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Sat, 23 Sep, 2023 - 00:55

It was a poignant message for us all when Dublin couple Vincent and Bríd Kelly, 60 years married, decided to publicly renew their wedding vows for us all to share. Because the ceremony, recorded by the Alzheimer Society of Ireland, was an eloquent reminder of our responsibilities to each other and to fellow citizens in a society where we are all ageing and will become mutually dependent.

Bríd, who lives with the disease, celebrated her original wedding with her husband, who is her primary carer, and other family members and friends ahead of World Alzheimer’s Day this week. More than 64,000 people are calculated to be suffering from some form of cognitive impairment in Ireland, while around the world about 55m are calculated to be affected by its impact.

Short-term memory loss is often one of the first symptoms although other early signs can include getting stuck for words, misplacing items regularly, losing track of time, mood and behaviour swings, and difficulty in finding the way, even in familiar surroundings.

This is a challenge we will all have to grapple with, either through our own experience, or because we need to understand and help relatives and friends. And it is encouraging that junior health minister Mary Butler was able to mark the international day by confirming that more than 160 staff are being recruited to support the development of new Memory Services across Ireland, bringing this year’s investment in support and services to more than €12m.

Ten new multi-disciplinary units are being created in counties Mayo, Sligo, Waterford, Wexford, Cavan/Monaghan, Donegal, Kerry, Limerick, Westmeath, and Galway. In each location medical, nursing and therapy staff will undertake up to 300 new assessments per year. New staff are being recruited to the existing regional specialist memory clinics in St James’s Hospital and Tallaght University Hospital in Dublin, while new clinics will also open in Cork and Galway.

This is good progress for which the minister can take credit. As she said, timely diagnosis is key to intervention and treatment which will slow the advance of the illness and maintain a person’s quality of life.

Vincent and Bríd Kelly celbrating 60 years of marriage at the Alzheimer Society of Ireland Curlew Road Day Care Centre in Dublin.

Risk factors identified for dementia include smoking, obesity, diabetes, sedentary lifestyle, depression, social isolation, and alcohol.

Anything we can do as good neighbours and family members to offset those impacts will repay us many times in the future.

Childcare strike: It’s time to go back to the drawing board

If we needed evidence that there is something substantially wrong about the provision of childcare services in Ireland, then we are about to get it in the most painful way possible next week, when 1,700 providers strike for three days starting on Tuesday.

The problem has been created by a scheme which, like the road to hell, has been paved with good intentions.

Providers were invited last autumn to join a core funding scheme which promised to deliver improved conditions in the sector. All, we don’t use this term lightly, the participants had to do was freeze their fees.

This is a requirement levied on nobody else during a period of rampant inflation, runaway utility bills, and a sclerotic jobs market which has lost the ability to adapt. This month the core funding gave facilities an increase of three cent per child per hour. With the scheme has come higher levels of regulation, administration, and bureaucracy. Staff are quitting and providers are closing — nearly 100 since March according to the largest union.

We now have fewer organisations providing services than we did five years ago, a difficult statistic to countenance when the requirement for households to have two working parents is greater than at any time this century.

Managers of the small businesses which supply most of the provision in Ireland have a word for it. “Devastating” is what they say. “The new system has failed.” At a basic level, this is becoming a major problem for parents. But it won’t end there. They will make it a constant headache for politicians. And with an election looming, that is exactly what they need to do.

Rights of succession

Successions, as we know from popular TV series and football clubs, do not always go smoothly, so we might take with a pinch of salt the unexpected news that Rupert Murdoch is to hand over control of his media empire to his elder son, Lachlan. And all the more so when two crucial elections are to take place in 2024 in the US and the UK, the two countries which he has called home for over 60 years, and where ambitious modern politicians have been supplicants for his support.

His choice of new job title, as chairman emeritus of Fox and News Corporation, at least gives us the chance to remind ourselves of an apocryphal joke at the expense of one of his Sunday Times editors. When Frank Giles decided to give up his post, his proprietor offered him the new role of ‘editor emeritus’. When Giles asked him what that meant Murdoch laconically replied, in a manner his TV alter ego Logan Roy would have appreciated: “It’s Latin, Frank. The ‘e’ means you’re out, and the ‘meritus’ means that you deserve to be.”

In a note to staff, Murdoch told them he would still be watching their “broadcasts with a critical eye, reading our newspapers and websites and books with much interest and reaching out to you with thoughts, ideas and advice”. In his goodbye note, Murdoch said his companies are in robust health, “as am I”, but it may not yet be the moment to write the valedictories.

Certainly, contemporaries in his natal country of Australia do not believe they have heard the last of him, with former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull waxing eloquent when he said his countryman had created an “anger-tainment ecosystem” that had left the US “angrier and more divided than it’s been at any time since the civil war”.

Turnbull, who blames News Corp’s promotion of climate change denial for his party’s decision to drop him as leader, says the companies “will continue in much the same vein”. Politicians in Washington and Westminster will be putting that to the test before too much longer.

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