Irish Examiner view: Attitudes to island life must change

A typical view from Cape Clear. The island has been without nursing cover for 51% of the days between January last year and August this year.

Ireland’s 247 offshore islands — some 63 of them populated — are a unique and integral part of our identity. However, population decline — continuous almost since the census of 1841 — due to a lack of funding to support and improve the lives of all islanders, is having a very negative effect on their well-being.

At the weekend, we highlighted the concerns of those 110 people living on Cork’s Oilean Cleire who live in growing fear over a lack of nursing cover. The island has just one registered general nurse and no cover when she is ill or on leave.

The island has been without nursing cover for 51% of the days between January last year and August this year. It has been about a year since the island last had a GP visit and the islanders are rightly concerned at the scarcity of local care.

The prospect of a ferry ride to either Baltimore or Schull to get treatment for any sickness or accident in winter is a stretch for most. Locals report they are getting sick from worry about the lack of healthcare, and some are considering relocating to the mainland.

Our islanders deserve more in terms of infrastructure and healthcare than they are currently getting.

Island populations have hugely decreased since 1841, when they totalled 34,219 people, to the current level of just 8,931 as recorded in 2022 by the Central Statistics Office. Certainly, the Famine contributed greatly to the decline, and enforced evacuations in the 1950s and ’60s didn’t help.

We have a duty to our islanders to preserve and protect their lives and cultures, but there does not appear to be much of an appetite for that in successive recent administrations. If we are serious about keeping people living, working, and healthy on our islands, that’s an attitude that has to change.

Desperate times for Trump

The multi-front assault of Donald Trump and his Republican Party to rewrite election rules ahead of next month’s vital mid-term elections to decide who controls both the senate and congress has failed in every phase of its execution.

Determined legal resistance has, largely, stymied their efforts to favour Republicans who have attempted to purge voter rolls of supposed non-citizens, impose new rules for mail-in voting, gerrymandering district areas, deploy federal agents in polling centres, seizing ballots or voting machines, and intimidating election officials.

With polling indicating a record low approval rating for Trump and his administration, he is nevertheless trying everything he can to disrupt and throw into disarray the November 3 election.

There is an army of lawyers across the US ready to file complaints, requests for restraining orders, affidavits, and other legal documents if Trump and his allies try to obstruct voting or ballot-counting. Many of those threats have already been stopped or disrupted.

Of course, there is always the threat that the administration, if it sees deeply dissatisfying results coming in when counting begins, will declare a state of emergency and put the election into abeyance, throwing American democracy into a deep crisis.

In an executive order last March, Trump announced a raft of measures to prevent alleged election fraud, but most of these have either been permanently stalled or blocked outright by the courts. And, despite the president’s repeated demands for congress to enact new voting rules, his “save America act” died for lack of support.

In another ruse, Trump and his allies have unwittingly created widespread awareness of disinformation campaigns that they have waged against feared Democratic candidates, and voters are increasingly wary of conspiracy theories weaponised against some of those trying to oust Republicans in so-called red states.

A case in point was that of Texas candidate James Talarico, a Democrat polling increasingly well across the state who vanished from the campaign trail last month for nine days, claiming to have the flu. Republicans stirred the pot immediately, saying he had been taken to a mental health facility.

Their fear is that Talarico will beat the Trump-backed Republican Ken Paxton and turn Texas blue for the first time since the 1980s. Their efforts failed, but it was a sobering reminder of how sophisticated the Republican misinformation/disinformation machine has become.

If Trump loses heavily in the mid-terms, he will effectively become a lame-duck president, unable to enact any legislation and leaving himself open to possible impeachment. That is an eventuality he and his allies are desperate to avoid.

White House chaos continues

Another challenge facing the Trump administration is communicating his often-controversial decisions to the American people and the wide global audience. It’s a tough job.

In the 21 months since he re-entered the Oval Office, he has started a war with Iran, plucked a dictator out of Venezuela, shredded global alliances, and upended established trade norms.

The dizzying blitz of Trump’s actions require effective communication to relay them coherently to his constituents and the wider world. Enter — and exit — Katie Zacharia. His new — and now former — press secretary lasted a disastrous four and a half days in the job.

During that time she presided over a single, calamitous, White House briefing, a campaign trip to Alaska, and a couple of interviews on Fox News. Having fired Zacharia, Trump said acerbically: “Maybe it was not for her.”

That she was appointed at all says a lot about the chaos that is the current White House, where articulating the administration’s vision has become a miasma of untruths, half-truths, suppositions, and guesswork, such is the bedlam of this presidency.

There is little going on in the Oval Office that makes sense; disorder, confusion, and bedlam are the order of every day. The appointment and swift dismissal of Zacharia was just another example.

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