Mick Clifford: It’s like back to the ’80s in a loop of history
Politics, Of Cork Brought Clifford Medical Morrison’s Enter Performance Time For The A Back Opera House As At Of ’80s Memories Inflation Van Gaa Spiralling We Columnist And Violence, Mick
He walked out on stage like a man arriving home, carrying his advanced years behind shades and a snazzy blue suit. Then he took off, straight into the music, back in his groove. The stage is where he belongs.
Van Morrison was in Cork Opera House during the week, the voice intact, his touch on clarinet and harmonica as firm and loose as ever. He’s 76 but he could pass for a crazy young kid of 60.
For some, the lustre came off Morrison during the pandemic when he railed against restrictions like a spoilt child. But Van Morrison the person is really irrelevant to Van the Man. Nobody would ever go to him for medical advice, unless it was for some healing of the soul.
He has no right to still have access to the outer reaches of a voice that echoes down through the last five decades, but there he was, making it real one more time again.
I could have been back on a pier in New York 36 years ago when first I saw him do his thing. And it wasn’t the only time in the last week that the 1980s beckoned across the pubic square, as if we are living on a loop of history.
The long-ago was also in evidence last Sunday in Croke Park where some scenes of ordinary GAA violence were on view.
At the full-time whistle after a wild and intoxicating game of ball between Galway and Armagh, the two teams got stuck into each other before entering the tunnel. There was, among all the usual flying fists and boots, an attempt to gouge out an eye of one of the Galway players.
Same as it ever was. Thirty and forty years ago, the violence was just as bad. Far less of it was captured on camera, some of the on-field stuff would have, in other circumstances, ended up before a court of law. Since then there have been huge advances in the GAA. Today, we have shiny stadiums, players trained within an inch of professionalism, and tactics elevated to a science. But we still have the violence, because there remains the kind of tolerance that no longer exists in other sports. Same as it ever was.
Gerry McEntee was not a man of violence but the Meath team of the 1980s, in which he played midfield, were not shy about asserting their physical presence when the occasion demanded it.
Today, McEntee is in a different battle, one that is depressingly straight out of the time when he was at his physical peak. He is a surgeon of some repute and is currently the clinical director of Our Lady’s Hospital, Navan. In that capacity, he is pushing to have the most critical patients entering the emergency department transferred to Drogheda. This, he is advocating for, in order to save lives that are in danger.
“All the indicators are that the Emergency Department (in Navan) arrangement, as it is, is unsafe,” he told Shane Coleman on .
“That is the view of nurses anaesthetists, surgeons, junior doctors, the management of the hospital and the board of the HSE.
“The view of all those looking after these critically ill patients, a small proportion of the total, is that they are not being given the best opportunity of survival.”
Railed against McEntee and his fellow medics are everybody from the Minister for Health, to the Minister for Justice, who happens to be McEntee’s niece, Helen, all the opposition politicians and a huge chunk of the citizenry from Navan and its hinterland.
All of these people claim that he is wrong and that they know better how best to save lives that are in danger. They want Navan to retain its current status and claim to be doing so in the interests of public health. Some of the consultants in Drogheda aren’t happy about things either, as they believe their hospital doesn’t have the resources to take Navan patients.
Back in 1987, when McEntee was horsing into the Dubs and Cork en route to an All-Ireland medal, the health service was cut to the bone in an attempt to straighten out the public finances. Many in the know contend that it never recovered from that cost-cutting and we have been trying to catch up since.
Down through the intervening years, medical science has sped into the future.
Another man who was in his prime back in the 1980s was Fergus Finlay. The columnist was the guest on this week’s podcast, comparing the current cost of living crisis with that which persisted for a decade after the Arab-Israeli war in the early 70s.
Finlay gave a fascinating account of life at various fronts in that battle as he served initially as a trade union negotiator, and subsequently in a coalition government attempt to come to grips with inflation and wage spiral. At home, he had a young family and was grappling with keeping the show on the road, the kind of challenge that has become increasingly familiar for thousands of young families in recent months.
By 1984, the government was getting a handle on things, but how did they do it?
“Ireland came out of it by social partnership,” he told me on the podcast. “By the government and trade unions and farmers and employers all sitting down together. We’re not doing that now and I think there ought to be the beginnings of a more intensive dialogue around the economic needs.”
Hard to argue with that but it remains to be seen whether the willingness is there to get around a table and try to keep an eye on the bigger picture this time around. What has to be avoided is that which befell the country in the clean-up job after the economic collapse in 2008. Then, it was those least able to bear it who took the greatest hit. That cohort has to be shielded as best as possible if any real solidarity is to be affected in this crisis.
Meanwhile, back in the Opera House, Van tore through his back pages as if he was in a mad rush to make it to the end of the gig intact and into the leaba with a cup of cocoa. He didn’t offer any opinions on GAA violence, medical politics or spiralling inflation. His concerns are of a more celestial nature, which is probably just as well as there’s a storm blowing right now out in the real world. Batten down the hatches and let’s hope it won’t be too long till we make it back to the bright side of the road.