It came as no surprise to me this recent screaming match regarding the every dwindling Irish health system. I have thought for a long time that there is a huge voiceless community out there who suffer the indignity of our so called health system.

During my mother’s recent illness and subsequent death we had a problem with her care at home during her last days. It was a Saturday night and there was one doctor covering emergency call-outs across the entire city…. The infamous SouthDoc, the cop out for Cork doctors who don’t want to work nights.  After four hours she arrived, driven by taxi, like someone off the set of a Greta Garbo movie, dressed to the nines with towering high heels as she clattered through our hall in the early hours of the morning.

Little or no English and under qualified to help (these foreign doctors fly in from Eastern Europe for the weekend’s work) she left again in less than a minute.   If it were not for a family GP friend who made a long journey to the house my mother would have been driven in my car, unconscious, to a Saturday night A&E, where she would have suffered further indignity under the name of the HSE. 

Christmas is coming and the retailer is getting fat, particularly in Cork where many of the greedy shop owners will be ringing up massive profits over the festive season as most of us get caught up in a shopping frenzy.  €5.52 bn will be spend in the run up to Christmas and as the second largest city in the country I think it is fair to estimate that much of this will be in Cork, so it would be fair to assume that the retailers would wish to give something back to the city as well as make it more attractive to lure even more spenders into town. 

Sadly that is not the case and while some of the traders in town are generous to a fault others are Scrooge reincarnated.  I think it is safe to say that many of the more benevolent retailers are people with roots in the area or are those associated with the Cork Business Association while the more miserly types tend to be the multi-nationals who can hide behind the excuse of their head office in London or further a field.

These mean spirited traders refused to contribute towards the cost of upgrading and running the city centre lights and decorations and shame on them for that.  I had wanted the city council to name and shame those who refused to pay, but in fairness they’ve gone one better; they are levying the cost of the City Christmas decorations onto the rates.  And well done to them for their resourcefulness. This weekend see’s the launch of Christmas in Killarney a great initiative to attract people to the town. 

Killarney is by its very nature a summer destination and in an effort to drum up business for Christmas, the local traders have come together over the past few years to put on a great Christmas festival incorporating street trading, Christmas sales, family orientated shows at the INEC, ice skating and much more besides. 

This has put Killarney on the Christmas Shopping trail and I have always wondered why we don’t promote Cork in a similar fashion.  Cork is a great city for shopping, dining our, having a few drinks, taking in a show or a concert yet we seem to lack the will to pull together to promote it accordingly.  Traders are great to advertise individually but not so great for seeing the bigger picture as the Christmas lights “near fiasco” proves.

It appears that racism is alive and well and thriving in Cork although admittedly within a tiny minority of the population.  I spoke on air to a number of people on 96FM who’ve been on the receiving end of some terrible abuse from fanatics who’d like to run them out of town.  In some cases “literally” such as the caller who told me that he is regularly driven at by a motorist threatening to mow him down near his business in the city centre.  What motivates such racism?  I suppose the myths and legends doing the rounds do nothing to help integration, I’ve heard intelligent people claim that non-nations working here don’t have to pay any tax for the first year and a half, I have heard that they get grants for cars and we’ve all heard  about non-nationals getting so many buggies from the HSE that they simply get on the bus and leave the buggy after them! 

The government hasn’t helped either allowing the situation to drag on thereby enabling this country to become an attractive destination in terms of social welfare.  There is a belief out there amongst a section of society that every person with dark skin in Cork is a refugee or an asylum seeker making a fortune sponging off the state while Paddy is left to rot.  This isn’t the case of course, admittedly there are non nationals abusing the system but so do our own and the non national gets no more than the indigenous person in the same circumstances.  In fact when it comes to refugees, who’re not entitled to apply for social welfare while they are waiting to have their cases heard, many are living in shelter and apart from their board and lodgings they get around €20 a week.  It wouldn’t even cover a family outing to McDonalds!

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