On my mind

DID you know that in August 1911 in Llanelli 500 railway workers went on strike?

This was because their pay was very low compared to other workers, and the railways and their owners were making large profits.

Sense of deja vu, anyone?

Words like “ownership” and “public” come to mind.

In order to make their voices heard they decided to stop any trains travelling through the town by crowding around the two crossings on the east and west sides of Llanelli station.

When Winston Churchill (beloved of the miners in Tonypandy) authorised troops to intervene, the result was tragedy with two young men dead.

The events were formally remembered in last week’s march in Llanelli.

A week later in Killarney I came across the statue of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, otherwise known as the Vatican Scarlet Pimpernel. Words like “Peck” and “Gregory” come to mind.

In the Second World War he hid many antiFascists and Jews from the Gestapo and went on to set up the Rome Escape Line to hide Allied escapees.

I have a theory that the source of global warming is the result of the stale hot air that billows out of political meetings, pressure groups, local councils and newspaper columns like mine.

So when these two events intersected in my recent experience they were a reminder that words without deeds are a total waste of time when it is action that really matters.

It is easy for a community to be paralysed by words of good intention and complacency, a kind of benign nonintervention.

It was Barack Obama, a proper US President, who said: “A change is brought about when ordinary people do extraordinary things”.

Words like “just do it” come to mind”.

Follow Graham on Twitter@GeeTDee