Older citizens unrewarded for ‘green’ policies

MY grandmother was frequently wont to declare that ‘eaten bread is soon forgotten’, and how fitting her adage was in the light of latter-day treatment of our older citizens.

Those people of her generation were the progenitors of recycling - long before the word was ever used, and eons ahead of the birth of ‘green’ politics. Although they did not realise it, they were recyclers extraordinaire.

They darned and sewed, rebored belts and mended braces. Clothes were not taken to bring centres but were brought to the cousins. Glass milk bottles were washed and put out again, while Cidona and TK bottles were useful for claiming back the valued deposit of tuppence. They took shoes to the cobblers, and got their wetcell wireless batteries recharged every other week. They did not have the luxury of food leftovers, but skins and peelings were brought down to augment costly pigmeal. Stamps, bottletops and silver paper from Gold Flake or Sweet Afton were all deferentially donated to local nuns.

Every household had its own drawer which contained a bewildering trove of nuts, screws, washers, wires, bolts and such like - one’s own DIY store. Many cut their own turf and in the hot hayfields of high summer, the farmer and his wife twisted the securing hay-ropes from the hay itself.

They were a resourceful lot: willful waste made woeful want, they taught us. Now they are in the autumn and winter of their lives, what of their reward for such resourcefulness and thrift?

They are given refuse bins they cannot fill, and refuse charges they cannot pay. Surely it is not beyond science and compassion to give them half-size bins, and a national waiver on refuse charges.

If, as a barometer of our civilisation, we put a weather eye on the value and respect given to older people, the glass appears to me to be truly at an all-time low.

Cllr Joe Conway

44 Roselawn

Tramore

Co Waterford