Critics of welfare state need a douse of Angela’s Ashes

I AM reading Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. I tried to read it 20 years ago but a few pages into the first chapter I gave up. I wasn’t able for the miserable Irish childhood and, as the author said, the miserable Irish Catholic childhood was even worse. Over the years, every now and again I’d look at the book on my bookshelf and feel guilty I hadn’t read one of the most important works ever written about my native city.

This summer, a musical version of Angela’s Ashes hit the stage at The Lime Tree Theatre in Limerick and moved on the Bord Gais Energy Theatre in Dublin and the Grand Opera House in Belfast.

When the notion of a musical version was first mooted many people thought it was a joke. Anyone who saw the film version most certainly thought an all-singing and alldancing adaptation of the memoir was surely taking black humour to a new level. However, the show met with great acclaim and commanded standing ovations every night.

The success of the stage version in contrast to the film is attributed to the fact that it drew on the humour of the book, whereas the movie concentrated on the rain, the hunger and ‘the consumption’.

I was fortunate to see the musical twice and was charmed by it, so much so that after a 20-year gap I took up the book again, and I’m riveted by every syllable. Yes, it’s as sad a story as you are ever likely to read, with more than its fair share of loss, betrayal, tragedy and deprivation.

However, it is enormously rich in language, pathos and straight-talk liberally sprinkled with Limerick humour.

Among the things that strike one about the world of Frank’s childhood is the horror of living in a society with little or no social protection and minimal health care. In Frank’s house, when the money ran out, as it did with cruel regularity, and the food ran out, they had nowhere to turn. There was little understanding and sympathy for their plight among those who had the power to make a difference. In fact the ‘middle Ireland’ of their day showed scant interest.

People like Frank and his family were undernourished, poorly clothed and prone to illness of all kinds. Their encounters with the professional classes would be hilarious were they not so tragic and infuriating.

Frank spent a month in hospital with severe conjunctivitis. As he left hospital to return to the grinding poverty of his home at Roden Lane, the doctor told him to keep his eyes clean with soap and water and clean towels. He was told if he built up his health with nourishing food, plenty of beef and eggs, he would have “a pair of sparkling eyes in no time”. Young Frank laughed at the doctor’s naiveté.

“God help us,” his mother Angela later says, “those poor doctors don’t have a notion of not having.”

One of the saddest cases is John Hannon, who delivered coal and turf by horse and f loat. He had ulcerated legs and couldn’t afford new bandages to keep the dirt at bay. The only medical advice he got was to “stay off the legs”. His wife responded: “Sure how can he stay of them legs? He has to work. What would we live on if he didn’t work? ”

The events recalled in Angela’s Ashes took place mainly during ‘the Emergency’, or the Second World War. There are constant allusions to it throughout the book.

Soon after the war ended, a quiet revolution took hold throughout the western world whereby the state became proactive in