Losing Friends to Cancer

Maggie was the first. I met her in February 1981. I was working for a UK company that manufactured synthetic fibres. There was at the time something called The Multi-Fibre Agreement, an international trade deal that restricted the ability of developing nations to export cheap fibres into Europe. It was due for renegotiation and employees of the company were naturally worried about the possible impact on their jobs. Several of us wrote to our MPs seeking support for a deal that would protect our company's position in international markets.

In a footnote to his reply the MP for Cleethorpes mentioned a meeting taking place to protest about the re-development of the old swimming pool as a modern leisure centre. I decided to go to the meeting and find out what it was all about. Although the Conservative MP had called the meeting none of the Conservative councillors bothered to attend. All 5 members of the minority Liberal Party group did attend. Their leader did his best to explain the thinking behind the scheme and to allay some of the concerns being expressed by those whose homes were close to the site of the planned development.

I had wanted to join the Liberal Party for some time and took the chance to button-hole one of the councillors after the meeting. A tall lady with dark hair and a friendly manner she introduced herself as Maggie Smith and invited me to join her and most of the others at the Liberal Club in the town. There I met her husband Brian and Norman, the leader of the group, who had so impressed me with the clarity of his explanations at the meeting.

Political Activity

Over the next ten years we all became close friends as well as party colleagues. Maggie acted as agent at the 1983 general election. As a member of her team I saw how hard she worked - I had already seen the extraordinary amount of effort she expended on behalf of the people she represented in a ward that consisted of a mixture of private and social housing. In 1987 our roles were reversed; I was agent, drawing heavily on her experience. By then I was also a Councillor at both County and District levels.

Throughout this period we socialised, usually at the Liberal Club where all of us also worked as volunteer bar persons as well as mucking in when the Club moved premises and a great deal of building alterations and decorating was required. We went on two or three holidays to Germany together where we were entertained by members of the FDP (German Liberals) in Cleethorpes' twin town of Konigswinter.

By 1991 changes in my career path necessitated a move away from Cleethorpes but we remained in touch. A large group, including Maggie, Brian, Norman and his wife, paid a surprise visit to our new home to celebrate my 50th birthday. It was not so long after that we had a phone call to say that Maggie was in hospital in Lincoln.

Cancer Took Them

We visited her there and were shocked to see her condition. Barely able to breathe, let alone speak, she kept apologising - for not being able to entertain us I suppose.  Within days she was gone and we were joining the hundreds who attended her funeral. It was there that Maggie's sister-in-law told us that Maggie had been in pain for many months but had refused to see her doctor, perhaps in fear of the diagnosis - who knows. By the time she did it was too late; the disease had taken hold and would not be denied.

If Maggie was the first friend to be taken by cancer she was not the first in our circle. Ann was barely in her thirties. The daughter of another of the Liberal Party circle in Cleethorpes she had already lost her father to the disease and her mother had, thankfully, recovered from breast cancer. Her husband was a teacher at my son's school but soon after we got to know them they moved to Norfolk. The form of breast cancer that attacked Ann must have been much more aggressive than that suffered by her mother for she died at a tragically young age.

A few years after Maggie's death we heard that Norman was undergoing treatment for bowel cancer. He recovered, or so we thought. The last time we saw him he was full of enthusiasm for the latest plans for development of a neglected part of the sea-front, something that he had been struggling to achieve for many years. Now, it seemed, there was hope that something positive was going to happen. He showed us the plans and explained how it would be a great boost to Cleethorpes' ability to attract visitors.

The remission did not last long enough for him to see the plans brought to fruition; he was dead within weeks of that last visit. I could go on with this list; Norman's sister, several family members who I won't name and ending with a lady from Portlaoise who I knew from her work with Tidy Towns and whose death a week ago prompted this reminiscence.

Support is Vital

I think I have said enough to make clear why I try to do what little I can for cancer charities. It is a horrible disease and, whilst survival rates are improving all the time, it seems that one in every two men and one in every three women will develop cancer at some point in their lives. The work of those who support patients and their families in places like the Cuisle Centre in Portlaoise as well as researchers developing new treatments is vital if premature and painful deaths like Maggie's are to be prevented in future.

The Myth of Fair Taxes

Opposition to taxes is universal. That statement looks like a truism - something so obvious that it does not need to be said. And yet there are exceptions. Few object to the things that our taxes pay for, unless it is the high salaries and expenses of those charged with the task of administering them. And lately in Ireland and in the UK there is plenty of clamour from those who see the solution to their own supposedly high taxes as the imposition of even higher taxes on others.

This is usually expressed as a move toward greater fairness. So, for example, many in Ireland would like to see the introduction of a third tier of income tax, taxing marginal income above, say, €150k at 50% instead of 41%. Meanwhile, in the UK, the run up to the 2012 budget saw a debate about whether the 50% rate already in force there should be reduced.

The other suggestion that is being made in certain quarters is the imposition of a "wealth tax"; a one off charge on the assets of the richest one or two percent of the population.

Whilst I can sympathise with the anger that lies behind such arguments I have serious doubts about the practical effects of such measures were they to be introduced.

50% Income Tax doesn't work

Consider, first, the 50% income tax band: those eligible to pay tax at that rate already have a marginal rate of 41% in Ireland. If they spend most of the remaining 59% they will pay 23% VAT on their purchases. With less to spend they will pay less in VAT so the €90 increase in tax on every €1000 of income has to be offset against a reduction of €21 in potential VAT income due to the reduced spending. The net gain to the exchequer is therefore only 90-21=69 or 6.9%.

It is also important to look at the kinds of things such individuals are likely to spend their money on. Someone on a tight personal budget will inevitably make the bulk of their purchases in British or German owned chain stores on goods imported from the Far East. Those with cash to spare are more likely to spend that spare cash on high-end Irish made artisan products or imported luxury goods that earn high margins for their Irish importers. Reduce the amount they have to spend in this way and you damage Irish businesses and put Irish jobs at risk.

Wealth Tax - the best way to export the nation's wealth?

I turn now to the idea of a wealth tax. It is my understanding that the wealth that is being talked about here is not cash lying idle in some vault. It is tied up in property, in race horses, in various valuable artefacts and, mostly, in businesses. In order to liberate cash to pay a wealth tax it would be necessary for the wealthy person to sell some of those assets. A forced sale would, of course, not realise the full value of the asset sold. And who except another wealthy person would have the means to make such a purchase? And as the only Irish people with the means to make such a purchase would be seeking to sell some of his or her own assets the only serious buyers would be foreigners; Arabian sheiks and Russian oligarchs spring to mind.

The impact on jobs would perhaps not be great; the assets and the jobs they represent would still be there but now under foreign ownership. The government would have the cash to spend but the overall wealth of the nation would have been reduced and a significant part of it transferred overseas, something that not even those on the extreme left want to see. All this, of course, assumes that the wealthy would readily succumb to the imposition of such a tax without taking avoiding action such as moving themselves and their assets overseas.

The plain fact is that the only way to reduce tax is to reduce the size of the public sector. We can all point to waste and ways in which the public services could be made more efficient. But, just as we object to paying taxes we don't like it when one person's efficiency saving leads to the removal of a perk from which we have benefitted. You may say that a particular road improvement is a waste of money; I might be grateful for the opportunity to get from one place to another more quickly and in greater safety.

In reality there is a limit to what can be achieved through increasing efficiency and reducing waste. And the most effective way of bringing those savings about is to tighten budgets and leave it to the people at the sharp end to seek and to implement the necessary changes. And isn't that precisely what Fine Gael/Labour are trying to do and what everyone seems to object to almost as much as they object to taxes?

Lies, Damned Lies and …

The furore over Ireland's Household Charge has degenerated in to an argument about numbers: how many had or had not registered and paid by the March 31st deadline; how many attended the protest outside Fine Gael's ardh fleish over the weekend.

Spin and miss-information continues to characterise the debate with those opposed to the charge being the worst culprits. Their campaign is full of scaremongering about the supposed unfairness of the charge which will, they claim, bear most heavily on those least able to pay.

Many people who will quite genuinely find it hard to set aside €100 towards the cost of local government services are angry and distressed. The truth is that most of the poorest citizens are exempt from the charge so the cynical rabble rousing by various bodies of the extreme left in Irish politics is playing unnecessarily on their fears.

House owners are the only people eligible to pay this charge. Tenants are not. And organisations that provide social housing - local authorities, housing associations - are also exempt from the charge.

The protest leaders harp on about the need to tax the wealthy more heavily than the poor. Show me a landlord who is not wealthy and I will show you someone who thought he or she could make a quick buck out of property during the boom years; someone, in other words, whose greed got us into this mess in the first place.

Cynicism of the extreme left

The leaders of this protest are cynically manipulating ignorant and ill-informed people. The level of ignorance and distance from reality was illustrated for me by one of the crassest statements I have ever heard. It came from a woman following a protest meeting in Tullamore last week. Interviewed on local radio she likened the situation in Ireland to that in Syria. The clip was repeated on several news bulletins throughout the day so there is no question that I might have miss-heard.

Now you can argue all you like about the number of people attending protests or registering to pay the charge but I can tell you with absolute certainty how many Irish refugees are streaming into Northern Ireland as a result of having their homes destroyed by government shelling. And I don't think anyone would dispute the figure.

What motivates the leaders of this protest? There can be little doubt that for some it is envy. For others it is the desire to create a socialist republic in which wealth would be taken from the successful and used to shore up an already featherbedded bureaucracy. Have such people not read any history? Have they seen what life is like for ordinary citizens in the planet's only remaining socialist republic? The people starve whilst their government develops nuclear weapons.

I deplore the notion that some people are in receipt of rewards out of all proportion to their contribution to society. But it is too easy to forget that unless that money is buried in a hole in the ground it inevitably finds its way back into the economy, as its (temporary) holders spend or invest it. Both activities are much more likely to create jobs for ordinary people than is any programme devised by a socialist administration.

England After the War

An introduction to Summer Day

For a long time I have wanted to write about my childhood home. I tried memoir; I tried writing about my mother's life. I began to think much too late in life about what it must have been like for her, a young woman brought up in the city, to find herself in an isolated part of rural England with no-one to whom she could relate. Of course, to begin with it would have been just another in a long line of unpleasant changes wrought in the lives of English men and women by the war. You just had to make the best of it, think yourself fortunate by comparison to those still being subjected to nightly air raids and the soldiers, sailors and airmen facing death and injury at every hour of the day and night. One day it would all be over and life as it was lived before the war would return. Later, when realisation dawned that returning to London was not a practical option, she must have experienced moments of despair at the loneliness and the constant grind of having to undertake everyday chores when the means to carry them out were so limited.

As a child I was blissfully unaware of any of this except perhaps in those moments when her anxiety overflowed into impatience with my contrary ways although I would certainly have had no notion of what might have been behind such outbursts which were, in any case, no more frequent than those of any parent frustrated by their children's behaviour. For me and, later, my sister the bright meadows that surrounded our cottage and the stream that flowed behind it, tumbling over two precipitous waterfalls and through a small gorge were a wonderful playground. We saw nothing out of the ordinary in the fact that all our waste was disposed of by tipping it down the steeply sloping side of that gorge. We enjoyed fresh vegetables from the garden with no real appreciation of the back-aching work that our mother had undertaken weeks before, digging, forking, weeding, raking and hoeing in order to make it possible.

We played hide and seek in the farm buildings that overlooked the small windows of the cottage with its thick sandstone walls. The fact that the floors of sandstone flags laid directly onto clay were often wet with rising damp was taken for granted in our innocence and ignorance. Like any other boy I took delight in tormenting my sister with the rag-like spider-webs that festooned those outbuildings with their aroma of manure and rotting hay.

Peace and Quiet Spells Loneliness

The fact that we might see fewer than half a dozen vehicles on the lane on most days and that all of them were familiar to us: the farmer from across two fields or his son; the milkman who delivered fresh milk, not in bottles but ladled from a stainless steel bucket with a metal pint measure straight into our enamel jug. The postman's red van making daily collections from the letter box along the lane and the baker's van making twice weekly deliveries of bread baked locally. The rare sight of a vehicle that we did not recognise was a source of excitement to us children and looking back I can easily see how this absence of contact with the outside world would have been deeply frustrating for an intelligent woman who had once looked forward to a career as a leading hand and perhaps in time a supervisor in a garment factory.

The farmer who owned the land and the cottage would visit daily in winter when he used the pasture to fatten a dozen or so bullocks. Through the late spring, when the grass was being allowed to grow prior to harvesting as hay, we saw much less of him. In any case, those daily visits were no more than a brief walk through the yard on his way to check up on the beasts. I remember the smell of the Shag tobacco he would smoke in thin hand-rolled cigarettes. He rarely, if ever, used manufactured cigarette papers. A torn piece of newspaper or the corner from a white paper bag usually sufficed. A torn tweed jacket, sweat-stained trilby hat, dung stained flannel trousers and week-old stubble complete the picture of this man who surprised us one day with his ability to play the piano quite beautifully by ear.

Hay-making was an annual event that began with the arrival of a small green Fordson tractor with a mowing machine in tow. A few days later the rows of cut grass would be tossed and turned using pikes (pitchforks). A couple more days of drying in the July sunshine and it would be time to gather the sweet smelling dried herbage into piles called cocks. Then it would be loaded onto a horse drawn cart and stacked in the Dutch barn. Finally it would be time for the annual summer pantomime of which the leading player was the mechanical hay rake.

This device consisted of a row of curved tines mounted between two large iron wheels. It was used to gather up any hay that remained on the ground. The width of the machine across the wheels was several inches more than the space between the walls of the former pig-sty on one side of the field entrance and the bullock's winter quarters on the other. Too heavy to be carried through this gap, it had to be manoeuvred through in a series of arcs that involved a lot of head scratching, a great deal of sweat and a vast amount of cursing and swearing. This latter aspect of the performance had Mum trying to keep us away from the show but it was far too enthralling to be missed and no Buttons or Puss-in-Boots ever had a more appreciative audience.

Frost, Snow and Floods

Childhood memories are always filled with sunshine but there were days when we were confined to the tiny interior of the cottage watching rain run in rivulets down the outside of the window whilst Mum tried to distract us with books, jigsaws and such games as Ludo and Snakes and Ladders. In winter the windows would be covered with delicate leaf shapes as moisture froze on the inside as well as the outside. Sometimes the stream would break its banks and form a lake around the cottage making it impossible to access the spring from which we obtained our water.

Entertainment and information came via the wireless which required two batteries. The first a 120 volt DC unit about the size and weight of two bricks stuck together. Beneath the cardboard outer casing were 80 1.5 volt cells linked together and embedded in shiny black pitch. This was always referred to as the "high tension" battery and required infrequent replacement. The other battery was a lead-acid accumulator, an early form of rechargeable unit that had two lead plates inside a thick glass vessel full of acid. Charging was carried out at the garage in the village about three miles away. A charge lasted about a week so we had two of the things, one in use and one on charge. This necessitated a weekly trip, on foot, to the village and back carrying the accumulator.

In the winter of 1946/7 we were snowed in for several weeks. I should have started school after the Christmas holidays but was unable to do so until the Easter break was over. We relied for supplies on one of our neighbours who brought essential goods up from the village on horseback. There were no helicopters to drop food and drink to stranded house-holders in those days. The summer that followed was one of the longest and hottest experienced in England for many years.

Thinking about my childhood I wanted to write something that evoked as much of this as possible for my grand-daughter's generation and for those of any age who, perhaps, envy country-dwellers. I remembered that one of our neighbours had a glass eye, the consequence of a shooting accident. And I recalled how a family pet had to be disposed of when we eventually moved away from the cottage. Putting the two events together I came up with the idea of a boy distraught at the prospect of his pet being "put down" and causing his father to be injured. Believing he is responsible for the injury - which he supposes is fatal - he runs away.

It began life as a short story entitled Bad Boy written during a series of workshops with the Laois writer and creative writing tutor John Maher in the spring of 2009. It eventually appeared in the anthology Pulse of Life, published in November 2011 by the Laois Writers' Group. But in that form there was a long unfilled day between the shooting incident and discovery of the boy. I wanted to explore what might have happened during those hours; to the boy, to the dog and to the other family members. I also wanted to gain a better understanding of the boy and to examine the attitudes of some of the people he encounters. The result is the 61,500 word novel Summer Day which will be available to download free of charge at Smashwords throughout the month of April 2012.