RSSIreland Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow Parts Three and Four
Gene Lalor | March 12, 2010
Slightly revised and updated, the following is a re-publication of an article originally published on TheAmericanThinker.com (”Ireland Today,” June 29, 2006, http://bit.ly/danrAX). With St. Patrick’s Day when everyone becomes part Irish for a day just a wee bit down the road, a re-printing is in order. These are parts three and four.
The Bad News
Meanwhile, despite all the good news, there was a distinctly dark side to life in Ireland in 2006, news that has grown much darker over four years with the economic contraction and the bursting of the real estate bubble.
The once-vaunted health system (acclaimed when the now-defunct Irish Sweepstakes financed Irish hospitals) was in serious trouble then and the situation has worsened as the euros have dried up.
On my visits, a number of people shared anecdotes about how friends and relatives had gone to emergency rooms and were kept on gurneys for more than twenty four hours before they even saw a doctor. Even then it was rarely an M.D. but what we would call a physician’s assistant.
In 2005, only five of fifty four hospitals were rated by the government as hygienically “good,” a figure that most were able to improve in 2006, but the hospitals were still woefully behind most international standards, a condition that has been exacerbated in the last few years.
New hospitals were still being built by the cash-flush government through 2007 but some were opening without beds! Staffing was another problem and, though the doctors, nurses, and aides that I met seemed competent and pleasant, the facilities were clearly short-handed and their staffs had to be supplemented by foreigners, some with minimal English language skills.
I had a personal and depressing experience involving the Irish hospital system and the aforementioned aged uncle in 2007 after he was admitted to the Midlands hospital in Portlaois, which has had difficulties with short-staffing, etc. (http://bit.ly/cJYWZV) In brief, his treatment under Ireland’s version of Obamacare was abysmal and culminated in the hospital’s requesting I agree to a Do Not Resuscitate order, a DNR.
As designated next of kin, I refused to accede to a DNR, a refusal Portlaois overruled when the hospital secured a DNR from another relative. My uncle died within days.
The hospital needed the bed.
Were health care the only negative in the Celtic Tiger’s new culture, it would be sad enough. There’s also the baby boom.
Walk the streets and byways of Ireland and you’ll see more babies than you can shake a shillelagh at. This in and of itself should have been a positive development—if not for the fact record numbers of young Irish men and women were choosing not to marry before they conceived a child.
Very Catholic Ireland outlaws abortion, for now, but young hormones being what they are, sexual intercourse is a very popular indoor sport. Irish lads and lassies are foregoing church and ring in favor of what used to be called, indelicately, ’shacking up,’ and little Irish tykes are being born seemingly en masse.
More nails in Ireland’s soul.
The other boom, the economic one, was not without its drawbacks, either. It bred governmental corruption and malfeasance and a growing currency deflation, the first such experience for Ireland in 50 years, which doesn’t bode well for the near future.
The Future
Irish myth says that the island will sink beneath the waves before the end of the world arrives. I don’t envision that in the near future but more changes are certainly in store for this diminutive but grand isle. It achieved too much in too short a time period to continue such prosperity. At the same time it seemed oblivious of the negative effects of sudden riches.
Four years ago, I read impressive stories about the government sending 30 million euros in foreign aid to Uganda. I also read stories of immigrants being given priority in public housing over native Irish, a largesse that didn’t sit well with the natives.
I read stories of child molestors like a notorious Mr. A having sentences reduced on technicalities and released into the general population. I read stories of a young man strangling his mother when she denied him a fag [cigarette] who was not prosecuted because he had an alleged mental disability.
I passed the remark to a cab driver that Ireland is starting to look and sound like a mini—version of the United States! I also said to him that Ireland seemed to be becoming as stupid as we are. He agreed on both counts.
But, come what may, Ireland will always be Ireland, the little island with the disproportionate influence on the world and especially on the United States. As my uncle said, it has traded its soul, and that may be. I expect though that some day it will re-negotiate the terms of that trade and once again become that fabled Land of Saints and Scholars.
Sure and begorrah, me darlins, one can always hope.
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