Myles Away From Dublin (5 page)

It seems that many people, puzzled and fed up with almost daily confrontation with the prospect of cosmic crisis and catastrophe, turn almost with relief to problems which are much nearer home and of
considerably
lesser gravity.

Just now tinkers have become a subject of pretty widespread concern and interest but the public attitude to them has been far from uniform. Some ten days ago it was reported that near Mullingar a herd of about 20 donkeys had broken into a holding, devoured
everything
green in sight, including a large plot of cabbages, and were then seen departing ‘in a southerly direction’. They were said to belong to tinkers encamped nearby, and there can be little doubt as to the feelings of the ruined farmer.

Only a few days ago while waiting for a bus by the side of what is reputedly the most heavily-trafficked and dangerous road in Ireland, I saw a large mare with a little foal ambling along the centre of the thoroughfare. They were unperturbed by swerves and the shriek of brakes until a grassy bank attracted them. They could have been killed or have caused the death of a whole carful of people, though grazing their animals on the verges of public roads, with no watch or control over them, has been the settled, long-standing practice of gypsies – that is, when they cannot get them into the fields of farmers. Yet at several public discussions on the subject (one in the Dáil) several speakers took the side of the tinkers and argued that they should be persuaded to settle down in houses provided by local authorities and that they were very decent romantic folk.

The prominence the subject has attained seems to indicate that tinkers are increasing in number, and I have heard the total genuine tinker population of the whole country estimated at 6,500. Is this a social trend, provoked by rocketing rates and taxes? Hard to say but there is no denying that tinkers in their way of life can be not only a nuisance but a danger.

With their livestock they cause damage to property and traffic danger.

Many of them steal and send their womenfolk begging, usually armed with an ailing child.

Their sanitation arrangements are either nil or of the most primitive kind, and thus menace the public health.

Their children, usually very numerous, do not go to school and grow up to be little savages.

A tinkers’ camp is too often the centre of mêlées or other disorders.

Their moral code is deplorable.

It is clear from the above that several of their practices are
prima
facie
unlawful but for some reason not obvious, the Guards will take no action unless a specific complaint is made to them in respect of a particular occurrence.

An advocate for the defence may blandly inquire what about the new type of tinker or nomad who is ever more frequently to be encountered – the kind who hauls a luxurious caravan behind a powerful motor car? It is a fallacious comparison. The new wayfarers are merely on a holiday, seek the permission of landowners when camping and do not have livestock, while in several spots in the country caravan sites, fully equipped with sanitation and drinking water, are being provided for a small charge. The genuine tinker spends his whole life moving about in those rickety vans of which few people have ever seen the inside. It must be an awful life in the middle of a real Irish winter.

Many people profess to make a sharp distinction between the gypsy and the tinker; the latter so-called because he repairs tin vessels while the former is a gaudy, light-hearted romany, swarthy with flashing eyes, bedecked with ear-rings and sashes, fond of music and playing the fiddle. I fear this distinction does not exist and probably originated in the cinema. The word gypsy is properly Egyptian, from whence those nomads came to Europe. The French call him a
Bohémien
and the Germans a
Zigeuner
,
and philologists argue that ‘tinker’ is an attempt to render the latter sound into English. The womenfolk have always been noted, though not so much in this country, for their pretences (or skill) at fortune-telling. It is true that the men often practised metalwork and were good at that craft but it was usually in copper, not tin.

The clans have never been trusted. Henry VIII issued several severe edicts against them and in 1611 three were hanged at Edinburgh ‘for abyding within the kingdome, they being Egiptienis’ and in 1636 the Egyptians were ordered ‘the men to hangied and the weomen to be drowned, and suche of the weomen as hes children to be scourgit throw the burg and burnt in the cheeks.’

In what we call their family life tinkers in Ireland seem to behave conventionally enough, though
elsewhere
polygamy and incest are practised and even cannibalism has been alleged.

Two oddities arise: first, in a world where the displaced person has become a large and tragic problem, here we have people who have voluntarily displaced themselves and seem to enjoy that status. Second, good citizens who pay taxes and live in houses but who are thought to have committed certain and various offences are brought before the court on a charge of vagrancy.

Some other day we may consider the tramp. He is a very different man.

It is common enough knowledge that doctors are a closely enough knit body; they do not speak out of turn, quarrel with each other publicly or make any comment that might suggest that all is not as it might be with the care of the sick.

One was much surprised, therefore, at some
outspoken
remarks made a few weeks ago by Dr Brian Pringle at the annual meeting of Monkstown Hospital, Dublin. He mentioned many matters which required to be attended to in the management of hospitals so far as the patients were concerned. Presumably he was referring to Dublin hospitals but his remarks may have a country-wide application. As a former patient (broken leg) perhaps I may amplify and supplement what he said. Sick people are quite defenceless and it is sad to say that every advantage is often taken of this condition.

Nearly all the general hospitals in Dublin are structurally not much better than slums; the buildings are over two centuries old, many unsuitable and dangerous, and most without any proper fire escape system. Through some disastrous breakdown initially of the Hospitals’
Commission
(which surveys hospital needs and recommends grants from the Sweepstake Funds) hardly any
significant
capital works were provided for over the years for the Dublin area. The new National Maternity Hospital at Holles Street was rebuilt, for the old one was positively tottering, and a big new fever hospital has been provided; but these are specialised services.

Dr Pringle mentioned the universal practice of rousing patients, even in mid-winter, at the unearthly
hour of 6 a.m., compelling them to wash and shave, have beds made and then try to face a breakfast which I personally always found poor and usually cold. The whole practice is barbarous and must be injurious.

The doctor also mentioned the strain caused by noise. He may have meant internal work noises or the clatter of traffic from without but there is another form of noise that could almost lead to the loss of reason. A modern peril is radiation sickness but what I mean here is radio sickness. You are in a ward with, say, twelve other sufferers. One of them has a radio which he keeps turned on full blast all day. But another also has a radio and exercises the same ‘right’, though not necessarily interested in the same station. The incessant din is excruciating and nothing is done about it. Occasionally a table with crucifix is set up at a bed, a clear enough sign that somebody is about to receive the Last Rites. No notice of this is taken, and I have honestly seen a poor man die to the strains of the Blue Danube.

The meals seem to be improvised and certainly cannot come from a modern kitchen designed for mass catering. The meat used is invariably low-grade mutton, usually boiled or stewed. A tough neighbour of my own told me he had got far better fare in Mountjoy Prison where, indeed, the ration for everybody includes five cigarettes per day.

A personal experience of my own may be worth recounting. Treatment for a broken leg usually entails having the whole limb impaled in plaster and a bar driven through the heel; from this bar wires are fixed to run over pulleys at the bottom of the bed and carrying heavy weights, the idea being to prevent the limb contracting when the break begins to knit. It all means that the poor patient must lie immovably on the flat of his back for several months, quite helpless.

The ward which found me in this position in
mid-winter
was an enormously lofty apartment, with beds lining the walls latterly on each side. Lighting was provided by a series of powerful lamps suspended from the centre of the ceiling. These lamps began to blaze at about 4.30 in the evening. Reading was, of course, out of the question since any book or paper would be in complete shadow. A patient unable to turn on his side had no alternative but to lie staring at this light. I complained to a matron that I thought this situation would cause me eventually to lose my eyesight, that I was having attacks of double-vision and that my eyes were already red and smarting. I was told for goodness sake to have sense and not be talking nonsense. My own resource came to the rescue. I bade a visitor speed off to the shops and get me the sort of green eye-shade one sees at the Central Court at Wimbledon. I was proud of this brainwave and prouder still when I saw that everybody else in the ward had one a few days after.

It is not easy to know in what quarter to assign the blame for such outrageous things. The doctor or nursing staff can scarcely be blamed, for their own work must be rendered the more difficult thereby. Most hospitals of the kind termed ‘voluntary’ are under the direction of a board, mostly of charitable laymen. I am not aware that they ever visit the wards and see how the house is run.

I cannot say what conditions are like in Laois but I fear that being a patient in any hospital in Ireland calls for two things – holy resignation and an iron
constitution
.

Provided big changes occur gradually, they are hardly noticed. There is no outcry about getting rheumatic, grey and old because those conditions assert themselves almost imperceptibly. In the days of my youth when living near Tullamore, I was well used to seeing farmers coming home in the evening from the fair, unconscious from drink in the bottom of a donkey-cart. That sagacious animal, keeping to his own side of the road, brought the boss safely home.

At that time one of the nastiest crimes of today had not been invented. I mean drunken driving. And within the last ten years or so, the whole routine of living socially has been drastically altered by television. Similarly, people slowly begin to forget one language and speak another. This process of change is endemic, ageless and unavoidable. Physiologists claim that the physical structure of a human being is wholly renewed every seven years and it is on record that one man tried to get out of paying back an old debt because it was somebody else, not himself, who had contracted the debt some eight years before.

New electronic aids have rendered old-fashioned and obsolete the system of learning things (which simply have to be remembered) by heart. That was the way most of us learnt which prepositions in Latin take the dative and ablative case, learnt the alphabet and our prayers. Another aid to memory was the plan of committing information to verse.

I think I have already remarked here on the extraordinary fact that there is no memoir or biography in
existence of John O’Donovan, the great Gaelic scholar of the last century; worse, his books are long out of print and circulation and it is only in one or two central libraries that one can consult, say, his edition of the Annals of the Four Masters. In Duffy’s attractive monthly magazine, the
Hibernian
Sixpenny
Magazine
for May 1862, there is a review of O’Donovan’s edition of
Topographical
Poems
,
being the work of two scribes named O Dubhagáin (died 1372) and O hUidhrin (died 1420). Their compilations deal with the location
territorially
of well-known ancient Irish families and are more a genealogical than a topographical record. The edition shows O’Donovan as a smart enough detective in finding out who people with strange and obviously foreign names really were after the great changes in the country following the Anglo-Norman invasion. Some of the patronymics were compulsorily conferred. In 1465 Edward IV decreed that every Irishman living in the Pale should take an English surname or, to quote the exact words, ‘shall take to him an English surname of one town, as Sutton, Chester, Trym, Skyrne, Corke, Kinsale; or colour, as White, Blacke, Browne; or art or science, as Smith or Carpenter; or office, as Cooke, Butler.’

This command was widely carried out, a family named Shinnah (to use a phonetic spelling) becoming Fox; MacGowan became Smith; MacIntyre (mac an tSaoir) became Carpenter; and McCrosane became Crosbie. Yet there was no clear system of anglicisation or transliteration. O’Connor was changed to Conyers, O’Reilly to Ridley, O’Donnell to Daniel, McCarthy to Carter.

‘In the county of Sligo,’ Dr O’Donovan remarks, ‘the ancient name of O’Mulclohy has been metamorphosed into Stone, from an idea that
clohy
,
the latter part of it,
signifies a stone. But this being an incorrect translation in the present instance, these persons may be said to have taken a new name. In the county of Leitrim, the ancient, and by no means obscure, name of Mac Connava has rendered Forde from an erroneous notion that ava, the last part of it, is a corruption of atha, of a ford. In Kerry and Thomond, the ancient name of O’Cnavin is now anglicised Bowen, because
cnáimhin
signifies a small bone. In Tirconnell, the ancient name of O’Mulmoghery is now always rendered Early, because
moch-éirghe
signifies early rising. O’Marchachan is translated Ryder, from
marcach
, signifying a horseman.’ It is noteworthy that the Os and the Macs disappeared almost completely from Leinster.

Christian or baptismal names did not fare much better than surnames, usually due to the identification of Irish names with English names to which they were in no way related. Thus we have Aodh (Hugh), Dermot (Jeremy), Mahon (Matthew), Conor (Cornelius), Cormac (Charles), Donnell or Domhnall (Daniel), Brian (Bernard), Flan (Florence), Teigue or Tadhg (Timothy), Donogh (Denis), Turlogh (Terrence), Felim (Felix).

It is useful to reflect on this question:
What
precisely
is
a
given
person’s
name
? A society in Dublin recently called upon its members to use ‘the Irish version of their names’. Surely a name is a name and cannot have versions? In the Middle Ages learned people and Church dignitaries used their vernacular names for day-to-day colloquy but for formal or solemn occasions used a Latin variant. But in law today it seems a person’s name is that appearing on his State birth certificate. Owing to the bother and disorganisation often attending a birth, the name intended occasionally appears on the
certificate
ludicrously garbled, often entered by a careless doctor or illiterate midwife. This sort of error could have serious consequences. If a generous testator left a fortune to a person cited by his reputed, but officially incorrect, name, he might have trouble getting paid. But this is a comparatively recent hazard. Up to some
twenty years ago, persons applying for the old age pension had trouble in establishing that they had in fact reached the age of 70, because the compulsory
registration
of births was not yet at that time 70 years in force. Baptismal and other parish records did not do much to help. A hair-raising recollection of the Night of the Big Wind was sometimes pressed into service.