Terry Prone: Stepping up to a challenge that could never have been anticipated

Jade Connolly, daughter of missing woman Bernadette Connolly, speaking to the media at the entrance to Donabate beach near the Shoreline Hotel in Dublin where Bernadette was last seen on January 7. Picture: Brian Lawless/PA 

Sunday

A homemade poster stuck to the window of the local SuperValu attracts my attention. It carries a photograph of a dark woman who is missing. 

Bernadette Connolly, according to the poster, comes from neighbouring Swords and disappeared at the end of the first week in January. 

Her daughter has put up the poster, appealing for help in finding her, saying plaintively that her mother “is a very solid woman” who was in great form on the day she vanished. 

Through the poster and media appeals, Bernadette Connolly’s daughter single-handedly moves her mother from a category — “missing person” — to individual humanity. 

Jade talks of her “mam” as “the Del Boy of women”, and has gone public to alert people who walk the beach from which she disappeared to the details, asking for footage that might include Bernadette. 

A daughter stepping up to a challenge that she could never have anticipated.

Monday

Meat Loaf’s songs are now being used as background music for anti-vax rallies in America. How infinitely sad.

Tuesday

It’s understandable that the bill allowing workers to request permission to work at home skews a tad towards employers, they being the folk with proper lobbying groups working for them. 

Your average Josephine Soap, in sharp contrast, is kicking take-out packages out from under the table she’s using as a desk, threatening that anybody heard shrieking or swearing in the background of an upcoming Zoom will suffer dire consequences, and reminding herself to straighten the picture behind her, knowing that it will stay crooked. 

Lobbying Leo to get the right to stay in Castle Chaos wouldn’t fit in her over-stuffed schedule. Josephine is putting in longer hours than she did when she was in the office full time, even with the sawn-off commute. But it’s working. Her boss may have to lay down rules to make sure she doesn’t come a physical cropper in Castle Chaos, but her productivity is not in question. 

That’s the general perception. Yet some employers are teeth-gnashingly anxious to get staff back in the office, pronto. Many of them seem — wrongly — to equate control and observation with management and leadership. 

Unconsciously, they draw their model from US prisons built in a star shape allowing constant observation of the incarcerated. 

It might be more productive to look at what has worked during the pandemic in Ireland, and apply the lessons to the future, while trusting employees.

Wednesday

The Irish Times runs a column about “insidious ageism” in healthcare, illustrated by Kathy Sheridan’s story of being wrist-banded and thereby branded as “a fall risk” because of her two recent falls, which could have happened to anybody of any age. 

This is reminiscent of the age-based stereotyping nailed a couple of decades back by the wonderful broadcaster and writer Alistair Cooke, who ended up in a hospital in New York, where he lived and worked, his complaint being that one of his legs had gone on strike and wasn’t working as it should have been. 

The consultant examined the leg, listened to Cooke’s information and then patted the limb, tented as it was in bedclothes. “You must realise, Mr Cooke, that this is an 85-year-old leg,” he smiled. 

Cooke pointed out that the other leg was the same age, and it was working just fine.

Thursday

Norma Foley and Simon Harris make positive noises about skewing the educational system towards those without an academic bent, by changing second-level exams and creating more apprenticeships. Which is all very well, but on the late side in a student’s life.

Would it not be better to look at primary school children to identify the ones who are easily distracted, who blurt out answers, who don’t like tasks that require sustained mental effort, who fidget and run around when it’s inappropriate? 

Those five are among the characteristics that can deliver a child an ADHD diagnosis under the DSM specifications developed in the US.

Once so diagnosed, the child is overwhelmingly likely to be treated using a stimulant drug, which, paradoxically, mutes their impulsivity and dampens their rampant energy. 

That’s because before the Second World War, a Dr Charles Bradley found that the stimulant Benzedrine, traditionally used by soldiers and truckers to stay awake for long periods, did wonders when prescribed to hyperactive, inattentive children. 

For nearly 80 years, children with ADHD have been fire extinguished in this way.

This is not to suggest that ADHD does not exist, although Richard Saul, an American professor working in behavioural neurology, made that claim in an eponymous book published in 2008. 

Nor is it to discount the misery of parents exhausted by a child who never stops, their misery exacerbated by teacher-reported problems.

It is merely to ask if it’s not possible to much earlier identify the children whose bent is towards the energetic, towards handwork, who is, perhaps, on the solitary side and adapt the system to them, rather than medicalise and drug them into alignment with the system.

Before anyone ever heard of ADHD, a kid in the US left school early (to the relief of his teachers), started to crew for his father on a small delivery boat and at 13 was running his own vessel. 

His writing was lousy to the day he died, but on that day, he employed thousands of people and was the richest man in America, having come from poverty. 

His name was Cornelius Vanderbilt and he was lucky that he was born at a time when sitting still in a classroom was not seen as the only route to successful adulthood.

Friday

Wattaboutery rises to new levels with reports that Robert Watt and Stephen Donnelly are gone off to Dubai to a wellness knees-up.

Saturday

I remove Spotify from my devices. Joni Mitchel has joined Neil Young in taking her music from the app because it provides a platform for an anti-vaccine podcast.

It won’t kill either artist, but on the other hand is unlikely to influence Spotify’s managers’ choice of offerings, since they did pay the anti-vaxx podcaster $100m (€89m) for exclusive rights to his misinformed ranting. 

In contrast, downloads of Joni Mitchel’s work, or the absence of same, will not even dimple Spotify’s bottom line. Unless some regulator comes the heavy, nothing will happen. Or unless dozens of younger stars take the same stance, which is doubtful.

The ridiculous thing is how good it feels to boycott something again. I have spent my life making principled behavioural points that have made no difference to anything. 

During the apartheid years, our family didn’t eat Outspan oranges because they came from South Africa. We never bought Spring Books because, according to my mother, they were printed in Czechoslovakia by brainwashed priests.

 Just why brainwashed clerics might have been recruited by the communist government to work on English-language children’s books was never clear, but it was a moral choice. Same with Spotify. Never mind the outcome, feel the principle …