Month: May 2020

• 

I was an accidental landlord once upon a time and I didn’t enjoy one miniute of it. I was forced into it because the house was costing me money while it was lying idle.

It was years ago, and I rented it out while I was trying to sell it. I had moved from the countryside a few years earlier to be closer to the town, but the market was slow, and the house wasn’t going anywhere.

I had some lovely tenants over the years but there was one who wasn’t easy to please. He was prone to complaining.

One day, he rang me with a serious problem. He was very upset because there was a smell of raw sewage coming from the toilet in the bathroom. He told me the house was stinking and proceeded to give me a lecture about the danger to his health from being exposed to this noxious gas. He was concerned that it could result in him being found dead in his bed.

He was quick to point out my responsibilities as a landlord. It was my duty to provide him with a safe environment and if I couldn’t do that, then he would be forced to leave and find alternative accommodation. I bit my tongue while I fought the urge to offer him some encouragement to go.

I couldn’t understand how this issue had developed so suddenly. In the first place, the ‘U’ bend in a toilet bowl is always full of water and that forms a seal to prevent any smell coming back through the system. Secondly, I had lived in this house with my family for over twenty-five years and I had never experienced that problem.

I told my irate tenant that I would get there as soon as I could. So, I dropped everything and headed off for the house. On the way there, I was running through all the possibilities in my head. I thought that maybe there was a burst pipe somewhere and I had visions of digging up half the property and creating a huge mess and a lot of expense.

I needn’t have worried.

I pulled up outside the house and the miniute I stepped out of the car I could see what the problem was. I met the tenant and advised him to close the windows and the smell would soon disappear. Then I brought him to the front door and pointed to the fields across the road where a tractor was pulling a large tanker behind it.

I explained to him that they were spreading slurry as fertiliser. I told him it was normal practice and they usually do it just before it rains so it disappears into the soil quickly and the smell doesn’t linger. If he had taken the time to do a little bit of investigation before grabbing his mobile phone to have a rant, he could have discovered that for himself.

Smells are part and parcel of country life, but rural life can be a challenge for some and sometimes even the farmers can have issues with odours.

A court in Germany, ruled that bad smells and farming go together. The ruling was made after neighbours complained about a farmer’s plans to extend his chicken hatches. The poultry’s poo, they argued would pollute their air.

But the court was having none of it. While stopping short of accusing the plaintiffs of muckraking, they argued that the countryside is the countryside and people there should be used to the smell of dung.

The judges said the plaintiffs were farmers too and had done their own share of muck shovelling in the past. They said bad smells are a fact of life and are something which inhabitants should be able to cope with.

Not all smells are bearable though and some landlords have discovered that the tenants themselves can often be the cause of the trouble.

One landlord had a problem with a tenant who hadn’t paid his rent for three months. He tried to evict the man, but the tenant dragged out the legal process for months, so it took time to get rid of him.

The property was eventually let out again, but the new tenants complained about a strange smell in the apartment. Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t discover the source. He threw everything at the problem, but the smell remained.

It dragged on for months until the landlord noticed a slight discoloration on a wall. He poked a few holes through the drywall and was surprised to see maggots pouring out through the holes.

The previous tenant had placed packets of raw meat behind the walls throughout the apartment as a last act of defiance. As it rotted, it created the terrible stench.

I have no intention of ever becoming a landlord again. It’s a lot of trouble and it can be risky too as one landlord in the States found out.  He had a lucky escape after buying an investment property. It was a house with an upstairs suite and a basement suite.

His first applicant for the basement suite worked in construction and had wonderful references so he immediately offered him the suite but the next day, the tenant told him he wouldn’t be taking it because he decided to move closer to his children.

A few months later, while watching the news on TV, he saw a story about a man who had held his former girlfriend – the mother of his children- captive in a cabin in the woods for five days. She eventually escaped and ran for safety. The man who kidnapped her was the man he had offered the basement suite to.

Maybe I should go back and just have one more look in the attic!

• 

Weddings have been put on the long finger for the time being and many couples are currently dealing with that disappointment. They won’t find it easy to get a date in 2021 either because apart from the normal number of annual marriage ceremonies due to take place next year, there will also be the spill over from 2020 to contend with. Wedding planners will be busy.

There wasn’t much call for wedding planners when I got married in 1984 but things have moved on a lot since then. In those days, weddings were simple affairs. You just needed a priest for the ceremony, a hotel for the reception and an apartment in Majorca for the honeymoon. Everything else fell into place.

For my parents and that generation, weddings were even more basic. They had a church ceremony followed by a breakfast, which was literally a breakfast, then a train ride down to Youghal for the day.

The photographs of their special occasion were limited to a few black and white snaps of the happy couple standing in front of the church. When the day long honeymoon was over, life returned to normal and it was back to work with the lot of them.

Not much need for a wedding planner there either but now you can’t get married without one. So, what do they do exactly?

Apparently, they help with your budget, the wedding plan, get the best locations to match your wedding size, find top florists, photographers, caterers, bands, DJs in your price range and handle the invitations. Sounds good.

It’s a responsible job and I imagine they are the first people to get it in the neck if anything goes wrong on the day, but I can’t help wondering if it’s really necessary? Things always go wrong and it’s those mishaps that give us the laughs in later years.

We organised our own wedding and it was going to be hi-tech because we were having it recorded for posterity. My brother-in-law, Pat O’Rourke, had a video camera. He was a marine engineer and travelled the world in the course of his work and came across a new type of camera on his travels.

Calling it a camera doesn’t do it justice. It was a large machine that you carried on your shoulder like an anti-tank weapon. The battery alone was the same weight as an average baby and the tape cassette that went into it was the size of a regular book.

If you produced it in the modern world and pointed it at people, they would probably run for cover fearing a terrorist attack, but it was state of the art in those days.

Anyone under forty years old probably won’t know what I’m talking about, but these cameras recorded on tape cassettes which were then played on video cassette recording machines (VCRs) that were hooked up to the TV. It took all that machinery to do what can be done with a little mobile phone now.

VCR’s were also used to record programmes on the TV so you could watch them back later. You could set the machine to tape a programme while you were out, which was new and exciting. It wasn’t straightforward though, so it wasn’t unusual to come home and find that you recorded the wrong programme or maybe recorded nothing at all because you hit the wrong button or messed up the timer.

Anyway, Pat was familiar with this stuff and he wanted to record the wedding day for us. I seem to remember that he had a spot light hooked up to a large pole or stick to throw extra light on the proceedings in the church. In fairness to him, he worked hard, and the pressure was on. It wasn’t easy walking around all day with that camera hoisted on his shoulder, but he stuck with it.

We didn’t get to see the result of his efforts until we arrived home from our honeymoon. We were delighted with it and the quality was really good. He captured everything and it was nice to think it would be there for the kids and grandkids to look at in years to come.

The relatives naturally wanted to see this video too but not everyone had a video recorder so someone with a machine would host a viewing where a few people would gather around to watch it. Not everyone was keen though and I always felt sorry for the poor souls that were forced to sit through it.

I enjoyed seeing it too, but a couple of viewings was sufficient. Women on the other hand can watch these things over and over and never get enough. So, it was for one of these gatherings that my sister in law borrowed the tape. She held on to it for a while and we thought no more about it.

Some months later, my wife retrieved the tape to host one of her own cinematic gatherings. When everyone was seated around the TV, she hit the play button and that was when she got a surprise.

The video should have started with the bride getting ready to leave the house for the church, but that was replaced with the famous theme tune for ‘Match of the Day’. Then Jimmy Hill appeared on the screen which was strange because we were fairly certain that Jimmy wasn’t at the wedding.

She frantically searched the rest of the tape but sadly, there was no wedding footage only football. Another brother in law, Billy Brophy, had recorded over the wedding.

Maybe if there was such a thing as a wedding planner back in the day, they might have suggested making a copy of the tape and that alone would have been worth the fee.

• 

An ex- colleague of mine, Aidan O’Connell is a retired garda sergeant and a former member of the Cork City Garda Divisional Search Team. That’s a team made up of specially trained gardai who were brought together whenever a search was required. He told me this story.

In 2006, Robert Sheehy, a farmer from Tully, Buttevant, found what appeared to be a human skull in his field. He alerted the Gardai who launched an investigation and Aidan was instructed to assemble the search team.

Aidan gathered his 16 members, including Sgt. Michael Lyons from Kinsale, and they headed for Buttevant. They were taken to the middle of the field where the skull had been discovered. The initial theory was that a fox had possibly dug up the skull and dragged it across the field. But there was also another possibility.

There was an unsolved missing person case going back to 2002 when William O’ Brien from Buttevant had gone missing and had never been located. With that in mind, they spent all day Friday and Saturday searching the field and surrounding area but found nothing.

As they were finishing up for the day, late on Saturday evening, Aidan walked from an adjoining field back to where the skull had been located. He used the same pathway through the ditch that he had been using for the couple of days.

As he went through the gap, he spotted something on the ground. He picked it up and it appeared to be a human thigh bone, about two foot long. He called Mick Lyons and as they were examining the find, another member went into the ditch and found the matching thigh bone.

He instructed the other members to carry out a quick search of the immediate area but nothing else was found. His attention was drawn to a very large tree nearby and that got a cursory search, but it was thick with branches and leaves so they couldn’t see much.

Aidan wasn’t satisfied though and wanted the tree searched properly. Mick agreed that if he felt that strongly about it, they should do it. So, they sent for Inspector Pat McCarthy, the officer in charge of the search, because they wanted him to organise a hoist. Pat arrived, had one look up and the next thing he was climbing the tree.

After about five minutes, he came back down and sat on a branch. He pulled out his phone, and made a call; ‘Superintendent, I found him.’ 

In an article on July 5^th 2006, journalist, Niall O’ Connor, reported on the inquest at Cork Coroners Court and told how the partially mummified remains of a missing man were discovered 30 feet above the ground in the branches of a tree, four years after he went missing. William ‘Wills’ O’ Brien (46) died sometime in April 2002. The Coroner recorded a verdict of death ‘from a mode unknown’.

John Moloney from Buttevant in Cork told the Court he last saw Mr. O Brien on April 22nd 2002 as he walked across a field.

Inspector Pat McCarthy gave evidence of finding the body. He climbed the tree and noticed clothes and human remains and it appeared that William O Brien had hung himself by his cardigan. Pathologist Margaret Bolster told the court that she had received the remains of the man, which included the lower leg bones still inside a pair of boots. Dental records were used to identify him.

About two years later, Aidan came across a book in a Cork bookshop, ‘Searching, The Stories of Irelands Missing People’, by Valerie Cox. The first name in the Index was that of Wills O Brien. It was only then that he became aware of the background of Wills O Brien and the family left behind. The following is an extract:

While most seven-year-old girls are thinking about Barbie Dolls and endless other toys when discussing their lists or Santa Claus. The 2002 Christmas wish of Natalie O’ Brien in Charleville, Co Cork was for just one thing; ‘I want my daddy to come home’.

Wills O Brien’s wife Patricia, and little Natalie were distraught, not knowing what happened to their husband and father. A huge search in Buttevant and a story in RTEs Crimeline had produced no results. Natalie was to make her first Holy Communion and neither she nor Patricia knew whether the event would be witnessed by her proud father.

The strange thing about this story is that the day the remains were discovered, Aidan had passed through that same gap in the field several times and saw nothing. Upwards of ten Gardai had also been there and had looked up the same tree and hadn’t seen anything either.

He’s convinced the bone was not lying on that piece of pathway previously because he would have seen it, so his only conclusion is that it must have fallen from the tree while they were searching.

He still doesn’t understand why he was drawn to that tree or why he was so determined to have it searched. “I’m not particularly religious but I think there was an element of Divine Intervention in the finding of Wills O Brien that day. I’m happy to have played a small part in solving the mystery of his disappearance for his wife Patricia and his daughter Natalie.”

I have been in communication with Trish and Natalie while putting this piece together and I’ll leave the last word to Natalie; ‘Please tell Aidan I said thanks to Aidan and his colleagues for finding my dad and giving us some closure.’

• 

It feels like an eternity since the Government introduced us to the world of lockdown. Little did we think it would be still going on at this stage, and that news of some easing of the restrictions would be like a Lotto win. Any reprieve would be welcome now, but I’m not hopeful.

I’m not complaining either though because when I look around and see how some countries are dealing with the Corona Virus, I’m glad I’m here and not somewhere else. And I nearly wasn’t.

I was due to fly to Cyprus on March 14^th, but I checked with the Department of Foreign Affairs a few hours before my flight was due to take off and their advice was to sit tight. They said the situation was changing by the hour and while I would definitely be able to leave, they couldn’t say when I might return.

As I could be going from the frying pan into the fire, I took their advice and put my passport away again. As it turned out, they were spot on and that’s not the only thing they’ve got right.

I don’t have any political affiliations and I regularly have a pop at politicians. I have been critical of the HSE too in the past but that aside, I have been impressed with the way our people have handled the pandemic.

Dr. Tony Holohan has provided a calm reassurance and Simon Harris has put his shoulder to the wheel and has been working hard. I take my hat off to these guys. They seem to have a handle on it in so far as that’s possible.

There are people pointing to mistakes they have made in the past and there is justification for some of that but I’m talking about their performance during this pandemic solely. We have lost friends and loved ones and that’s tragic, but it could have been so much worse.

Just look across the Atlantic. The leadership from the White House is anything but clear or assured. President Trump is a divisive character at the best of times and now large crowds have taken to the streets, demanding that restrictions be lifted. The same restrictions that were put in place for their benefit and to keep them alive.

Closer to home, the UK seems to have been a bit slow getting out of the traps too. The government there is coming in for a lot of stick for initially going with the herd immunity plan.

So, I’m more positive about how we’re doing here and I’m proud of the way the public has responded to the lockdown. The vast majority have answered the call for isolation, social distancing and cocooning and they’ve done it with the good humour and tolerance we’re noted for. There have been some lapses but by and large, people have acted responsibly.

In situations like this, common sense is an extremely useful tool to have in the bag and fortunately for us, it’s a quality the Irish have in spades. We just need to keep the flag flying for another bit.

While most of us are complying with the recommendations, some are struggling. All we’ve been asked to do since this Corona Virus came to visit, is to stay at home and watch TV but a minority are struggling with it.

Easter weekend was tricky. The weather was good and some with second homes at the seaside wanted to go there but the locals had other ideas and made their feelings known. Gardai blocked the M50 but a few went anyway. It created additional stress we can do without.

The current climate is difficult enough without us turning on each other. We’ve done well so far but we need to stick with the programme.

The plan was to flatten the curve and ease the flow of patients into our hospitals so staff would be better equipped to deal with the rush when it came. The best way to achieve that we were told, was to keep apart. It worked. We have paid a significant price and we’re not out of the woods yet but we’re getting there.

Some have had it tougher than others. We’ve heard heart breaking stories of loved ones dying alone, while family members and friends were unable to spend their final moments with them or attend the funerals. That will leave its mark on us forever.

Our health care workers have been playing a stormer too fighting this illness on the front line every day. Not only the medical staff but the cleaners, porters and maintenance staff have all been risking their health. That should never be forgotten.

They deserve our respect and if we have to put up with a little inconvenience to help them, then so be it.

There has been some discussion around allowing the pubs and restaurants to open while observing current restrictions – arranging the seating in such a way as to keep the required distance between customers. Anything that gets us out for a pint again is worth consideration, but we need to be sensible.

It would be difficult for a publican to police social distancing in those circumstances. Apart from that, it may not even be practical from a financial perspective for a publican to open his doors if his income is going to be cut by 50% before he even pulls a pint.

Toilet facilities could be a problem too as many of these are no bigger than old phone boxes. Enforcing the rules of social distancing might be easy to do with compliant customers but telling the guy who is three sheets to the wind to stop slobbering in your ear would definitely be challenging.

We still have a way to go, so just hang in there.