This involuntary talkfest about incontinency is peeing me off

We should NOT talk more about anything. We should talk less about almost everything, writes Terry Prone

WHEN incontinence meets transparency and accountability is where the line must be drawn. Especially when the incontinence is real. Not figurative. Or metaphorical.

The ruling consensus maintains that transparency and accountability are the ultimate virtues. Of course, the ruling consensus is always self-righteously wrong in the long term, and when climate change drowns and burns the human race off this benighted planet, the current focus on transparency and accountability will count for nought. However, right now, all right-thinking people stand firm on the importance of transparency and accountability, voluntary and involuntary.

The involuntary kind of transparency and accountability is much more fun than the voluntary version. Voluntary transparency requires endless form-filling and never forgetting anything. It’s like living with the Revenue Commissioners on a daily basis.

Involuntary transparency is less tedious, more dangerous. It is what recently happened when a man and a woman planning to get married to each other, found themselves, as frequently happens, a bit short- taken when it came to cash. If the wedding was to be a splash, something had to be done. They knew they needed to get creative to solve their liquidity problem, if not their solvency problem, and so they wrote a little screenplay. Starring themselves. Their big showbiz break, so to speak. Not only did they write a screenplay, they then picked a location. The fact that they picked Donabate, just around the corner from where I live, is beside the point, and I had no hand, act, or part in any of this production. Which I severely regret, because it did have its moments.

One of those moments was when the car belonging to one of them ploughed into the car belonging to the other of them, although “ploughed”, in this scenario, may be a little agricultural and overly energetic, because neither car was desperately damaged. The claimed soft tissue damage to each of the drivers, however, was immeasurable and worth a multiple of thousands of euros. Soft tissue can be stretched in every direction and claimed damage related to it is costly for insurance companies.

The insurance company involved learned that these two strangers had experienced a prang. But hold, I hear you say. These were not strangers. This couple were planning to tie the knot and their financial plan was predicated on a prang. True. Nonetheless, the point of the prang was that — in theatrical terms — it was supposed to happen between two people who knew each other not at all, thereby generating an insurance payoff to each of them. To cover the nuptials. It was, in short, an unusual pre-nuptial agreement between these two ostensible strangers.

A cunning plan, I hear you say. Not so much. This is where involuntary transparency kicked in. Each of these ostensible strangers had the other on their Facebook page. The insurance assessor did the obvious and examined these pages, clapped a hand to his forehead and went “AhAH”. All became clear. Untruths abounded. The insurance assessor got the wheels of justice grinding, and though they grind slowly, they grind exceeding small, as the two ostensible strangers found to their cost. Not only did the couple NOT get the money for their wedding, they ended up convicted as charged with appropriate sentences. A cunning plan is not so cunning when it does not take involuntary transparency into account, and the wider moral is that too many people are too transparent about too much.

This leads us to the up-close-and-personal encounter between incontinence on the one hand and transparency and accountability on the other. The encounter was curated by the inestimable TV star, Bláthnaid Ní Chofaigh, who, in the interest of other sufferers from incontinence, shared her grim personal experience with the condition, prior to successful surgery.

She went further, according to media reports. She said we had to start talking about incontinence. Do we? Do we, really? I would not for a moment seek to control Bláthnaid’s right to talk about anything she wants to talk about, mainly because the chances of success are pretty small, but I’m not joining her in a talkfest about accidental peeing. I’m not even joining her in a chat about peeing on demand. I am in full baulk on this one.

I just don’t buy this “we must talk more about” trope at all. Most of the issues we’re being told we must talk more about, we have already talked about way too much to no purpose. We have, over the past few years, talked incessantly about, inter alia, eating disorders, suicide, paedophilia, menopause, abortion, the Catholic Church, terrorism, depression, transparency, babies, and accountability.

Of that list, menopause probably came first. A sudden hot flush of books came out about 20 years ago, all based on the false premise that “we must talk more about menopause”. At that point, US star Cybill Shepherd became the poster girl for this perfectly natural, nay, inevitable process, thereby ensuring herself a cohort of fellow “sufferers” and simultaneously writing an end to her career. Because, once you’ve done the HRT argument, had chill pillows explained to you and gone the black cohosh route, there’s not much left to say about menopause, and if you’ve found something, please keep it to yourself. Think common decency. Plus, half the population is unaffected in a direct sense by menopause and doesn’t want to know anything about it, and more than half of the people who ARE directly affected do what women do with the rest of their lives: They shut the hell up about it and get on with coping.

We should NOT talk more about anything. We should talk less about almost everything. We should shut up and listen. If we must talk about difficult pressure points in life, then we should talk sparingly but more efficiently about them. Talking more efficiently starts with research, not about the topic, but to find experts on the topic. Research on the topic itself leads the researcher to headbanging, unevidenced nonsense, and the fact that thousands of others swear by this garbage is beside the point and also knocks a hole in the widely-held reverence for the wisdom of crowds.

Talking efficiently about life’s challenges means talking to the right people privately. Things do not need to be discussed in a public forum, undirected. Unmanaged public discussion can be reckless, unhelpful, and can add to the stigma around certain issues, rather than subtracting from it. It creates support groups which start out as voluntary and self-funded and end up competing for HSE cash.

Let us be clear. Sufferers from stress incontinence or other variations on the theme have an awful time, so spreading the word that surgery can help is a good thing. A good thing that should emerge from a quiet chat with a GP.

However, it’s not clear to me that a national debate on incontinence is required, right now.

It’s not clear to me that “we must talk more” about involuntary peeing.