Image of a child in pain must spur us into action
ALITTLE girl is sleeping on a small couch in a waiting room for want of a hospital bed. Even though she’s only seven years old, her feet, in pink and white socks, dangle off the side of the couch because it’s too short for her to stretch out. She has a burst appendix, and the wire from a portable monitor snakes beneath the blue blanket covering her tiny frame. She is just one of hundreds of patients sleeping in corridors and waiting rooms, on chairs and couches and trolleys, in overcrowded hospitals all across this prosperous country in the past week.
‘A frail old man, blind in one eye, lying dead on a wet bed with an old blanket gripped in his left hand, two cold rooms in that timber chalet, no fuel for the fire and no food in the press and he halfnaked, stiff in his death sentence, alone in his misery.’ On a freezing February day more than 40 years ago, a Dublin fireman described finding that scene in a shack in Charlemont Street. It was just one of dozens of such scenes he’d come across, in his years with the Tara Street ‘escape tender’, detailed to investigate houses where the residents hadn’t been seen in days. But it was the one that made him cry ‘Enough’ – as this newspaper’s headline over the picture of the little girl on the couch this week echoed.
That fireman, a father of five young children, promptly gave up his fags and his few pints and used the money to print posters asking people to look out for such lonely old folk. Word got around that a Tara Street fireman was behind the posters. One day, a schoolboy gave him 14p from his pocket money, a pensioner gave him two pounds, a businessman gave him a tenner. The fireman sat down with his £12.14p and wondered what to do with it.
And so the charity Alone was born of those humble donations. The fireman was Willie Bermingham, and the charity he set up has provided dignity and shelter to countless old people over the past four decades. One of Alone’s housing developments now bears his name – Willie Bermingham Place in Kilmainham, south Dublin. When he died in 1990, he shared his grave with several paupers to whom he’d offered his plot.
The little girl lying on the couch in Crumlin Hospital last week is Willie’s granddaughter, Ruby. Her dad is Willie Bermingham Jr, himself a fireman in Tara Street, a career of which his dad was so proud that he named his youngest son David Francis so he’d have the initials of the Dublin Fire Brigade.
RUBY never knew her grandfather, who died of cancer in 1990. And there’s no comparison between conditions in modern hospitals, even when they’re busy and over-crowded, and the sort that drove him to despairing action in 1977. But now, as then, sometimes a problem needs a human face before it ceases to be a political or administrative issue, and becomes an imperative function of compassion and humanity. Back in the harsh winter of ’76–’77, when eight old people froze to death in their homes, that face belonged to a starved and stiffened corpse on a wet bed in a wooden hovel.
Today, the sight of a little girl curled up in pain on a hospital couch might just be the image that compels the politicians, managers and administrators to cry: ‘Enough.’