Terry Prone: Donnelly can prove himself with apology to thalidomide survivors

Sixty years ago, the State failed to protect its own and turned its face away 

Finola Cassidy and Austin O'Carroll, of the Irish Thalidomide Association. Ms Cassidy was one of the many children catastrophically damaged by a drug aimed at pregnant women which the State failed to get off pharmacy shelves for months after it had been withdrawn as dangerous by its distributors. File picture

SUNDAY

The husband is standing in the doorway at an angle. He tries to speak — and fails to produce anything other than a spongy squirt of vowels. “You’re having a stroke,” his wife says. He slurs agreement. She calls 999 and gets Karl, who promises an ambulance and then gets down to instructions and reassurance. When the ambulance arrives, the paramedics ask dozens of questions, because this patient had a heart transplant some time ago and they need to inform the multidisciplinary team in advance of him arriving at the emergency department.

When we talk about frontline medical staff, we don’t always think of paramedics, endangered by their job during the pandemic, going through preliminary interrogations infused, in most cases, with heart-easing kindness. Nor do we include those professionals answering 999 calls, carrying unseen people through their crisis and never hearing another word from them.

MONDAY

The current Mick Clifford podcast is extraordinary. Clifford does what good broadcasters/podcasters do when they hit gold; he shuts up. The gold is a woman with a broadcaster’s voice, reporting with the impelling control of a good BBC World Service correspondent. Except she’s not a reporter at all. Finola Cassidy is the spokesperson for the Irish Thalidomide Association. Sixty years ago, she was one of the many children catastrophically damaged by a drug aimed at pregnant women which the State failed to get off pharmacy shelves for months after it had been withdrawn as dangerous by its distributors. That unconscionable delay ensured that some of the 40 Irish survivors were hurt after the State knew how disastrous thalidomide was. The State failed to protect its own. They were maimed with State connivance, in other words, the later ones. And once babies had been killed or maimed, the State turned its face away.

All 40 survivors are now in constant pain and, after six decades, Ireland has yet to apologise to their parents or compensate them for a historic national outrage. The reluctance to ease the misery of the handful of mothers of thalidomide survivors is difficult to understand. Perhaps it’s because the scandal is historic, ergo forgotten by many who once knew about it and not known at all by younger people. Whatever the reason, it’s even more baffling if you learn about it through the Mick Clifford podcast from a fact-driven woman who eschews self-pity but nevertheless breaks your heart when she tells simple stories, like an account of herself as an excited teenager going to her first disco, being told to wear a long-sleeved dress to conceal her arms if she wanted to be asked to dance.

Cassidy was neither defined nor empowered by her diagnosis. Or by public comments on her visible disability. Her objective was to live a normal life. She and most of her stricken peers achieved that and more. The minister for health plans to meet them soon and, as they always have been, they’ll be focused on outcomes. Compensation to acknowledge government failings at the time and make their lives livable in the present. And a State apology — a great chance for Stephen Donnelly to prove himself.

TUESDAY

Those ads praising people who stay home when they’re sick remind history buffs of the disasters caused by leaders who failed to do just that. Like America’s president Wilson, who insisted on working when he “only had influenza” during the negotiations at the end of the First World War and did so horrific a job that, in a blistering letter of resignation, one of his team presciently said: “Our government has consented now to deliver the suffering peoples of the world to new oppressions, subjections and dismemberments — a new century of war.” In an eerie echo, US president Roosevelt insisted on being part of the chopping-up of Europe after the Second World War even though he looked like he was — and was — dying and, as later became clear, was incapable of standing up to Stalin.

WEDNESDAY

Two of us, standing, talking on the office stairs are silenced by the wonder of a sound coming from one flight down: collective laughter. Four people in our public relations office in stitches over something. That’s the gift of returning to the office even one day a week: fun. I don’t remember much laughter on Zoom, do you?

THURSDAY

Public health experts and communications consultants alike must be breathing a sigh of relief as they read new research concluding that anti-vaxxers and Covid-deniers overwhelmingly share one characteristic: they experienced a large number of what are called adverse childhood events (ACE). We’ve known the more ACE you experienced as a child (sexual abuse, violence, alcoholic parents, divorce of parents) the more apt you are to suffer ailments such as heart disease and die younger. But this latest research widens the focus and feels head-smackingly right. Of course grownups who had an irrationally frightening childhood are going to assert control over their adult lives by defying power figures. Of course they will take pride in scepticism.

FRIDAY

Joe Duffy reveals how gullible and gagging for praise are some of our biggest organisations. They were contacted by a magazine and told they had won an award for something and all they had to do was hand over a few thousand euro to support the editorial publicising their win. These vast organisations, most of them State-supported, fell over themselves finding the money and then found even more money to put up plaques drawing attention to their win. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of them to ask who they’d beaten, how they’d never known about the award up to now, precisely how the judges had decided they were worthy of it. Nope. Flattery blinded them to all that. Significantly, it didn’t blind Alice Leahy, who leads the homeless charity named after her. She smelled a rat immediately.

Nobody smelled a rat at Eir when told it had won a customer service award, which is roughly equivalent to Bruce Willis winning the prize for best ringlets. When Eir tweeted its delight, it got eaten alive by customers and took down the tweet. But let’s hand it to Eir’s PR people, who plaintively but courageously observed that, according to ComReg, the level of customer complaints about Eir dropped in each of the last five quarters.

SATURDAY

Blurbs for books often point to how easy they are to read. One that is difficult to read but worth it is Head Hand Heart by David Goodhart.

Goodhart maintains that the worldwide push-back against experts and the political establishment isn’t due to unequal pay. “If income inequality was the driving force behind political alienation and national populism,” he points out, “how come it is also thriving in the most equal societies on the planet in Scandinavia?”

He attributes the alienation to resentment of the “cognitive classes”, those with degrees and contacts that skilled and unskilled workers don’t have, even though they may be doing beautiful, necessary work and making good money at it.