To understand life is to grow with it

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”

Herman J M Nouwen

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.” 

James Baldwin

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”

E K Ross

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” 

Ernest Hemingway

“I learn from my own daughter that you don’t have to be awake to cry.”

Jodi Picoult

“When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death.”

Clarence Darrow

Right Against Might: The Finnish and Russian war 1939

On November 1939 Russia attacked Finland on one of the coldest winters on record: some 50 degrees below zero.

Four soviet  armies, 21 divisions, thousands of tanks and planes, and half a million soldiers attacked Finland on the first day alone. It was three times larger than the combined allied forces that landed in Normady on DDAY. They then threw yet another million soldiers against Finland along with thousands of more aircraft and hundreds more of tanks shortly afterwards.

The Finns on the other hand had over two hundred thousand men, with just a few rifles in their hands, and a few Molotov cocktails in their arsenal between them. 

The Finns fought with incredible bravery, skill, and with respect for the living and the dead, including that of the enemy. After all, it was the only the Finns that buried the Russians. The battle lasted 105 days.

At its end, a million Russian soldiers lay dead from bullets, bombs, frostbite, starvation, brainwashing and stupidity. The still living ones had abandoned the others still trying to cling onto life, and had resorted to cannibalism of the ones that were dead and the meat of horses on their way out the exit door. The finnish however were still standing.

They would have fought longer and harder still except for the fact that their closest geographical neighbours, along with other promised allies, had abandoned them in order to save their own skins.Their skins, because of that action were not saved.

In the final peace treaty Finland did concede some territory in order for Russia to protect its borders from their admitted fear of the Germans, at least this is what the Russians claimed. The Finnish people though kept their country and independence to this very day.

The reality of this war is one where David did slay Goliath but has deeper meanings. The finns respect for life, liberty, sacrifice, and love of freedom helped win that battle. They had come together not only as a nation but as a large close-knit family in great peril, and lived not only to fight another day but also to tell their story. 

For me herein lies a lesson and an inspiration: There is always a way within the unity of sharing and that can make a singular part, that when it is moulded, becomes the driving engine of a much larger force. It also helps to have right on your side against might that makes the cause easier to fight or even die for.

Barry Clifford   

The five best things about living back in Ireland

What I once took for granted, I now see with new eyes since moving home from Sydney

Elaine Doyle in Co Cork: ‘Living away from Ireland has given me a new appreciation for my country.’

Leaving Australia for good has been like a relationship breakup that hasn’t ended on bad terms. There is a sense of loss that’s hard to explain.

The decision to leave amazing job opportunities, a decent salary, good friends and endless sunshine in Sydney behind after five years was difficult. But something was missing for the last year. Perhaps it's my age, but the longing for family and friends started to mean more to me than anything else. I wanted to be around people who have known me for a long time. As many of my friends have moved home already, the constantly changing social network was getting tiring. Missing family weddings and funerals was becoming too much.

As a counsellor, I always ask clients what support networks they have in their life. I began to ask myself that question, and realised my network wasn’t where I needed it to be. Or, more to the point, I wasn’t where it was.

When I finally made the decision to move home a few months ago, I did it because I knew I had to listen to my gut instinct. I was homesick, and no number of sunset walks could ever fix that.

Mount Leinster, Co Carlow at sunset.

Many of the Irish friends I had over there had already moved home and had very positive experiences, which has helped pave the way back for me too. I have tried to surround myself with these people, and avoid listening to the negative experiences, especially online. It’s important to be aware of the difficulties you could potentially face, but obsessing about these issues is not helpful for me.

From talking to these friends, and based on my own experiences since I’ve moved home, here are my top five most positive things about being back in Ireland:

1. When the sun is shining there is no place I would rather be. I recently spent a few days down in Kerry and Cork when the weather was good. I’ve travelled a lot, but Kerry is still one of my favourite places in the world, because of its food, the music, the mountains and some of the best beaches I’ve ever seen.

Coomenoole Beach in Dingle, Co Kerry.

Living away from Ireland has given me a new appreciation for my country. What I once took for granted, I now see with new eyes. While driving around Slea Head Drive in Dingle and the Wild Atlantic Way, one of the longest coastal drives in the world, I realised I’ve travelled to the other side of the world to see sights like this, and here they are right here in my home country. Even when the sun wasn’t out, I found the landscape breathtaking.

Sunset at Dungarvan Harbour.

Other road trips I’ve done since moving home include cycling the Greenway in Waterford with my mother, a scenic cycle route along an old railway line with gorgeous coastal, river and forrest views. That night we watched one of the nicest sunsets I’ve ever seen at Dungarvan harbour. I am so excited to keep discovering this wonderful country. There is an endless amount of adventures and experiences to be had, and I cant wait to see more; rain, hail or sunshine.

The Greenway, Co Waterford.

2. Being able to escape to a sunny destination in Europe when the rain becomes too much. After living in Australia, it’s a real novelty to be able to hop on a cheap flight to anywhere in Europe and be immersed in a different culture, new foods and sunny weather. Last month I was in Monaco in France and a small mountain village called Eze, and a few hours later I was back home in my bed in Ireland. I plan to do weekend vacations in Europe as often as I can.

Eze village near Nice, France.

3. Being surrounded by family. My family are right beside me when I’ve difficult decisions to make, and the happiness I can see in them since I moved home is priceless. Last month I got to spend my birthday with my family for the first time in four years. This month I threw a party for my fathers 60th birthday. I am so lucky and happy that I get to do these things now instead of missing out. For me, life is too short to spend it away from the people you love the most. Yesterday I spent a rainy day with my grandmother baking Irish soda bread and listening to her talk about how glad she is that I’ve moved home. Bliss.

Inch Beach, Co Kerry.

4. Being around old friends. Luckily, most of my friends are now back in Ireland, or never left at all. I love being back around friends I’ve known for years, who know me really well. As much as I enjoy meeting new people, the warm fuzzy feeling I get around old friends is hard to beat. Last week I got a wedding invitation from a friend and it feels great to know I can accept the invite without having to fly half way across the world.

5. Irish people, ‘the craic’, the Irish sense of humour. I have travelled to more than 30 countries and have friends from many different cultures, but for me, nothing beats the Irish. Perhaps I had to travel the world to realise this. One of the most important things in life I’ve realised is to be able to laugh and have fun, and who better at that than the Irish. A friend who I lived with in Perth now living in Clare expressed her appreciation for the sense of caring from Irish people, their easy going nature, and the sense of community.

Slea Head Drive, Dingle, Co Kerry.

I also have a new profound love for Irish culture. The food, the music, the history, and - being from Kilkenny - GAA. Last month I went to the semi-final of the Leinster senior championship with my Dad and brother, and was so excited to be supporting Kilkenny. The electric atmosphere at a hurling match is something I have missed.

While down in Kerry recently we went to O’ Conners Pub in Killarney where six musicians were playing some of the best traditional Irish music I have ever heard. Any time I listened to Irish music in Australia I felt sick to my stomach with homesicknesses, and on this night I just felt pure happiness.

Sunset at Killarney National Park, Co Kerry.

Some of my happiest experiences in the last few weeks have revolved around food. Eating seafood chowder overlooking the ocean in Ardmore in Waterford, fish and chips at the pier in Dingle, or pub grub at Mary Barry’s Bar in Kilmore in Wexford, which was voted the best Gastro Pub Food in Leinster this year, are among the highlights.

I understand that moving back can be very daunting. The decision to leave your life and career, and having to start all over again can be too much for some. But for me, my priority is to be closer to my family, and with that comes different challenges, but once I keep reminding myself why I’m doing it, these fade away.

As I have said to others, you have to do what’s right for you. For me, the right thing was moving home.

By Elaine Doyle

To teach how to learn rather than what to learn.....

The teachers would slap me about the head. But that was all part and parcel of school at the time. I was hauled before the headmaster, who said that there was something wrong with me. My teacher twisted my ear till it broke and said, “You are only fit to grease your fathers biscuits tins,” because I didn’t understand arithmetic.

Anthony Hopkins ( Actor)

One had to cram all this stuff into one’s mind whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.

Albert Einstein (Genius)

The problem with school is that the teachers always asked me about things that I did not know but never about the things that I did.

Winston Churchill ( leader)

I had never let schooling interfere with my education

Mark Twain (Wit)

Our teachers were absolute tyrants. They had no sympathy with youth; their one object was to stuff our brains and turn us into erudite apes like themselves. If any pupil showed the slightest trace of originality, they persecuted him relentlessly, and the only model pupils whom I have ever got to know have all been failures in later-life.
Adolf Hitler (Tyrant)

Barry

There are lies, damn lies, and rumours

Everybody knew that the famous sports figure had abused the child. Everybody knew he was the man at the centre of the X case, in which a 14-year-old girl was initially stopped from travelling to the UK for an abortion in 1992.

 Everybody knew he was the man who had impregnated the girl. Or something like that. Even the dogs in the street were aware of the details.

So went the rumour — elevated to the status of Gospel — around the country over two decades ago. The sportsman had been a popular figure but that didn’t stop the “truth” spreading like wildfire.

Eventually, he felt compelled to come out publicly in the media to deny it, doing so first in the pages of the Sunday World and subsequently on the Kenny Live programme on RTÉ television.

His plea of innocence, and his account of what the rumour had done to him, his family and his business, tugged at the public’s heart strings. Everybody sighed relief that it wasn’t true. Everybody wondered how such a vicious and baseless rumour could have come to be so widely accepted.

Swap a popular sportsman for a garda whistleblower, reviled by large sections of the organisation he had sworn to serve.

Soon after Maurice McCabe began highlighting malpractice in An Garda Síochána in 2008 the rumours began to spread around Cavan and Monaghan.

The first one concerned his marriage. He had left the family home. Of course that made sense. His wife probably gave him the door. She saw what a toerag he was, telling tales from behind the blue wall, and realised she could no longer live with such a human being.

Then there was the other woman. While he was sergeant in charge at Bailieborough station, McCabe had received a complaint of sexual harassment from a young female garda. He acted immediately to have the perpetrator transferred to another unit.

The female garda’s complaint of harassment was included in the internal Garda investigation into McCabe’s complaints of malpractice, and ultimately upheld.

But some put two and two together and we all know by now that certain members of An Garda Síochána aren’t the best at sums.

McCabe was having an affair with the female garda. That made sense. Hadn’t he sorted her out in the station, and now he’d left his wife and five children and was shacked up with her?

His life was in turmoil as a result of his whistleblowing. Or his redundant complaints can be explained by his turbulent life. Or whatever, as long as the rumour does its work to blacken his character.

Those baseless rumours only had a short shelf life. While hurtful to all concerned, they were easily discounted. But there was worse to come.

By 2013, McCabe was discommoding not just gardaí in Cavan Monaghan but senior officers across the country. He had complained about the widespread fixing of speeding tickets within the upper echelons of the force.

Such upheaval of the way things were done required the creation of the basest rumour of them all. Everybody knows that the guy highlighting corruption has questions to answer himself. Everybody knows he’s a kiddie fiddler.

In this instance, there was something to work with for those minded to twist the truth beyond recognition.

In 2006, the daughter of a colleague, who had been disciplined after McCabe reported him, made an allegation. She claimed that McCabe had touched her inappropriately eight years previously during a game of hide and seek in the McCabe home.

The allegation had precious little credibility. The DPP, who received a file on it, concluded that the girl had told different stories, lacked credibility and in any event the allegation wasn’t even criminal in nature. The local state solicitor described the allegation, if it occurred at all, as “horseplay and no more”.

But so what? Those who wanted to blacken McCabe battered the life out of the facts, repackaged them in slime and sent them forth to multiply into a malicious rumour.

The Charleton Tribunal, investigating whether McCabe was smeared, has been told that TD John McGuinness and senior civil servant Seamus McCarthy will both claim to have been told by former commissioner Martin Callinan in January 2014 that McCabe was being investigated for child sexual abuse offences. Callinan has denied this to the tribunal.

He says he didn’t say any such thing to McCarthy and that when he met McGuinness the TD was aware that there had been an allegation against McCabe and a decision not to proceed with charges.

An example of what was being peddled emerged at the tribunal on Monday. The tribunal was told the colleague’s daughter made a complaint to Gsoc about how the case was handled in 2006-7. (Gsoc ultimately dismissed the complaint.)

In her statement, she related that she was told McCabe would “hang around girls’ secondary school, looking at young ones”. She also suggested that there was another girl in Clones, where McCabe had served, with a similar allegation to hers. All of this was complete lies and being peddled around the place to dispatch McCabe’s reputation to the gutter.

Listening to this stuff spill out in Dublin Castle can be a chastening experience. What was heard in evidence is the tiniest example of the kind of rumours that were retailed about McCabe right through the force, in the media and politics, and into elements of the wider public.

Walk for a minute in his shoes. Sit in his seat at the tribunal. Imagine hearing that people were talking about you in these terms. Imagine how it must feel to know you were being portrayed far and wide as somebody who would prey on children.

The power of the rumour is awesome. Most of us like to gossip in a casual manner. Many who pass on rumours don’t do so with malicious intent. Some even issue the lies in embarrassed whispers, as if attempting to genuinely find out if there could be any truth to it.

That was the case to a large extent with the sports figure referenced above. Few among the general population would have harboured animus towards that man. If anything, the whispers were tempered with sadness.

When the rumour is fuelled by malicious intent, its power is hugely amplified. Now you have people spreading it who want to believe it, who want the world to know that the subject is a person of ill repute because it suits their own personal agenda.

In the case of Maurice McCabe there was malicious intent among a considerable cohort who spread the muck.

The rumours were not a function of idle gossip, but weapons to be used in an attempt to destroy him because he was upsetting a way of life, highlighting what was wrong with policing.

In such a milieu, the orbiting lie takes on a terrifying power. At last though, as evidence spills out of the tribunal, the truth is taking to the skies.

Michael Clifford

The Lonely Hearts Club

Lonely heart ads had been around in Britain since 1695, when a pamphleteer concluded that love could be sold just like fish and chips or bread and milk and as easy as giving candy to a baby.

The first ever ad was by a 30-year-old man, with ‘a very good estate’, in search of ‘some good young gentlewoman that has a fortune of £3,000 or thereabouts’. £3,000 (sterling) is equivalent to roughly £300,000 today. Below are a few more lonely heart ads since:

In 1750 one read: ‘Good teeth, soft lips, sweet breath, with eyes no matter what colour so they are but expressive; of a healthy complexion, rather inclin’d to fair than brown; neat in her person, her bosom full, plump, firm and white; a good understanding, without being a wit, but cheerful and lively in conversation, polite and delicate of speech, her temper humane and tender, and to look as if she could feel delight where she wishes to give it.’

In 1768: ‘A lady, whose accomplishments hath acquired the esteem of the beau monde, having lately lost a secret friend, is desirous of putting herself under the protection of any person of rank and fortune.’

One in 1772 read simply: ‘No ­bodily deformity,’ 

Another in 1772, who wrote even more simply ‘shapely ankle preferr’d’

Yet another in 1787: ‘He must never drink above two bottles of claret, or one of port, at a sitting, and that but three times a week. His education must be liberal, and his address captivating. In company he must pay a ­constant attention to his spouse, and not ogle, or intrigue, by squints and looks, with pert misses, who constantly give men encouragement, by made-up leers, and ­manufactured sight. Only he has promised to do so in the sight of heaven. He must never get up after twelve, or rise before nine o’clock; in a word, he must be the very man he ought to be.’

In 1776, an ad appeared from a British member of parliment talking in the third person:  ‘He lives in great splendour, and from whom a considerable estate must pass if he dies without issue. He hath no objection to marry any widow or single lady, provided the party be of genteel birth, polite manners, and five, six, seven, or eight months gone in her pregnancy.’ 

By World War 1 (1914 to 1918, a British soldier had placed this ad: ‘Lonely young officer, up to his neck in Flanders, would like to correspond with young lady (age 18-20), cheery and good looking.’

While a soldiers girlfriend in1915 wrote: ‘Lady, fiancé killed, will gladly marry officer totally blinded or otherwise incapacitated by the War.’

During the American Civil War between 1861-1865, this extract from a soldier to a woman who had responded to his lonely hear ad is my favourite, and so describes the efforts of what a little embellishment can do in the tangled web he weaved when he lied (just a little) to deceive to support his quest for that special partner:-  

Camp of the11th Battery. Feb 9^th 1864

‘Before proceeding further, truth and candor compel me to acknowledge that a little deception was used in the advertisement in the “Waverly.”  In other words, my true description differs materially from the one therein set forth, and may not please you as well as the one “fancy painted,” but I thought it was all for fun, therefore funningly gave a fictitious description as well as cognomen. 

Be it known unto you then, this individual is 29 years of age, five feet and eleven inches high, dark blue eyes, brown hair, and light (ruddy) complexion. There you have it. How do you like the description? Me thinks I hear you answer. I don’t like it so well as the advertised description. Well ! I’ll admit it is not quite so fascinating to a young lady as the fictitious one, but it is a fixed fact, “like the laws of the Medes and Persians,” which alter not.”……’

Barry Clifford

‘We’re not as far from Magdalene days as we’d like to believe’

‘Eclipsed’ tackled abuse in laundries in 1992. The original cast are set to read it at Galway