Myles Away From Dublin (15 page)

Today in Britain and to a somewhat lesser extent here, much attention is being showered on that eternal wayfarer, the Man in the Street.

For years there has been an Institute of British Standards which lays down the specification, size, weight and function of various articles.

Other bodies prescribe the content of sundry
manufactured
items of food and drink, and even the strength to which some of them must conform, as e.g. whiskey.

Milk is minutely supervised from the point when it leaves the cow till it arrives in a sterilised bottle on the citizen’s doorstep, and frequently prosecutions for deficiency or adulteration are proof that those in authority do not lack vigilance.

Despite occasional and alarming breakdowns such as the recent scare about the drug thalidomide, there is strict surveillance of the production of drugs, narcotics and pharmaceutical products.

Most proprietary products must bear on the label a statement of the chemicals and the amount of them contained in a particular product, and the law insists that many things which doctors enjoin us to take for our various ailments must be labelled Poison.

Yet this complicated and intricate apparatus for making sure that the customer is not only right but all right is indeed far from perfect; there are cracks and fissures and even chasms, and many an operator who is not only able but also unscrupulous can wangle many a questionable substance through the net.

Under our own last Health Act elaborate regulations
apply to the storage, handling and exposure for sale of foodstuffs but it is common knowledge that in many shops little or no attention is paid to them.

Indeed, enforcement, inspection and sampling is in itself a formidable task. Recently in Britain a new body has been set up to attend to misleading, exaggerated or downright fraudulent advertising, but many members of the public are by no means convinced that the move will achieve any spectacular improvement.

Every particular make of 16 different makes of motor car is still easily the best of the lot. There is only one decent holiday resort in all Ireland, one newspaper, one golf course, one hotel, one make of shirt.

I have an old cutting (alas, undated) from the London
Daily
Telegraph
dealing with some observations made by the Public Analyst for the City of London at a meeting of the Royal Society of Health. Here were some of his disclosures:

The meringue, formerly composed of white of egg and sugar, was now made from an ‘artificial cellulose gum in place of the egg’.

Among products debased in one way or another were beer, cordials, custards, jam, demerara sugar, mustard, French coffee, shortbread, lemon curd and some of the more expensive teas.

What is presented as ‘whipped’ or ‘Jersey’ cream often is of a grade of cream containing less fat than was usual in plain cream before the last war. What is often put forward as pâté de foie has nothing to do with the livers of geese.

‘Meat pies’ were an amalgam of meat and potato. Cider was sweetened with saccharin, fish paste
contained
as little as 25 per cent of the fish specified.

Apart from the unannounced use of substitutes and adulteration in general, there had been many
prosecutions
for the finding of foreign bodies in food and the sale of food that was mouldy, maggoty, unfit or rancid.

The wonder is that some of us are alive at all.

The problem is so big and wide that it is very difficult
and in some respects intractable. What can one do if one finds bugs in one’s hotel bed?

Write to Bord Fáilte, certainly, but will that cure the bites? A good safeguard against thirst is to have a syphon of lemonade in the house; it is a good refreshing drink but it has nothing whatever to do with lemons.

It is merely tap-water charged with carbonic acid gas and flavoured with some chemical. A great number of other ‘fruit’ drinks and even confectionery have
absolutely
no fruit content.

Every individual has his or her own pet complaint adulteration and deficiency in a particular thing. My own, I am sure, will be echoed by many males.

When I was much younger the pockets in the trousers of even the cheapest suit were made of yellow, indestructible canvas. They were the pockets of the greatest stress, containing not only weighty metal things like coins and keys but also too often a heavy pair of hands.

Nowadays the pockets of even an expensive suit are made apparently of cotton, sure to be riddled with holes after a month’s wear.

I suppose it’s one argument for going back to the kilt and sporran.

Well, there you are and where are you? The first time I read that phrase I thought it was profoundly wise, subtle and terribly true. But after some weeks reflecting on it, I decided it was quite meaningless and just damn silly.

But now I’m not so sure. It does seem to have a queer psychic import. It bears nothing so simple as an actual meaning but a sinister suggestion, a warning, a threat of the necessity of taking care.

There is almost a hint of nuclear disaster just around the corner, germ warfare perhaps, or generalised rheumatism of the brain. After all, this is 1963 and the world is bound to get worse before it’s better.

Ireland has had at least four days of snow and frost. A nationwide epidemic of leprosy could not have shaken the country more. Thunderous news reports on the radio gave ever more fearful details of the momentous crisis.

Two men were starving to death in a cottage at Ticknock, County Dublin, and the question of
requisitioning
a Constellation of Irish Airline was under consideration; the dropping of four loaves of bread was planned but nobody could be sure whether it was brown bread or white bread they liked.

A banshee had fainted from the cold on the border of county Carlow. A hop-off-my-thumb from Strabane had savagely assaulted a B. Special with an icicle which contained plaster of Paris. In Ballymore Eustace an old man demented with chilblains mistook a bag of coal for tobacco and had smoked three pipefuls of it before he could be stopped.

Nobody doubts that the heart of Ireland is sound but if everybody in the country was to be frozen to death, what then?

In the middle of all this terrible consternation a Dublin paper made editorially and very casually a revelation which startled the few people who had retained the use of cold reason.

That Government committee, the paper said, had been sitting for four months and had not yet reported. That was not good enough. If it could not bring its deliberations to an early close and make a
recommendation
, the Government should ignore it and go ahead within the confines of its own judgement.

The time for action had come; mere talk had rarely solved any problem of grave national importance. There was indeed far too much talk in this country.

Know what this committee was pondering for so long?

That the State here should buy one helicopter!

At the present time there is absolutely no helicopter anywhere in the 26 counties.

True, disasters at sea threatening along our very extended coastline call for rescue intervention by helicopter and with no shyness at all our respectable Government alerts the British Navy at Derry, who usually have already despatched a machine on its errand of mercy and hope.

It seems that in Ireland the British are now accepted as the haven of last resort. We would be lost without them.

What does a helicopter cost?

Personally I have no idea but a knowledgeable friend tells me that the standard machine can be got for about £50,000, and that maintenance costs are nominal.

This sum of £50,000 is, of course, enormous but one should remember that our prodigiously numerous collection of Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries are fluthering about the place in brand-new cars of the Mercedes Benz make; those cars are good but they are not cheap.

Some people feel (and I am one of them) that a second-hand Post Office bike would be the very man for
this job, and more in keeping with the ancestry of our betters. For that reason one may take it as the general feeling that one helicopter for the whole country would be preferable to having innocent people drowned or frozen to death.

From another point of view, £50,000 is not really so much if one finds oneself in this new dimension we call air travel, for there costs tend to take on a fictional quality and the tendency is to ignore them.

What does money matter if the question is one of prestige and national pride, to say nothing of
convenience
and safeguarding life? Aer Lingus (Irish Air Lines) have three Constellation aircraft.

Know what they cost? One million pounds each, with goodness knows what maintenance burden. I suppose it’s all right, since those giant birds stimulate emigration and also bring American tourists here to be skinned alive.

Meantime, I have chilblains on my corns. Any reader who knows of a remedy will be sent a book token value three shillings.

The observant wayfarer in this vale of tears will have noticed that misfortunes do not come singly. They more usually descend in a shower.

Since about Thursday night, the 10th January practically everybody I know (including myself) has been in a bad temper. Although Cuba is far away, perhaps this countrywide depression dates from that very narrow shave the whole human race had.

As I write these lines, news has come over the electric radio of the death of Hugh Gaitskell, one of the brilliant and academically distinguished lights of the Labour Party in Britain. Western Europe can ill afford such a loss at this stage of tumult and threat. The Congo situation, though apparently nearing a stage of finality, due mostly to exhaustion of the militant natives of Katanga, was never a very pleasing operation and one feels that if there is to be a truce, it will be an armed truce.

But most of the continent of Africa is unsettled and unhappy, not the least part of it being South Africa, where the minority whites have indulged in the most cynical exacerbation of relations with the natives.

Then there is universal puzzlement about the entry of ourselves (with Britain) into the Common Market. Such comment as has been forthcoming from official sources is vague in the extreme but generally admits that native industries long sheltered by a tariff wall will be wiped out. It is also admitted that the price of food here will go up, and that there will be a general rise in the cost of living.

Unemployment and dearer food are not enticements, and could result in steeper emigration figures. Some people have assured us that membership of the Common Market will automatically make the existence
of the Six Counties as part of the United Kingdom a meaningless anachronism. In other words there is a fearful amount of guesswork and prophecy going on. I am personally too cunning to contribute my share here.

But nobody writing on the subject of contemporary hardship, local and international, can dodge comment on the main excruciation: I mean the awful descent of snow and frost. It has meant, sometimes absolutely literally, just paralysis. If this country, with its natural wealth of food and fuel, collapses at the onset of a week of stern weather, what would happen if there came from the skies not snow but several thousand armed invaders, aimed by aircraft at strategic points such as big towns, rail centres, water reservoirs and installations for the production of electricity?

It is a sobering subject for meditation, for the truth is that there is no pre-arranged apparatus in the country to deal with a short period of very severe weather. Those who have listened to radio news from Britain console themselves with the thought that what the British are getting is something far worse, with the situation made more bitter in the eastern district, including London, by the coinciding go-slow of workers in the power stations.

Tough phrases like ‘national sabotage’ have been used to describe this semi-strike activity, condemned as roundly by the unions as by the Government and the newspapers. It certainly imparts one lesson that should be learnt everywhere, and that is the utter dependence of modern human living on the supply of current artificially generated.

Theatres, cinemas, streets, phones and electric razors can all be reduced within a few hours to chaos and nullity.

Reports seem agreed that Dublin, Wicklow and Waterford got the worst dose of snow and ice but to show there was no purely geographical rancour,
Donegal
was also refrigerated. In Wicklow there were situations reported which for exaggeration seemed to border on the comic.

In one remote cottage one old man who lived alone survived, fireless, for ten days on turnips, presumably eaten raw. Another man who died could not be buried or even taken out of his house. A Dublin evening newspaper, never reluctant to adopt the heroic role, hired an aeroplane to drop parcels on Wicklow farmsteads.

Unfortunately it printed a picture of the plane in flight, and it was a
biplane.
Like many people, I did not think there was any such machine now in existence and wondered who had been so carefully hiding a fighter of World War I? Many people also wondered exactly what was in those parcels? Eight sods of turf, two loaves of bread, a quarter lb of butter, two ounces of tea and 20 cigarettes – but no matches?

Mystery abounds. Surely an isolated cottier in wild mountain country has a rick of turf outside his door? He must also (one thinks) have a supply of at least a month of tea, flour to bake bread, a pound of rashers, maybe a bit of gur cake, and a big bit of plug tobacco for his pipe. Indeed, nowadays it is nearly certain that he also has a television set, and his wife and sons are probably there to make possible a hand of cards.

If any general conclusion is possible, it must be that we Irish are getting soft. How could we be getting soft, a famished farmer may roar, when me boots is frozen solid and the well where I get me water is frizen? I won’t attempt to answer. Engendering heat in print won’t make my own yield water. I pray tonight for a thaw, when all my pipes will burst, damaging carpets and ruining wallpaper.