Isn’t the title pretty self-explanatory? I could remain silent. I could pen down thoughts about heroes, warriors, and friends, which is exactly what I am doing because a variety of people exist in this world.
And it is these myriad individuals that determine what happens or doesn’t, if they are involved or otherwise.
Take for instance the devastation of the Stardust scandal and the horrifyingly unforeseen burning of Dublin’s young stars in the labour district. It took one or more individuals to decide that the club conditions that fateful night would be identical to those of the fire incident. An individual or group decided to conduct a water-linked enquiry around it for the first time and another concluded that a faux scandal that culminated in countless years being wasted on rectifying it.
The common scapegoats are ‘the system’ or ‘the sistéam’ which are responsible for human failings. However, these are merely constructs populated by people. Yes, people have a series of laws, procedures, etiquettes and crowdsourcing as a milieu, but these are not incarceration facilities or the ties that bind them.
Anthony Boyle shares, ‘My father had to attend Gaelic training, and every day the same British soldier would hurl his gear into a puddle.’
It was an individual who decided to attack Ukraine on 22 February 2022 (we know who, don’t we?); another orchestrated the Iraq invasion on 20 March 2003 (we have his name too). If the decisions were not made by ‘systems’, then who made them?
As unfairness continues to unveil gradually, the nation’s mill of apologies must race to keep pace. Perhaps we need to establish an ‘Apologies Department’ at the end of some other department that isn’t overrun with elites. Let bygones be bygones, but the future will stay busy making excuses for our refuge provision for refugees and those whose childhoods were spent waiting without knowing if they could stay or leave, scandals of poorly built houses and flats, and economic and other regulations that were too light.
I have considerably devoted my existence, along with my emotional energy, to engaging with diverse public sectors, such as the Department for Education, Skills, Science, Training, Schools, Institutions, Foras na Gaeilge and other fashionable authorities of the time. For the most part, I encountered agreeable individuals, superb conversationalists, and ones you’d enjoy interacting with beyond professional confines. In fact, amongst them, I found some of my closest friends…
This scenario served as the backdrop to policy innovations, oft-recurring events, circumstances when realisation was unattainable, times when it wasn’t merely about gaining an upper hand but was more about the system – the machinery, the framework, the establishment as they say. It becomes more challenging to point fingers when things become abstract.
Yet, it was under these systems we encountered the major health scandals of our nation. There was Brigid McCool contracting hepatitis C due to the negligence of the blood transfusion service, the furore spurred by the faulty cervical smear tests, the dread instilled by the Whites nursing home scandal involving patients misused, not to forget the forgotten symphysis or typhemism cases. Today, we report on the tragic demise of Aoife Johnston at a hospital in Limerick.
The instinct is to blame the impersonal entity – the system, the method, any inanimate element that can’t directly be held accountable. However, at the end of the day, the undeniable truth is that actual individuals lay behind these decisions.