Aged and outraged: OAP army launch church seat rebellion

AH, the elderly. They’re such gentle folk. Quiet, slow, timid creatures; not terribly clued in, bless them, and so contented with their little lot.

That might have been the view of ministers as they sat around the cabinet table punching the subtract button on their calculators last week, but the crowd that thronged St Andrew’s Catholic Church yesterday put them right.

On foot, on sticks, in wheelchairs and with Zimmer frames, they filled the seats and flooded the aisles — relocating to the church after their numbers grew too great for the hotel function room booked around the corner.

As members of their own generation spoke, they clapped and cheered. When members of government parties tried to follow, they booed and jeered. They stamped their feet, banged their umbrellas, waved their cloth caps and shook clenched fists.

They shouted Out! Out! Out! Rubbish! Go home! They sang We Shall Overcome and they threatened to overthrow. The local elections were coming up next year, they warned, and those who betrayed them now would be remembered at the ballot box for all the wrong reasons.

These were the people who lived through the bad days that came before the bad days that came before the 1980s. They paid for the future through high emigration, high taxation and low expectation.

They didn’t ask for much — just to have their aches eased when they were older — and after a week of dithering in the Dáil, they weren’t letting the Government away with a late, begrudging and partial U-turn.

Bob Waddell from Sandycove, Dublin, held aloft his medical card and vowed resistance to any attempt to make him fill in forms to prove he deserved it. “I am a law-abiding citizen but I say tear up the bloody forms,” he said to wild applause.

Roger Coughlan from Bishopstown Senior Social Centre in Cork said the move made no financial sense as it would force more people into hospitals and nursing homes. “The medical card has kept the figures living at home at a wonderful 96%.”

Joseph Beggs, 73, from Portmarnock, Dublin, pushed a copy of the constitution into Enda Kenny’s hand, highlighting article 45 which pledges special care for “the infirm, the widow, the orphan and the aged”.

Galwegian Alice Noonan, 82, brought the house down.

“As I get older, I get bolder,” she declared.

Junior health minister John Moloney looked as if he was telepathically telling Brian Cowen and Mary Harney they owed him several pints as he stood helplessly on the altar attempting to speak before being booed off.

PD senator Fiona O’Malley stood her ground and delivered her spiel but winced in exasperation, unheard above the din. “I’m glad to be at this meeting because I do think it’s important to have heard what people had to say,” she bellowed to no effect.

The people will be on the streets today, protesting outside Leinster House at lunchtime, again giving the politicians a chance to hear what they have to say. Sticks, wheelchairs and age are no obstacles to a revolution.