Fergus Finlay: Scrap vulnerable and elderly labels and stop adding insult to injury

Those attacked in their home recently were made vulnerable only by being overwhelmed by the callousness of their attackers

Mary O’Halloran called to home of her brother Gerry (79) on Boyce’s Street in Gurranabraher, Cork city, on Sunday morning, not knowing that Gerry was being held at knifepoint by an intruder. Picture: Jim Coughlan.

FIVE people were attacked over the last few days, in Sligo, Kilkenny, Kildare and Cork. Threatened, intimidated, in some cases beaten. And then, as they tried to deal with the aftermath of the attacks, they were all labelled.

The five attacks I’m thinking about were on ordinary citizens of Ireland. One man had advertised a scrambler bike for sale and came across a group of men trying to steal it from his shed. They beat him up and left him there.

Another had his home invaded and was pushed and threatened by men intent on robbing his house.

The third, the most serious, involved a man attacked at his front door by men looking for money. His name is Tom Niland, and he was described by neighbours as a gentle giant, a lovely man by all accounts. He is seriously ill in hospital.

The most recent one involved a man armed with a knife assaulting Mary O’Halloran and her brother Gerry. Mary is 84 and Gerry is 79.

These kinds of attacks are vicious. They’re for nothing — nobody gains from them. Brave, ordinary people suffer, in some cases terribly. The attackers are now hunted fugitives, all for the sake of a couple of hundred euro and an old motorbike.

Meanwhile, all the people who were attacked, and their families, will take a long time to recover. Hopefully, they will draw strength from good medical care and from the support of neighbours and community. In the case of Mary and Gerry, there is already a substantial Gofundme campaign to support them.

With luck, they will get back to living full and normal lives, as they did before the attacks.

And I hope, when they read or hear the media reports about the vicious attacks on them, they won’t feel that insult has been added to injury by the dismissive way they have all been labelled in the media reports of what happened to them.

Two words leap out from a lot of the coverage and headlines. Vulnerable. Elderly.

And in the process five people, attacked as they went about their normal lives, sort of disappeared. With everything else that has gone on, they’ve lost their individual identities. They’re just part of “the elderly”. The vulnerable.

Gardaí search for the phone belongingto Tom Niland, inset, from Skreen, CoSligo, who was badly beaten in hishome and is now in critical condition. Picture: James Connolly

Let me tell you why I find this insulting and demeaning. These are people. It’s possible — how would I know? — that their homes were vulnerable to attack. It’s possible they may have had some vulnerabilities themselves, perhaps because of ill-health or loneliness or whatever.

But they weren’t ‘elderly’. They were in their early 70s, most of them. Nothing in any of the reports suggested that they had been rendered infirm by age.

They were made vulnerable only by being overwhelmed by numbers and deadly weapons, and by the callousness of their attackers.

Tell me I’m grinding an axe if you like. I’m in my early 70s now. I’ve lived a full and hopefully productive life, and I don’t intend to be written off as ‘elderly’ for a long time yet.

But more to the point, I know artists, builders, craftspeople, photographers, historians, writers, gardeners, trekkers, hill walkers, and hosts more. Women and men all around me. Sixties, seventies, eighties. None of them fitting into some category or label just because it suits.

Some of them — many of them — discovering new joy in being grandparents and reliving all over again the significance of helping young people to grow. Most of them secure in the knowledge that they’re the generation that built what you see around you know. The Ireland you’re proud of — we did that.

The State may not recognise our contribution — especially if we are women — but that doesn’t mean we didn’t do it.

Not all of us may be able to run as fast as we did once (or hit a ball as far, sadly). Some of us have had to buy the odd second-hand part to manage loose teeth or newsprint that’s far too faint these days.

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But there’s wisdom in my generation, and judgement. We can deploy a lot of experience to solving a lot of problems. If heavy physical burdens aren’t as easy as they used to be, we can carry enormous amounts of emotional weight, especially for those who matter to us. We’re calmer (some of the time anyway!), more reflective. We don’t place as much store in what people think about us, and that enables us to be a lot more open about stuff that’s important.

I work with people on boards and committees quite a lot. Those that are young in that world — often with more skills and qualifications than I have — are often frustrated and impatient. It takes an older person sometimes to see the bigger picture, and to let everyone know that if we stop and think we’ll find a way through the maze.

The funny thing young people never seem to realise is that, by the time you get to our age, you’ve solved more or less every problem under the sun at least once.

Tom Niland, who was attacked at his Co Sligo home.

So every time I see people being clustered under a label, I want to shout: “Back off.” It’s demeaning and dehumanising.

But it’s actually more than that. Policymakers — especially the ones with no imagination — love labels. You take not just the identity, but the face and the personality and urgency, away from the issue.

Take another favourite label, nothing to do with older people this time — ‘the disabled’ (how many times have you seen that in a headline?).

When policymakers talk about ‘the disabled’, they stop talking about people. More to the point, they don’t have to think about the essential fact that far too much disability is caused by structural barriers and societal attitudes.

That’s why, all too often, people with a disability are people who must overcome more than the rest of us. And a lot of the time, the stuff they have to overcome is stuff we’ve put in their way.

But if we can talk about ‘the disabled’, sure can’t we assume that all those barriers and obstacles just go with the territory. The disabled are just the disabled and that means there’s no obligation on us to change anything.

Except they’re not, you know. A person with a disability, no matter what has caused it, is an equal part of the Irish nation. He or she has a fundamental duty of fidelity to the nation and loyalty to the State. He or she, once over a certain age, will elect our Oireachtas and our President. His or her preferences will help to determine how the rest of us are governed.

And there’s more — it’s all written down in black and white in the Constitution. It’s all summed up in one word, the only label that matters: Citizen.

So could we stop it, do you think, this business of writing people off with easy labels. That same document, the one I’ve just quoted, says we’re all equal. We might have a long way to go before we achieve that. But if we did away with the easy labels, at least we’d stop making people invisible.