Terry Prone: Gratitude to brave sea rescue workers who risk their lives for us
US president Joe Biden meeting Pope Francis at the Vatican on Friday. Mr Biden's joke, that he may be the only Irishman who never drank alcohol, should give the nation pause for thought. Picture: Vatican Media/AP
When you live on a promontory jutting into the sea north of Dublin Bay, the Coast Guard search and rescue helicopter is a constant. It always seems to be racketing past, particularly at weekends, its sound diminishing as it progresses.
Today, no diminution. It sounds as if it’s hanging in the sky. Which, as it turns out, is exactly what it’s doing. Beneath it, a drama is unfolding. A canoe and a rib. Unclear, at first, which is in trouble, although it stands to reason that the bigger boat is the rescuer and the small craft is the rescued. From the distance comes another rib, prow up like a speedboat.
Difficult to be sure, even using a telescope, but the impression is of the occupants of the canoe transferring to one rib while a crew member from another gets into the canoe and paddles energetically for the Rogerstown estuary. Later, we learn the canoe crew became exhausted in the face of high winds and higher waves. Everybody safe, the two ribs head off to different marinas while the helicopter spins and exits, sky left.
Despite not knowing them, a surge of general gratitude and admiration arises. These are the good guys, saving lives in situations that can pose lethal risk for them. Today’s rescue makes this a great day for them. But, just one week ago, in the same pleasantly lethal stretch of coast, an experienced swimmer, one of a pair of lads frequently swimming here, got into trouble and despite helicopter, boats, ambulances, fire engines and squad cars, could not be saved.
Afterwards, the crews loading their gear into their vehicles on the viewing point were silent, rolling and packing the tools of their trade on mental auto pilot and muscle memory. Doing it carefully, not knowing how soon the next demand would come, but knowing, as day follows night and calm follows a storm, that the next demand WOULD come and that they must be ready for it.
The black cat, cured of his allergic skin condition, nestles on the surface where I’m working on my iPad and bites my arm in an absentminded way. A sleeve prevents any damage, but I yell at him and hurl him out the door. An hour later, he brings me a small dead mouse to make amends.
Hey ho, hey ho, it’s off to work we go. Until the moment a bright yellow light appears on the dashboard and the car begins to judder. I find a safe place, pull in, take a photograph of the icon (I think it says EPC) and text it to my son, turning off the engine lest it blow me up. He immediately texts back the diagnosis: “Car has a sick brain. Needs garage. Is it running? Can you get home?”
I can, I tell him, mystified that it would do this a week after a service and passing its NCT. I turn the engine back on. No yellow sign. No juddering. I get back on the road and go to work, convinced the car is copying my brain fart (technical term, TGA) of the previous week. No further problems.
Today, John Spain died. Good journalist, superb literary editor. The first time I met him, he terrified me. I was standing in Mary Kenny’s office in the Irish Press building on Burgh Quay when this man walked in and handed Mary some documentation.
“This is John Spain, the best sub-editor who ever lived,” she told me, and told him who I was. He acknowledged my name without interest and was halfway out the door when he snapped his fingers and came back into the office. “YOU’re the one,” he accused, pointing at me.
I explained that I got kind of carried away when I was typing and would suddenly find myself at the end of a page and because I had been told never to carry a sentence from one page to another, ended up holding the page in position with my left hand while typing the rest of the sentence with my right. Hence the bendy last lines.
He did that silent beckoning thing that’s always a precursor of you being shown the error of your ways, and sat down at an empty desk with a typewriter on it and a pile of A4 white paper, from which he took one sheet, carefully putting a large pencil X on the left hand side about two inches from the bottom. Then he looked interrogatively at me: the glance conveying “You with me so far, you moron?” I nodded, despite not having a clue what he was at. He rolled the paper into the typewriter and kept rolling until the X appeared. All suddenly became clear. The X would always surface at the right time for me to comfortably finish a sentence before hitting the end of the page. And I could then erase the pencilled X. “Jesus,” I said, enthralled. “Yeah,” he said and left the room.
Today, it emerged that the prime minister of Luxembourg plagiarised his university thesis. No, he didn’t accidentally cut and paste five words from another text. He lifted 54 pages. To give him his due, he did write two pages all by his little self.
Xavier Bettel is the man’s name, and he fairmindedly admitted, after being outed as a plagiarist, that the thesis “should have been done differently”. On the other hand, the 48-year-old went on to point out that the thing had been crafted over two decades back, implying that the statute of limitations on stealing someone else’s work might have run out. Anyway, he went on, he had written it with a clear conscience. Most of us who make our living by writing stuff for publication lurch fearfully between, on the one hand, the terror of libeling someone and having to pay them a fortune, and on the other inadvertently lifting one whole sentence and being found out. So we do not find his unjustified clear conscience even a small bit funny.
The US president tells the Pope in the Vatican that he may be the only Irishman who never drank alcohol. We need a lot more of his teetotal type as figures emerge of cirrhosis and other liver diseases going up more than a quarter thanks to lockdown.
What’s wrong with us, that we treat lockdown as an imposition to be borne only on a tide of alcohol and, when lockdown stops, treat the return to nightclubs and other drinking venues as a liberation on the scale of the downing of the Berlin Wall?
Someone needs to tell the EU to lay off interfering with winter time. We need an extra hour’s sleep to cope with the chaos of Halloween, never mind the egregious environmental damage.
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