing is all the rage now, it seemed appropriate to bring forward my handwashing column.

Hygiene is a serious business and the people behind Global Handwashing Day, say that handwashing is an important part of keeping food safe, preventing diseases, and helping children grow strong. The tagline ‘clean hands a recipe for health’, reminds us to make handwashing a part of every meal.

That’s fair enough but I had wondered if it was necessary to make a global day of celebration out of it, but recent events have proven that these people are right. It’s never been more important to promote handwashing.

If my mother told me to wash my hands once when I was a child, she must have told me thousands of times. It was drilled into us as children and it’s one of the first instructions I can remember getting from her. It was constant and I carried on the tradition with my own kids.

Having said that, when I worked on building sites with my father in the seventies, hygiene wasn’t always front and centre. Handwashing back then consisted of a quick wipe on the overalls and that was that.

The nicest sandwiches I ever tasted were those eaten on building sites while sitting on concrete blocks with my hands covered in a mixture of cement and sand. The best tea came from a billy can, stained from years of tea making and the water was often boiled in the can using a gas blow torch.

Before the lunch break, the dirty mugs were collected on site by the young lad, probably me, from where they had been left the previous day. On windowsills, scaffolding planks or hanging on a nail. They were rubbed with sand and rinsed out in the barrel of water that was used for mixing the concrete. There was always a barrel of water on a building site.

The tea was stirred with whatever was handy. The timber ruler that was kept in a pocket on the leg of the overalls was a popular choice. It would be wiped on the overalls after and returned to the pocket. A pencil taken from behind the ear, a screwdriver or a piece of stick would do just as well.

If health enforcers existed in those days, they would have had a field day. Building sites all over the country would have been shut down and the workers put into quarantine. There was no shortage of evidence.

Safety was neglected too. The primary concern was getting the job done regardless of the risk to life and limb.

I was about fifteen when I dropped a concrete block on my foot. My big toe took most of the impact and I rested for a few minutes until the pain subsided, my vision cleared, and I ran out of swear words. You didn’t get much sympathy from fellow workers either, only abuse if you didn’t hurry back to work.

I still have trouble with that foot and there are times when it stops working and shoots pain through my body to remind me of the seventies. Punishing me for not getting medical attention.

Now, workers have boots with steel toe caps, ear protection and safety glasses and that’s all good. We didn’t have those and that’s why so many of us are limping and pestered with tinnitus today.

Anyway, back to the handwashing. Hands obviously play a big role in the transmission of germs, as we are now finding out. But our dedication to hand hygiene is a waste of time if the person we are shaking hands with is a non-believer. So, is it time to stop?

According to research from the University of California, on average we carry 3,200 bacteria from 150 different species on our hands. That means every time we shake hands we may as well be sticking them down the toilet bowl.

Yet, it’s part of our way of life. We’re a friendly bunch and it’s natural to stick out the hand to introduce ourselves, to greet each other or to offer congratulations. It’s an automatic reaction.

If someone offers their hand and you refuse to accept it, things could get awkward. Mass goers are being encouraged to offer each other the sign of peace with a nod or a smile to those around them instead. Makes sense.

I worked with military guys from Slovakia a few years ago and they were a very sociable group. They shook hands every time we met, but if their hands were dirty, they would offer their elbow. Like a fist pump only with elbows. So that might be another way to go.

Whatever we decide, I suggest that for now, we avoid the New Zealand Maori tradition of rubbing noses and foreheads together. I don’t fancy sharing nasal mucus with anyone, especially in the current climate.

In 1797 an American farmer named Levi Dickinson used strong grass to make a broom for his wife. He lashed some of it to a stick, and it proved to be more durable and effective than previous models, so it was soon in demand.

It wasn’t long before Dickinson and his sons were selling them throughout the United States and for many years, they were a popular household item.

These days, our modern homes are a bit more sophisticated with lots more furniture and plenty of nooks and crannies to be cleaned so the humble broom isn’t always suitable. Thankfully in the 1800’s the vacuum cleaner made its first appearance and that made life easier.

I do most of the hoovering in our house. I don’t mind it and I have time on my hands since I retired so it’s no big deal. I sometimes find it even mildly therapeutic, especially when I can take my time. But I’ve had tough times too.

I took a set against our last machine and we became confirmed enemies. Our relationship had been strained for a while, but it finally reached the stage where I began to hate the sight of the thing. It had a silly face on it that constantly smirked at me. I pulled it around the house by the hose, but it always resisted.

It deliberately got caught in everything. When I tried to go around a corner, it would wedge itself in the skirting board and it tangled itself up with the furniture at every opportunity. The lead was always getting stuck under doors and in a complete act of defiance, it would often throw itself on its side and refuse to get up. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

There was also a sneaky side to it. It always waited until I was reaching into tricky places or down behind furniture that couldn’t be moved, to do its worst. That’s when the tubing that connects the hose to the head, would fall off. It only happened in the most awkward, hard to reach places where it was impossible to retrieve it.

No amount of kicking that machine seemed to make a difference. I often cursed and swore at the thing until I was bordering on cardiac arrest, but it continued to make my life a misery. I came close to wrapping it around a tree in the garden a couple of times, so it had to go.

There was only ever going to be one winner. This machine was threatening my physical and mental health so with that in mind, my queen and I headed off to find a replacement. We hit on one of those cordless gadgets and decided to take a punt on it.

I’ve only had it for a short while, but the early signs are good. The fact that there is no lead to strangle the furniture is a big plus and the various attachments make it very adaptable. As good as it is though, I doubt the European Space Agency will be rushing out to by one.

They’re about to embark on a bit of hoovering but I reckon they are going to need something a bit larger.

According to National Geographic, space junk is a huge problem and it’s only getting bigger. Hundreds of thousands of man-made objects are flying around our planet. Everything from dead satellites to errant nuts and bolts are putting the working satellites at risk.

In 2009, two satellites collided at 22,300 mph, bursting into a cloud of thousands of pieces of debris. The culprits were the inactive Russian satellite Cosmos 2251 and an active U.S.-based communication satellite Iridium 33. It was the first known time that two satellites collided in space and was a startling reminder of the growing problem of space junk.

More than 23,000 known man-made fragments larger than 4 inches, which is a little wider than two golf balls, zip around our planet. But those are just the pieces large enough to track. An estimated 500,000 pieces between 0.4 inches and 4 inches join those larger fragments.

Space junk can impact other objects faster than a speeding bullet and can damage the many satellites, telescopes, and other objects orbiting our planet. In 2006, for example, a tiny piece of space junk collided with a Space Station, taking a chip out of the heavily reinforced window.

The junk includes the stages from rockets that jettison satellites into orbit and the satellites themselves once they die. But it also includes smaller bits and pieces lost to space including paint chips that flake away from the outside of devices.

The European Space Agency has chosen a Swiss company called ClearSpace to carry out the €120 million clean-up in 2025. They plan to launch an unmanned “tow truck” spacecraft into orbit. Using robotic arms, it will grab a section of a spent rocket that is now circling the Earth at a speed of more than four miles a second.

The tow truck will then drag it towards Earth, causing both to burn up in the atmosphere. They hope the first ClearSpace mission will help to create a new “vacuum cleaner” industry to rid space of man-made debris.

I didn’t realise there was so much rubbish up there. It seems we’re not satisfied with just littering Planet Earth, but we’re determined to leave a mess after us in outer space as well. Somebody has rightly called time on this sky tipping and wants to put things right.

So, it’s time for a clean-up and I’m happy to donate my old hoover free of charge. They’re welcome to it. But I suspect it won’t be long before they lose patience and cut it adrift to join the rest of the junk up there.

I was sitting at home two weeks ago when I got a text message telling me that an ex colleague of mine in Blarney had died. Dan Ahern, a man I spent many hours sharing a patrol car with had passed away. I was completely stunned because I didn’t even know he was ill.

We worked together for a few years and got on well. Dan was a reliable character. He was someone you could depend on in a jam which was important at a time when uniformed gardai carried nothing but a timber baton for protection.

They have something more substantial now, but the pieces of hickory we had, didn’t offer much protection so it was important to have someone you could trust beside you when things got a bit sticky. And they sometimes did.

Dan Ahern would never let you down. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was broad shouldered and as strong as a bull. He never got over excited either as I discovered one night, back in the eighties, while we were on patrol in Watergrasshill.

In those days, Watergrasshill was part of the Blarney garda district and fell into our area of responsibility. That didn’t make a lot of sense geographically and when the boundaries were reorganised in later years, Watergrasshill went in with Midleton which made more sense.

Anyway, that’s how we came to be in that neck of the woods. It was around midnight when we got a radio message that Dominic McGlinchey had driven through an armed checkpoint near Silversprings Hotel in Tivoli and was heading east.

That got our attention because this guy had been on the run in Cork for a few weeks and was dangerous. For those of you who have never heard of Dominic ‘Mad Dog’ McGlinchey, let me give you some background information courtesy of journalist, Cormac Looney.

Dominic McGlinchey was the head of the Irish National Liberation Army, and he was on the run in the Republic for 18 months. He and his gang were rampaging around the country, pursued by gardai.

‘Mad Dog’ McGlinchey claimed to have killed 31 people, including a child, and was wanted for the murder of a 77-year-old woman, Hester Mullan, in Derry after his fingerprint was found on the roof of the car used by her killers.

In 1983 he tortured and murdered fellow INLA man, Eric Dale, from Armagh believing he had slept with his wife, Mary. He was insanely jealous and believed Mary had an affair while he was in Portlaoise Prison previously.

Two months later McGlinchey and Mary together murdered two other south Armagh men, Patrick Mackin and Eamon McMahon, a brother-in-law of Eric Dale.

As tensions mounted within the INLA, McGlinchey and Mary struck again, this time with the brutal murder of Gerard “Sparky” Barkley, 27, from Belfast. The couple lured Barkley to their home where McGlinchey shot him through the back of the head as he sat watching television.

They dragged him to the back yard, slit his throat and drained his body of blood to make it lighter to carry and dumped it near the border in a secret grave. On another occasion when Mary was present McGlinchey and his henchmen tortured an INLA man for hours, roasting him on an Aga cooker.

But the Bonnie and Clyde, gun-toting couple also became heavily involved in smuggling and extortion in the border area. Now they were in Cork.

They were heavily armed with automatic assault rifles, a pump-action shotgun and handguns. On two occasions his car was stopped at garda checkpoints and on both occasions, they overwhelmed gardai with their firepower. At Cobh, McGlinchey had to restrain his wife after she threatened to murder two gardai.

The gang robbed a bank in Foynes and were eventually located at a house in Newmarket. As teams of detectives approached the house, McGlinchey opened fire from an upstairs window.

A gun battle ensued as firing continued from inside the house. In the exchange, a detective was hit in the shoulder. They forced their way into the house and McGlinchey then called for a priest and surrendered after the priest arrived.

While McGlinchey was in prison in 1987 gunmen burst into his family home and murdered Mary as she was bathing her children. They shot her nine times in the head.

McGlinchey was released in 1993. A broken man, he still tried to fall in with criminals in Dublin and the border area, but they betrayed him to his former INLA enemies, and they shot him dead in Drogheda the following year.

So that gives you some idea of what we were facing in Watergrasshill all those years ago when this gang was on the run in Cork. Dan and I were driving along this narrow road, in the middle of nowhere, when we came across their car.

It was abandoned in the middle of the road with the lights on and the doors wide open. The engine was still running but there was no sign of anyone.

We weren’t about to tackle these characters with our little batons. We had no idea where they were anyway. For all we knew they could have been watching us from a ditch, so we beat a hasty retreat and there was only one way to go; backwards.

Dan was behind the wheel and he was very good driver. He slapped the car into reverse and I was lucky I didn’t get whiplash from the speed he drove up the road, not knowing whether we were driving into danger or away from it.

As it happened, they were gone but we weren’t to know that. The incident only lasted a couple of minutes, but I found it a bit unnerving. It didn’t bother Dan too much.

By now, you may have heard about a 96 page annual magazine set to be launched this year in Cobh. ‘The Cobh Chronicle’ with stunning photography and artwork by Colm McDonagh and Pat Carroll, is a non-profit venture designed to showcase all that Cobh and its inhabitants have to offer.

‘The Cobh Chronicle’ will remember the history of the town and its past achievements, while also focusing on what is happening now and likely plans for the future.

The magazine also aims to support and promote local talented people, many of whom have already been published and hopes to encourage and provide a platform for those yet, unpublished poets, writers and authors.

It will be produced to a high standard and there will be something in it to suit all ages. It is expected that the publication will appeal to a wide audience of Cobhites home and abroad, and also to visitors and those with any connection to the town.

The editorial team is appealing for submissions. Everybody has a story to tell and the more submissions that are received, the better the content will be. It might be a piece of nostalgia from your school days, old sporting memories, a bygone event in town or an old photograph.

They want to hear your stories and what you remember about the people who shaped the town and the local characters who are no longer with us. Don’t be shy.

An email address has been created specifically to gather this information. Don’t worry if you don’t feel confident enough to put your story on paper, just send in the basic information and the editorial team will find another way to get the information out of you. Torture is always a possibility.

You can get in touch through the Facebook page or through chronicle@europe.com