Terry Prone: Judgement shouldn't come from friends — or domestic appliances
Charles Haughey in 1982: Professor Gary Murphy’s monumental biography of Charles Haughey is the most merciful account of his colourful life.
So endearing, that singer’s funny pronunciation. “Last Christmas, I gev you my heart…”
Sell off something that worked, was well run, trusted by the public and relentlessly generated money for good causes in order to help fund the National Children’s Hospital? Barking, it was.
That chunk of change looks tiny, now, set against the current estimate of what it will cost to build the NCH.
The buyers dispensed with most of the top people and went anonymous. Now, it is distrusted enough for John Mc Guinness to want to grill the operators in an Oireachtas committee.
Between Covid and Christmas, nobody’s going to pay a blind bit of attention. The real error was selling off the National Lottery in the first place.
About six weeks ago, I found an electrician. Electricians are like rare species in a David Attenborough show; to be secretly filmed and spoken of in whispers, lest they go extinct out of spite.
But, lo, an electrician appeared unto me, and his name was Alan.
Alan walked around my house, nodded wisely as I moaned about the lift not working (carrying a load of laundry up a spiral staircase), praised the layout of the fuse box, made copious notes, and promised an estimate and dates would follow.
Also, it made no sense to waste an hour of an electrician’s time walking around a house without being paid for it, therefore to recoup the money, Alan or one of his colleagues would send me a letter and follow it up with action.
They did not. Nothing followed. I sent a cheery reminder email. Couple of days later, I sent another, markedly less cheery email.
Another couple of days and I sent one that wasn’t rude but was certainly mad as hell. Did they respond? Nothing. So, six weeks on, I am back to square one.
Swear to God, when I saw the picture of the newly discovered Peruvian mummy wrapped in ropes, the first thing that occurred to me was that he must’ve been an electrician a few centuries back and a potential customer was determined not to let him escape.
Recent legal requirements on employers to publish pay rates so the rest of us can judge if women in that company are paid less than men will generate action, no doubt about it.
But it will also generate excuses and explanations from some entities for failure to achieve the gender pay equality aimed at.
Today, though, it’s no excuses from An Post. That’s because the Irish postal service has proven it pays female employees as much or more than their male counterparts.
This is just the latest smart-and-good direction set by An Post since David McRedmond took over at the top.
He has re-branded a dated and constrained entity with a quiet effectiveness that goes to the heart of the service offered, rather than to logos and slogans or to whines at government seeking more support.
On the gender issue, they’ve done everything right.
Their chief people officer Eleanor Nash points out that they’ve been tracking gender pay since 2019 and fixed it (remarkably, within just three years) by actions encouraging women to stay and seek promotion, by removing gender references from job specs and by flexible working arrangements.
Let’s hope other organisations, in the private and public sectors, ask An Post for advice on how to speedily effect good change.
Professor Gary Murphy’s monumental biography of Charles Haughey arrives. It is by a country mile the most merciful account, thus far, of CJ’s life, informed by unprecedented access to his papers.
It is not possible to be unmoved as he recounts Haughey’s final painful illness during which faithful friends — the late Gillian Bowler among them — visited him in Kinsealy.
Gill was surprised when someone asked her how she could continue to be friends with the disgraced former taoiseach.
She thought judgement and punishment might rightly be meted out by the media, the opposition, and the judiciary. But never by friends.
Today is the day of Inanimate Object Rebellion. Me and a friend are in the kitchen when an engine starts up.
“The hell is that?” she asks. “The hand-held mini vacuum,” I answer, opening the door to the press where it’s kept. (This is oddly reminiscent of , where the Protestants keep their toasters in a press.)
As the two of us stand there, it turns itself off, untouched by either of us.
“Ah, Jaysas,” my friend says reproachfully, puts her anorak on and leaves. The little vacuum turns itself on again in a sort of brief farewell and doesn’t do it again for the rest of the day.
After shopping, much later, I am heading home along the M1 when the passenger window rolls down. I check if my elbow was anywhere near the controller. It wasn’t.
I manually roll the window up again and keep moving. Then, whoosh, it happens again.
This time, nothing happens, so I cover a couple of kilometres before it closes itself up again. I wish I had someone in the car with me for fear, when I report this, I get looked at with a “Yeah, right” expression on disbelieving faces.
When I pull up at the red light down goes the passenger window again, which convinces the driver on my left that I want to communicate with him.
I shake my head but since I can’t get the window to go back up, he looks betrayed, as if I am playing with his feelings.
For the rest of the day, I have to remind myself that it’s the coronavirus I should be afraid of, and that looking sideways at the hair drier isn’t, strictly speaking, necessary.
Apropos Nphet, Government needs to realise that trying to fix leaks is like trying to cure jaundice.
Big mistake. Both are symptoms. The actual illness to be cured is a deepening mutual mistrust.
It’s a mistake for the Government to believe Nphet leaks in order to force government action. It may, but other explanations are also possible.
On the other side, it’s a mistake for Nphet to believe Government knickers are knotted because they want to be the only leakers.
Knicker-knotting also happens when Nphet timing doesn’t give even the most agile Department enough space to plan how to cope with the consequences of a radical Nphet recommendation.
Decisions made in the conviction that your side of an issue is uniquely righteous tend to be flawed. Decisions made in the rage occasioned by the displayed righteousness of the other side, likewise.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
