by Padraig O’Meiscill
[This article is part of a series called Answering Ireland’s Call: Thoughts for a new republic (Freagairt ar Ghlaoch na hÉireann: Smaointe ar phoblacht nua). The series will publish articles discussing the reunification of Ireland but within the context of early 21st Century ills such as the climate crisis, capitalism and fascism. If you like what you read, please share the articles far and wide. If you have insights and ideas on the subject and want to make a contribution, the project team would love to hear from you via irelandscall@mailbox.org. This article was also published on ZNetwork.]
A man I know – I’ll call him Liam – worked as a nurse in a Belfast care home throughout the Covid pandemic.
With the world about to collapse, I read a bit, maybe did a Zoom call and then went for a dander. Liam, on the other hand, was working 12-hour shifts, feeding old timers and cleaning them, then going home to stick a swab up his nose to see if he’d got it yet.
Liam has COPD but he hadn’t told the bosses that in the interview because he was afraid he wouldn’t get the job if he did and, once he was in the door, he wouldn’t tell his employers then because he was afraid he would lose his job, even – or especially – when a new disease came along that could leave a person’s lungs in bits.
When the first lockdown began, Liam told me the owners of the care home were keeping all the Personal Protective Equipment locked away in a storeroom until there was a confirmed case. Many days, he’d be escorting a resident to a hospital appointment, at a time when people were dying in them because they couldn’t catch a breath, before a vaccine had been developed, but the PPE in his place would only come out once there’d been a positive test. Otherwise, there could be money wasted.
While no relatives were allowed in on visits, everyone waited for a resident to bring the infection back from hospital or for a nurse to bring it in from home. The workers in the home took to chipping in and ordering their own masks, while in other homes, Liam told me, nurses were wrapping black bin bags around themselves when treating Covid patients.
Obviously, the infection eventually got into Liam’s home and the protective gear was unlocked, and the elderly were now treated by people in what looked to them like space suits and not a small number died. Liam says he’d watch a patient struggling for a breath, sometimes a breath that definitively refused to come, and then walk home through deserted streets, coming across not a single soul in a neighbourhood he’d lived in his whole life. Even his phone was silent.
When he eventually tested positive after months of waiting for it, Liam was told to isolate at home for at least ten days on statutory sick pay of £87 a week. The owners of the home weren’t legally required to top that sum up and, anyway, they said to Liam, everyone was taking a hit, so why shouldn’t he?
Liam was lucky, his chest was fine, he didn’t even have a temperature, but he had to go scrambling for the rent money that month. I can almost hear the commentary that never was, ‘Here comes the hero now, watch him as he digs himself up to his neck in debt over his heroics. Look now, he’s heading back to the frontline, not a thing in his pockets; all to the sound of rapturous applause’.
That was then. We don’t talk about that anymore. Today, the husband and wife who own the care home are clocking up the air miles again, never missing a big game in Manchester, the plague a dim memory to them, like something that happened to someone else.
Liam is still doing 12-hour shifts for several days at a time, doing some of the hardest work, becoming so close to residents that he’s often at funerals when their time is up. The money’s still bad and there’s not even the sound of that applause ringing in his ears anymore, but the friends he makes along the way keep him going.
The dichotomy between those who own nothing and those own too much is something that isn’t talked about enough when life after partition in Ireland is imagined. Who will the new country be for?
Ireland today, north and south, like every other society, requires carefully curated myths to keep us all going. At the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, then taoiseach Leo Varadkar, addressed the nation thus, “Let it be said that when things were at their worst we were at our best. Not all superheroes wear capes… some wear scrubs and gowns.”
“Many ordinary people, especially in public systems like health, education and emergency services, have spent their year doing extraordinary things,” a columnist was writing in the Irish Examiner by Christmas 2021 and new taoiseach Micheál Martin agreed, “We remain deeply grateful for their heroic effort,” he intoned.
That was two years before Joanna Hickey, an Intensive Care Unit nurse from Dublin, posted her pay slip on Twitter to demonstrate to the nation why she had no choice but to go out on strike with her workmates.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve written a string of news stories about the treatment of some young people in care in Children’s Health Ireland hospitals in the capital. There is a problem with the system, and much of it can be traced back to the fact that it has as its primary motivation the accumulation of profit for private companies and individuals. But what has struck me again and again is the absolute lack of any meaningful mechanism for those most affected by illness – the child patients, their parents and wider families, the frontline staff who treat them – to impact upon the nature of the treatment or the direction of the care.
What you encounter time after time is the contempt with which primary care givers – whether hospital staff or relatives – are treated when it comes to decision making, information sharing and accountability. There is contempt at high levels, and I use that word after seeing plenty of evidence of it, for the opinions and experience for those who suffer and struggle and learn through that painful process every day of the week. No room is made for hard-earned knowledge and no space is given to transparency, never mind popular participation in public healthcare.
We have an Ireland that parrots the myth that caregivers are central to our being – and the country must do this, otherwise it couldn’t hold itself together at times like pandemics – but has no place for these people at the tables where decisions are taken. A lot of the time, administrations north and south and private concerns like care homes won’t even pay these people a wage they’re able to live on – they’re left to subsist.
This is a microcosm of how society in general operates in Ireland. Take housing, for example. What mechanisms do the tens of thousands of people languishing on waiting lists across the country have to remedy their plight? What real access to power do they have? Who has more influence over the direction of things as it stands? A working parent who slaves to pay an extortionate rent to a letting company? Or the company? Maybe the company will donate a couple of pounds from the rent money to a local GAA team. Maybe the GAA team will then print the landlord’s name on their tops. Maybe another myth can be got going that way.
The question needs to be asked of us, are we going to replicate these structures of deliberate disempowerment in the new Ireland? Will power – the ability to shape the directions of people’s lives and define the material conditions in which they live them – still be held in a few isolated, privileged hands after reunification?
In English, the noun ‘care’ derives from the old German word ‘kar’ for ‘sorrow’ or ‘lamentation’, but as a verb the origins of ‘to care’ are in the older Indo-European word for ‘shout’ or ‘call’. While care provision in today’s Ireland may often take the form of an isolated, despairing shout, the opportunity is going to present itself for things to be turned upside down. I like to think of it in terms of one lonely ‘shout in the street’ that transmogrifies into a call that emanates from many throats at the same time, filled with hope, impossible to ignore.
For who, then, will the new Ireland be put to work? Will it work for those who expend their strength in the care homes and for those who live in them, or will it work for those who own them? Will it work for those who risk their health for others, or for those who lock protective gear away because it might save them a few quid to invest somewhere else? The country can’t work for two masters.
Sooner or later (and while even a day later is another day too long, we have learned to be nothing if not patient), the disastrous attempt at dividing the people of Ireland will be brought to an end and the building of the new society will begin. In many small and important ways, it already has begun – component parts of the new world must be built within the shell of the old one.
Ireland is an old place with a long history that’s worth being proud of, but we still have to make the place anew if it’s going to accommodate the needs of its children. And every grand endeavour, every new country needs foundation myths.
Foundation myths can be dangerous things, they can start life as lies and act as a precursor to genocide – myths like ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’. They can become threadbare, being used and abused by people on the make. But more often than not, they enter the world as system shattering imprecations to build something better out of the ruins of injustice, like ‘cherishing all the children of the nation equally’. And we should never stop trying to write them.
Why not then dare to prepare for life after partition by writing a powerful one? One so breathtakingly naïve that every hard nose with a bank account that’s topped up by other people’s labour will say it’s destined to fail.
It could go something like this: That the new Ireland will be owned and run by those who care for it, not those who seek to profit from it; that this new country of ours will belong to those who build it with their hands and to those who cry and sweat for the wellbeing of their afflicted sisters and brothers.
Why not start the story like that and see where it takes us?
Pádraig Ó Meiscill is a writer from Belfast. He currently lives in Beijing.
