Red rag and bull
The Taoiseach’s red meat resolution for the New Year has irked Ireland’s farmers, writes Maurice Gueret, who worries more about people numbers than cattle
Leo’s beef
February is a good month to review your New Year resolve. Dr Leo may be regretting that new mission to reduce his size-twelve carbon footprints. I don’t know how many jet miles he racked up on his January trip to Mali, but curtailing his exotic travel would surely help prevent climate change. It will also annoy beef farmers less than his stated aim of eating less red meat. I’m not sure that his remarks will damage an industry. But they may damage Leo. There may be a case for reducing the number of farting cows, but to my uneducated mind, human population growth is the greater barrier to a healthier world. When I was born in the 1960s, there were three billion people on the planet. Today, that figure is almost eight billion. If Leo wants an international stage, and I believe he does, I’d rather hear less about his Hereford steaks and more about his plans to address a serious population issue. It surely dwarfs all of his concerns about bovine emissions.
New Year fibre
My own health resolutions are modest for 2019. They got off to a slow start, owing to an over-supply of mince pies in the January cupboard. Resolution 1: buy a lot less food next Christmas — it’s a 24-hour day like every other. There was an interesting review of fibre in the diet last month. It was commissioned by the World Health Organisation. New guidelines are on the way, but the clear message seemed to be that our hearts, health and lifespans will improve if we eat a lot more fibre. Most people eat fewer than 10 grams a day, and we should actively consider a high-fibre diet of 30 grams a day. Not as easy as it sounds, but you’ll find plenty of ideas at Dr Google’s surgery. Sugary cereals have already been banished from my breakfast larder and replaced with bran flakes. The scientists who helped this research are also advising us to seek out greener bananas (yellowyblack ones mean more sugar and less fibre). We should be buying more cabbage, eating cooked potato skins, and snacking more on nuts and apples. Sounds like Halloween of yesteryear.
Kindest Man
Enough preaching for a Sunday. I had nice correspondence on memorials to doctors from a reader out west. She tells me that in the watery district of Claddagh near Galway city, there is a lovely stone bench facing out to the harbour. The inscription says it was erected in memory of “the kindest man in town”. That man was Dr Joe MacHale. Before my time, but some digging in old medical directories tells me that he qualified in NUI Galway in 1929, and delivered a few babies at the Coombe Hospital in Dublin. He was then Resident Medical Officer at the old Central Maternity Hospital in Galway, and practised family medicine at The Crescent, a popular city medical haunt to this day. Dr MacHale died in 1977. My correspondent recalls that he was a lovely man. Going to him as a child wasn’t in the least bit frightening. He looked after her own mother during her pregnancies. One of the things that endeared him to the family was that no matter what the ailment, cough, tummy bug or whatever, he always admitted to having a little touch of that himself the week before! Sounds like Dr Joe had empathy in spades.
Court bugs
I enjoyed the newspaper story that surfaced recently about the Master of the High Court who had to take a hammer from home to deal with a little ventilation problem in his Dublin courtroom. Don’t they have wooden gavels in courtrooms any more? When his Royal Dublin Fusiliers returned from Ypres, my Grandfather Gueret toiled in the courts service in the early years of the Irish State. Working conditions mightn’t have been that different to the trenches. He died in his 40s from tuberculosis, and family lore had it that he contracted the disease at work. In the recent case, the Master of the High Court says he feared health risks due to the lack of ventilation in his public court. He had four colds in four weeks. He said that he and the registrar had to sit “in a fug of stuffy hot air” listening to coughs and sneezes that infected the room with various virus, causing respiratory and other complaints. So he took his hammer into work and knocked the glass out of three high internal windows that wouldn’t open. The cost of repairs to the State was €340. Perhaps the cheapest and most effective public-health information campaign in years. Well done, the Master.