Authors: Maeve Binchy
C
harlie Haughey got up at seven-thirty a.m. yesterday morning and had a cup of tea. Later on he had another cup of tea and a third. That’s his breakfast, not only during the campaign but always. ‘I don’t bother with breakfast,’ he says fastidiously, as if those who do are somehow gross.
By eight o’clock he was washed and dressed and ready for the economic advisers who were going to prepare him for the morning’s press conference. He emerged ready for anything. He likes to look presentable, he says, he knows that people often judge by appearances, and he doesn’t find it a waste of time to have to keep himself looking Milan.
He thinks that if you are in the public eye you owe it to people to look well. He often remembers Seán Lemass telling them all in the old days that people are entitled to seeing you looking your best. ‘Seán Lemass’s great phrase was “who did your haircut?”,’ not just to Charlie but to all of them.
Charlie’s own hair is very silvery and well groomed these days. If he hadn’t taken his father-in-law’s advice literally he has certainly taken the spirit of it. Did he give it a lot of attention?
‘Well, Maureen Foley of Clontarf has always kept it in order for me, she’s made me look respectable for the past while, and then for the debate my son Ciaran’s girlfriend did it. She’s qualified as a hairdresser so she had a go for that night.’
Was he pleased with the debate?
‘Very. It’s hard to know,’ he says, ‘how much the general public will be swayed by two men talking to each other,’ but he thinks it was civilised and that they covered a fair amount of ground.
He had no complaints about Brian Farrell. He was a very professional chairman and he didn’t favour either one of them. Was it nerve-wracking? It was undoubtedly stress-creating. He had cleared the previous day to have a proper rest and time on his own or with just a few advisers to clear his mind and to marshal his thoughts. Did he sleep at all during the day waiting for the debate? Not really, a couple of snoozes but not going to bed and drawing the covers over him and going in to a deep sleep. Nothing as deliberate as that.
After the debate he had come home and there had been a crowd in and yes indeed they had talked about it. No they had not played it over on the video; they remembered the bits they wanted to talk about. Were people over-flattering to him, did he think, in fear of inferring his wrath? He smiled beatifically. Wrath? He seemed not to have heard of such a possibility. But seriously he said he did hear the bad as well as the good and his family in particular were all very frank with him.
There’ll be no fear that he would live in an ivory tower out in Kinsealy. He had a busy day yesterday, not too much time to sit and brood over what the papers said about the confrontation. He is sunnier about the papers this time round. He thinks they have managed to dilute some of the more extravagant plunges at the jugular. He has always felt and still believes that there is a kind of media fog about things like elections, where everyone in papers and on the radio believes their own preferences.
Just look how wrong they all were about the divorce referendum, to take just one example. But he agreed that he’s getting an easier passage this time. People are not hostile. ‘Perhaps they’ve just got used to me,’ he said. ‘I’ve been around so long now they know I don’t eat babies.’
Or indeed much else. Charlie Haughey wasn’t planning on having any lunch. He doesn’t bother with lunch on the campaign, he says, in the same way that he dismisses breakfast. But it’s because he’s never anxious to break the momentum.
It’s a delay, a diversion, a bit of a waste of time to have to go and sit down for lunch somewhere. A cup of tea out of his hand would be enough for him. A sandwich if he was pushed. We drove from Kinsealy into the Berkeley Court Hotel in Ballsbridge, his mind now clear about what he would say at the press conference to launch the plan for an international financial services centre in Dublin.
At the hotel handlers and television teams and people in good suits who had all had their hair cut stood around. The lights, the thumping music played low but insistently, the television screens and the paraphernalia of a press conference were all underway. After eleven he would go to the helicopter pad in Vincent’s Hospital and fly to Limerick, and then to Listowel. No, nobody was in trouble, just trying to get around and see everyone, that’s all.
There didn’t have to be a reason to go to places, a base party reason. Take today, for example. He’d be up in Killybegs this morning to launch their fisheries policy document and there was no question of looking for extra seats up there. No, it was quite possible to go to places for real reasons. Charlie Haughey had planned to be back in his home while it was still daylight and he would spend the rest of the evening in his own constituency.
He loves walking around the constituency with people saying hello to him, and telling him about the real issues of the election, about wanting a bit of hope and about how Charlie would give it to them. He thinks about that when he wakes up and that makes it easy to get up in the mornings.
F
or many old people, the huge rosettes and the bright young people coming to rap on their doors is a welcome chance to meet people. They haven’t had people taking such an interest in them since the last election when the circus came around as well. The arguments about youth unemployment are almost meaningless on some streets where teenagers don’t play and babies don’t cry to each other from prams. In many parts of Britain, an ageing society, almost everyone on the electoral roll is on the pension as well.
They ask about the cost of living and the Tories tell them that four years ago inflation raged at 18 per cent, but now thanks to careful management it is down to 4.5 per cent. This simply is the best guarantee that they can afford to live. If they say, well it’s still difficult to live, the answer is, imagine what it would have been like if inflation had been allowed to continue.
The Labour candidate will tell them that fuel costs have been forced up behind their backs and that Labour will cut these. Labour will freeze council and all rents for at least a year. Labour will insulate their houses.
The Alliance says one of the great wrongs pensioners suffer from is that they have to pay fixed charges for gas, electricity and telephone. All these fixed charges would go under an Alliance government.
Old people ask the candidates too about reducing the retirement age. In Britain, men retire at 65 and women at 60, and there has been increasing interest in a younger retirement age for men both from management and workers. So if a household asks the canvassers what the policies on retirement are, they will get these answers:
The Conservatives say that to reduce the retirement age would cost £2,500 million and is hard to promise. The Tories also say that they are against compulsory retirement at any age.
Labour says that its aim is a common retirement age of 60, and that if returned it will endeavour to get this organised, but it will first raise the pensions before it does anything else.
The Alliance has no very strong views, but says that it should all be more flexible.
A matter which worries many pensioners is the earnings rule. This means that if you earn any more than £57 a week and are in receipt of the pension, that pension will be reduced in line with your earnings. Many older people who feel capable of working on for several years after official retirement age resent this rule greatly.
The Conservatives say that it was their party which raised the earnings rule to £57 from a lower figure and they hope to take the top level away altogether eventually. Labour says that it doesn’t intend to do anything about it at once since it’s a matter that only affects a small number of the country’s pensioners anyhow. The Alliance is in agreement with the Conservatives on this matter.
So far, no specific campaign has been spearheaded towards the elderly. The granny vote has not been isolated as an area of winning support. It is presumed that the elderly in society will follow very much the general view on matters to do with defence and the economy, and will share the opinions left or right on a normal statistical basis. But there are some matters, like the cost of living, law and order, and housing, where you would imagine that more specific attempts might have been made to woo this considerable section of the electorate. There’s nothing to stop you being a floating voter at any age. Pensioners do not always vote according to the habits of a lifetime.
F
irst I’m afraid you have to have a little of the background. Since July, I haven’t been able to straighten my right leg. This is of no consequence when you’re sitting down or lying down which I seem to do a lot of, but in the odd bits where you have to walk from one place to another it is very harassing. Not to put it too finely, it means you can’t walk.
I have arthritis in the other leg and so I thought gloomily that it must be spreading, like a rumour, or like one of those nice Russian vines that cover a wall in no time. But this knee took on terrible proportions, and by the time I found it easier for people to pour my gin and tonic into a saucer and let me at it on all fours like a big kitten I considered the wonderful Art of Medicine and went to a doctor who was very nice and said it seemed unmerciful to her and she sent me to a specialist.
I can’t tell you all these people’s names because it would be advertising, but suffice to say the country is filled with kind, sympathetic GPs and serious, efficient orthopaedic surgeons.
We had a merry month in August which involved great things like heat treatment which were really nice and didn’t work and cortisone injections in the knee which were desperate and didn’t work. ‘Will these make my neck swell up?’ I asked anxiously. I’m chubby enough already without gaining a lot of innocent fat from a knee treatment. It wouldn’t, I was told. Then because we were all getting puzzled and I was like Quasimodo on two sticks now and I was wondering would I have to be fitted with a collar on my neck and led around … I went for an arthrogram.
Now I know I’m a long time coming to the hospital bit but honestly if you’ve never had an arthrogram you’d need to know about them. They call them X-rays. And you go like a simpleton to the X-ray department of a hospital to have one. I thought it was a great name for a start: arthrogram, like something out of
Minder
or a telegram from Guinnesses.
By this time the scene had shifted back to London but I feel sure that the beauty and joy of an arthrogram is pretty much the same no matter what part of the world you’re in. First it was in an operating theatre, second it took nearly two hours, third it involved a series of injections of dyes to point up little-known facets of the knee and lastly it had something straight from a James Bond film: they blow your knee up with gas like a balloon and X-ray it in its expanded state. I was nearly demented at this stage and trying to make conversation with people who seemed to be surrounding the operating table in increasing numbers. I saw a pile of papier-mâché hats and wondered did those who have to be exposed to radiation a lot wear hats as well.
‘Do you often wear those hats?’ I asked a tiny girl from Trinidad.
‘They’re sick bowls,’ she said.
‘Are you very uncomfortable?’ the polite English radiologist asked kindly.
It was a ludicrous question. I tried to single out the most agonising thing about it all. ‘There’s some awful bit of machinery underneath my knee sticking into it,’ I said, thinking it was probably a wrench or a hammer that someone had left there by mistake.
‘That’s my hand,’ said the radiologist.
Ashen, I came out of it all and carried the pictures around my neck on a string until I got home. Remember I was now walking on two sticks and it’s not easy to carry things and the arthrogram was not something I would repeat just because I lost the snaps. The snaps and myself flew back to Dublin and the serious but brilliant orthopaedic surgeon looked at them.
‘Nothing,’ he said after five minutes.
‘Was there no film in the camera?’ I said, tears in my eyes, ready to go back and bludgeon them all to death in that hospital with their own sick bowls.
‘No, perfect pictures, just reveal nothing at all,’ he said.
I waited for it … my poor big heart thumping, I waited and he said it.
‘We’d better open you up.’
When the world settled down from the thunderous roar of terror that filled my ears, I heard myself saying in a high-pitched voice of total panic, ‘Well, if that’s it, then I suppose that’s it. Let me look at my diary.’
I couldn’t even see my diary. I just agreed like a big lamb to what he said, and a date was fixed. And I went to Admissions and an admission date was organised and then there was no getting out of it. I looked at the knee very dismally. What could it be, I asked myself in lay person’s terms. Maybe my leg had just gone crooked to punish me for all my loudness and showing off. I was going to suggest this to the surgeon, but brilliant and serious he was, a person able to cope with an impish, ageing sense of humour he was not, so I said nothing.
I packed five books and a typewriter and 144 sheets of paper, and a manual on how to take up calligraphy and several tomes about evergreens so that I’d be an expert on them when I came out. I remembered to take some nightdresses and a wash bag too, but only at the last moment so I had to carry them in a plastic bag.
I put on my ingratiating face when I met the nurses on Floor Three of St Vincent’s Private Hospital. ‘I’ll be a model patient,’ I said. ‘I’ll be no trouble.’
Two of them remembered me from the gall bladder incident over a decade ago. ‘She’ll be a monster,’ they said.
‘I’ve got much calmer and older and more fearful since then,’ I said.
They were possibly the kindest bunch of women I ever met in my life anywhere, and I’m not only saying that because one day I suppose I’ll have to go back to them, to get a new hip, but they were kind. There wasn’t one of them I could find fault with and let me tell you after a day or two I was ready to find fault with anything that moved. But not the nurses ever. Night and day cheerful and reassuring and they didn’t even laugh at the typewriter and the books that just sat there untouched for two and a half weeks. They know we like to come to hospital with our illusions. I suppose there’s a name for the operation. I didn’t ask. I was so weakened by the memory of the arthrogram. I wanted no more definitions; anyway, a kind, efficient and nameless anaesthetist came the night before to tell me about it, and I closed my ears so that I wouldn’t hear a single word while maintaining what I hoped was a look of alert interest on my face.