Time Warp Ireland

In the Irish times immigrants and emigrants tell their stories. What it's like to leave Ireland and what its like to come back.  everyone seems to agree one thing...it's painful, whichever way you are travelling.

Recently someone wrote a piece about how returnees come back 'enlightened' or rather with their horizons expanded. They've changed, they've seen progress, new ideas, innovation, standards, policies of the new age. Then on returning nothing has changed HERE.  It's same old, same old , head in the sand, back slapping, brown envelope, who you know, keeping them on your side, happy skulduddery. 

That's when reality hits.  That's when you long to love Ireland like you used to...wasn't ignorance bliss. you simply never knew how narrow-minded, enmeshed, cronyism-rife, Ireland was. You didn't KNOW it was a small hick island! You just did not SEE it. you didn't know or experience it. Going away...changes you completely.

Coming home is harder than you might think. You didn't know how everyone is just a gossip, where confidentiality is not an ethical base of either business or health care or neighbourhood watch!

Where your GP can tell you how the consultant, YOUR consultant skipped the country for tax reasons! Where a villager you don't even know,  tells you some child you know was sexually abused in childhood and is a holy terror in school, where a neighbour can tell you who has died, who was robbed and who gets government grants and such like...

Where the local primary care team is beyond the pale in discrimination, oppression and deviousness to such an extent you need your solicitor in tow. Where they almost accuse you of 'forging doctors letters from a top hospital in England'. well they DID say; "we can't accept the doctors letters from YOU because you might have forged them, they must come directly from the consultants". You begin to worry whether they need to be 'locked up' by the men in white coats for severe psychotic paranoia!

Where consultants just don't know how to challenge the local primary care teams for your benefit, preferring instead to be 'Mr Nice Guy' to what he probably sees as his beleaguered medical colleagues. After all patients are truly out to screw you, aren't they! So the patient in extreme hysterical distress because the powered wheelchair she was in ploughed into a wall when the wheel flew off on her way to see him was translated to the primary care team as 'understandably upset'.   UPSET!? 

This is when weariness sets in. a bone weary lethargy ...of a magnitude enough to send you to bed in exhaustion. The 'fighting' with 'authority' gets you no-where because there is a game to be played, and its a game you don't know the rules to.  You are advised to 'tow' the line, go along with it, pretend you like it, agree to do it, etc... not because you believe it the right thing to do, but because its part of the Irish corrupt game everyone is playing and if you're not 'in' you are 'out'.  Its so well played the HSE have standard letters to send to TDs or local councillors which cleverly exonerates THEM and blames the patient. So the TDs and Councillors are 'happy' and they can rest assured the patient is making it all up.

You might think I've got a true bout of paranoia now...well when does healthy scepticism become the truth of how people operate? how does suspicion, because you see it time and time again, not become paranoia? good question.

All I know is I'm not paranoid, I am one not for turning. I can't play that game...I see it all so clearly...too clearly...I've been away for 42 years, I saw a different way, it was not like THIS where everyone tries to play a perverse game ....but you know its because they are encultured by corrupt education, religion, abuse and narrow-mindedness. they are quite simply, products of  a dysfunctional island. No manner of hanging on the trouser legs of Merkel makes this Island any better. it's infinitely WORSE for the right wing political shanigans of Kenny and co .

it would be best all round if the whole Island sank in the Irish sea.