Vicky hits out at former HSE boss
VICKY Phelan yesterday joined the chorus of condemnation of former HSE boss Tony O’Brien over his controversial weekend interview.
Mr O’Brien, who stepped down earlier than planned from his role over his handling of the CervicalCheck scandal exposed by Ms Phelan, made a series of attacks on politicians in a weekend interview – including labelling Health Minister Simon Harris ‘weak’.
However, in a Twitter post yesterday, Ms Phelan said: ‘By his own admission, “You should be judged by what you do when you get it wrong.” And with the CervicalCheck debacle, I am afraid, Tony got it very wrong.
‘As the Head of the HSE, he presided over one of the worst health scandals ever to hit this country.’
Yesterday, Mr Harris said he wouldn’t get engaged in name calling with the former HSE boss.
‘My reaction is going to be the same today as it was yesterday and as it will be tomorrow and the day after that,’ Mr Harris told journalists in Co. Tipperary. ‘And that is I don’t engage in the politics of personalised attacks. It’s not in my nature. It’s not what I want to do. I want to focus on the issues in the health services.’
He also thanked Ms Phelan, saying: ‘I really appreciate the support of Vicky Phelan on Twitter this morning’ – in reference to a message she retweeted by UCD Medical School which said Mr Harris ‘hadn’t lacked courage’. He added: ‘My entire approach with cervical cancer was one of being concerned for the women involved and their families. I’ll never apologise for asking difficult questions and holding people to account. That is my job. The only people on my mind were the women involved and their families.’
However, Mr Harris acknowledged some of Mr O’Brien’s complaints about the questioning of officials at the Public Accounts Committee were justified. ‘I think it’s important that that forum is always respectful, and I think... there are times when it isn’t,’ he said. ‘I think there is a delicate balance between holding people accountable and making sure you do it in an acceptable way.’
OF course it should be the most inoffensive of symbols. A blood-red wildflower with the large, blunt petals of a child’s drawing, a common herald of high summer blooming in stony wastelands and fertile meadows.
If you knew no better it would appear to be the most innocent of things, a flower worn in remembrance, in tribute, in hope, in sorrow.
We offer flowers to speak for us where words aren’t enough, in the best and the worst of times, for funerals and weddings, Christenings and romances, disappointments and triumphs. And the simplicity of the fragile poppy spoke more of the madness and savagery of war than a million words ever could: while it flourished and danced on the battlefields of Flanders, Gallipoli and Ypres, thriving in the churned soil, young men were falling and dying as if swept away by a harvester’s scythe that somehow left the flowers untouched.
And yet, in a wretched paradox, the poppy that was meant as a cry for peace has become the most divisive and inflammatory of symbols. At the weekend, soccer hooligans used it as an excuse to hurl missiles and abuse at Derryborn James McClean during a game between Stoke and Middlesbrough: the irony of launching a violent attack to enforce the wearing of a peace symbol was lost on the ‘cavemen’, as McClean called them, who bayed for his blood.
McClean might not have eased tensions by quoting Bobby Sands – ‘they have nothing in their whole imperial arsenal that can break the spirit of one Irishman who doesn’t want to be broken’ – but he left nobody in any doubt about the depth and sincerity of his conviction.
Emblem
To the child of a city still scarred by the memory of Bloody Sunday, when British troops shot dead 13 unarmed civilians at a civil rights march after Mass in January 1972, the poppy is a memento mori of another class of victim, a hated emblem of swaggering British militarism.
And, as Liadh Ní Riada found when she said she’d be willing to wear one if elected President, the reach of that enmity stretches far beyond those cities and communities sundered by the Troubles.
You will rarely see poppies sold or sported on Irish streets. And however often we’re assured that the badge is simply in remembrance of the dead of the two World Wars, rather than a celebration of British military victories to date, that particular battle has been lost. Rightly or wrongly, in this country the poppy is just about the most toxic symbol you can display.
At the weekend, Donald Trump told an audience of cheering yahoos that ‘barbed wire is a beautiful thing’.
He was talking about the rolls of lethal spiked wire that his troops are now rolling out against a footsore procession of poor and desperate people, and he is far too ignorant to understand the associations barbed wire evokes in this, the month that marks the centenary of the end of the Great War.
Coils of barbed wire, draped with the bodies of the butchered and damned, remain one of the most recognisable motifs of trench warfare. Mr Trump, of course, knows nothing about war since he dodged the Vietnam draft by pleading those famous ‘bone spurs’ that never stopped him playing golf. But his ignorance, his reckless belligerence and his hate-filled rhetoric have made the world a much more dangerous place, where menace is closer to the surface than ever and the need to remember the horrors of past conflicts is all the more urgent.
A century ago, tens of thousands of young Irish men joined the war for the freedom of small nations. The youngest soldier to die in the Great War was a 14-year-old Waterford boy, John Condon, who lied about his age to fight for what he and his fellow combatants believed would be the ‘war to end all wars’.
We have never properly commemorated the 35,000 Irish men and boys who died in World War I, because their sacrifice became enmeshed with the domestic upheavals of the time, and those who survived the trenches were more likely to face abuse than acclaim if they dared to return. In many Irish households they remain, as the ballad goes, strangers without names behind the glass frames of yellowed old photographs, forgotten and unsung.
Memory
A century on, we owe them our observance. The thugs who attacked James McClean are arguably the ones besmirching the memory of the war dead, who did not give their lives for symbols or slogans.
Instead, as the Irish poet Thomas Kettle wrote four days before he died at the Somme, he and the ‘foolish dead’ died ‘not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor, but for a dream born in a herdsman’s shed’; for the principles of Christianity, in other words, for love of your neighbour, for peace to all men.
Those boys and their courage deserve to be remembered, and now, as the centenary approaches, is the time to devise a new emblem we can all wear with pride.