Unthinkable Facts.

The prominence the subject has attained seems to indicate that tinkers are increasing in number, and I have heard the total genuine tinker population of the whole country estimated at 6,500. Is this a social trend, provoked by rocketing rates and taxes? Hard to say but there is no denying that tinkers in their way of life can be not only a nuisance but a danger.

With their livestock they cause damage to property and traffic danger.

Many of them steal and send their womenfolk begging, usually armed with an ailing child.

Their sanitation arrangements are either nil or of the most primitive kind, and thus menace the public health.

Their children, usually very numerous, do not go to school and grow up to be little savages.

A tinkers' camp is too often the centre of mlees or other disorders.

Their moral code is deplorable.

It is clear from the above that several of their practices are prima facie unlawful but for some reason not obvious, the Guards will take no action unless a specific complaint is made to them in respect of a particular occurrence.

An advocate for the defence may blandly inquire what about the new type of tinker or nomad who is ever more frequently to be encountered the kind who hauls a luxurious caravan behind a powerful motor car? It is a fallacious comparison. The new wayfarers are merely on a holiday, seek the permission of landowners when camping and do not have livestock, while in several spots in the country caravan sites, fully equipped with sanitation and drinking water, are being provided for a small charge. The genuine tinker spends his whole life moving about in those rickety vans of which few people have ever seen the inside. It must be an awful life in the middle of a real Irish winter.

Who Are They?.

Many people profess to make a sharp distinction between the gypsy and the tinker; the latter so-called because he repairs tin vessels while the former is a gaudy, light-hearted romany, swarthy with flashing eyes, bedecked with ear-rings and sashes, fond of music and playing the fiddle. I fear this distinction does not exist and probably originated in the cinema. The word gypsy is properly Egyptian, from whence those nomads came to Europe. The French call him a Bohemien and the Germans a Zigeuner, and philologists argue that 'tinker' is an attempt to render the latter sound into English. The womenfolk have always been noted, though not so much in this country, for their pretences (or skill) at fortune-telling. It is true that the men often practised metalwork and were good at that craft but it was usually in copper, not tin.

The clans have never been trusted. Henry VIII issued several severe edicts against them and in 1611 three were hanged at Edinburgh 'for abyding within the kingdome, they being Egiptienis' and in 1636 the Egyptians were ordered 'the men to hangied and the weomen to be drowned, and suche of the weomen as hes children to be scourgit throw the burg and burnt in the cheeks.'

In what we call their family life tinkers in Ireland seem to behave conventionally enough, though elsewhere polygamy and incest are practised and even cannibalism has been alleged.

Two oddities arise: first, in a world where the displaced person has become a large and tragic problem, here we have people who have voluntarily displaced themselves and seem to enjoy that status. Second, good citizens who pay taxes and live in houses but who are thought to have committed certain and various offences are brought before the court on a charge of vagrancy.

Some other day we may consider the tramp. He is a very different man.

The great perils of being nursed.

It is common enough knowledge that doctors are a closely enough knit body; they do not speak out of turn, quarrel with each other publicly or make any comment that might suggest that all is not as it might be with the care of the sick.

One was much surprised, therefore, at some outspoken remarks made a few weeks ago by Dr Brian Pringle at the annual meeting of Monkstown Hospital, Dublin. He mentioned many matters which required to be attended to in the management of hospitals so far as the patients were concerned. Presumably he was referring to Dublin hospitals but his remarks may have a country-wide application. As a former patient (broken leg) perhaps I may amplify and supplement what he said. Sick people are quite defenceless and it is sad to say that every advantage is often taken of this condition.

Peep O'Day.

Nearly all the general hospitals in Dublin are structurally not much better than slums; the buildings are over two centuries old, many unsuitable and dangerous, and most without any proper fire escape system. Through some disastrous breakdown initially of the Hospitals' Commission (which surveys hospital needs and recommends grants from the Sweepstake Funds) hardly any significant capital works were provided for over the years for the Dublin area. The new National Maternity Hospital at Holles Street was rebuilt, for the old one was positively tottering, and a big new fever hospital has been provided; but these are specialised services.

Dr Pringle mentioned the universal practice of rousing patients, even in mid-winter, at the unearthly hour of 6 a.m., compelling them to wash and shave, have beds made and then try to face a breakfast which I personally always found poor and usually cold. The whole practice is barbarous and must be injurious.

The doctor also mentioned the strain caused by noise. He may have meant internal work noises or the clatter of traffic from without but there is another form of noise that could almost lead to the loss of reason. A modern peril is radiation sickness but what I mean here is radio sickness. You are in a ward with, say, twelve other sufferers. One of them has a radio which he keeps turned on full blast all day. But another also has a radio and exercises the same 'right', though not necessarily interested in the same station. The incessant din is excruciating and nothing is done about it. Occasionally a table with crucifix is set up at a bed, a clear enough sign that somebody is about to receive the Last Rites. No notice of this is taken, and I have honestly seen a poor man die to the strains of the Blue Danube.

The meals seem to be improvised and certainly cannot come from a modern kitchen designed for ma.s.s catering. The meat used is invariably low-grade mutton, usually boiled or stewed. A tough neighbour of my own told me he had got far better fare in Mountjoy Prison where, indeed, the ration for everybody includes five cigarettes per day.

Fading Eyesight.

A personal experience of my own may be worth recounting. Treatment for a broken leg usually entails having the whole limb impaled in plaster and a bar driven through the heel; from this bar wires are fixed to run over pulleys at the bottom of the bed and carrying heavy weights, the idea being to prevent the limb contracting when the break begins to knit. It all means that the poor patient must lie immovably on the flat of his back for several months, quite helpless.

The ward which found me in this position in mid-winter was an enormously lofty apartment, with beds lining the walls latterly on each side. Lighting was provided by a series of powerful lamps suspended from the centre of the ceiling. These lamps began to blaze at about 4.30 in the evening. Reading was, of course, out of the question since any book or paper would be in complete shadow. A patient unable to turn on his side had no alternative but to lie staring at this light. I complained to a matron that I thought this situation would cause me eventually to lose my eyesight, that I was having attacks of double-vision and that my eyes were already red and smarting. I was told for goodness sake to have sense and not be talking nonsense. My own resource came to the rescue. I bade a visitor speed off to the shops and get me the sort of green eye-shade one sees at the Central Court at Wimbledon. I was proud of this brainwave and prouder still when I saw that everybody else in the ward had one a few days after.

It is not easy to know in what quarter to a.s.sign the blame for such outrageous things. The doctor or nursing staff can scarcely be blamed, for their own work must be rendered the more difficult thereby. Most hospitals of the kind termed 'voluntary' are under the direction of a board, mostly of charitable laymen. I am not aware that they ever visit the wards and see how the house is run.

I cannot say what conditions are like in Laois but I fear that being a patient in any hospital in Ireland calls for two things holy resignation and an iron const.i.tution.

The ancient game of name-calling.

Provided big changes occur gradually, they are hardly noticed. There is no outcry about getting rheumatic, grey and old because those conditions a.s.sert themselves almost imperceptibly. In the days of my youth when living near Tullamore, I was well used to seeing farmers coming home in the evening from the fair, unconscious from drink in the bottom of a donkey-cart. That sagacious animal, keeping to his own side of the road, brought the boss safely home.

At that time one of the nastiest crimes of today had not been invented. I mean drunken driving. And within the last ten years or so, the whole routine of living socially has been drastically altered by television. Similarly, people slowly begin to forget one language and speak another. This process of change is endemic, ageless and unavoidable. Physiologists claim that the physical structure of a human being is wholly renewed every seven years and it is on record that one man tried to get out of paying back an old debt because it was somebody else, not himself, who had contracted the debt some eight years before.

New electronic aids have rendered old-fashioned and obsolete the system of learning things (which simply have to be remembered) by heart. That was the way most of us learnt which prepositions in Latin take the dative and ablative case, learnt the alphabet and our prayers. Another aid to memory was the plan of committing information to verse.

Forgotten Man.

I think I have already remarked here on the extraordinary fact that there is no memoir or biography in existence of John O'Donovan, the great Gaelic scholar of the last century; worse, his books are long out of print and circulation and it is only in one or two central libraries that one can consult, say, his edition of the Annals of the Four Masters. In Duffy's attractive monthly magazine, the Hibernian Sixpenny Magazine for May 1862, there is a review of O'Donovan's edition of Topographical Poems, being the work of two scribes named O Dubhagin (died 1372) and O hUidhrin (died 1420). Their compilations deal with the location territorially of well-known ancient Irish families and are more a genealogical than a topographical record. The edition shows O'Donovan as a smart enough detective in finding out who people with strange and obviously foreign names really were after the great changes in the country following the Anglo-Norman invasion. Some of the patronymics were compulsorily conferred. In 1465 Edward IV decreed that every Irishman living in the Pale should take an English surname or, to quote the exact words, 'shall take to him an English surname of one town, as Sutton, Chester, Trym, Skyrne, Corke, Kinsale; or colour, as White, Blacke, Browne; or art or science, as Smith or Carpenter; or office, as Cooke, Butler.'

This command was widely carried out, a family named Shinnah (to use a phonetic spelling) becoming Fox; MacGowan became Smith; MacIntyre (mac an tSaoir) became Carpenter; and McCrosane became Crosbie. Yet there was no clear system of anglicisation or transliteration. O'Connor was changed to Conyers, O'Reilly to Ridley, O'Donnell to Daniel, McCarthy to Carter.

Mistranslations.

'In the county of Sligo,' Dr O'Donovan remarks, 'the ancient name of O'Mulclohy has been metamorphosed into Stone, from an idea that clohy, the latter part of it, signifies a stone. But this being an incorrect translation in the present instance, these persons may be said to have taken a new name. In the county of Leitrim, the ancient, and by no means obscure, name of Mac Connava has rendered Forde from an erroneous notion that ava, the last part of it, is a corruption of atha, of a ford. In Kerry and Th.o.m.ond, the ancient name of O'Cnavin is now anglicised Bowen, because cnimhin signifies a small bone. In Tirconnell, the ancient name of O'Mulmoghery is now always rendered Early, because moch-eirghe signifies early rising. O'Marchachan is translated Ryder, from marcach, signifying a horseman.' It is noteworthy that the Os and the Macs disappeared almost completely from Leinster.

Christian or baptismal names did not fare much better than surnames, usually due to the identification of Irish names with English names to which they were in no way related. Thus we have Aodh (Hugh), Dermot (Jeremy), Mahon (Matthew), Conor (Cornelius), Cormac (Charles), Donnell or Domhnall (Daniel), Brian (Bernard), Flan (Florence), Teigue or Tadhg (Timothy), Donogh (Denis), Turlogh (Terrence), Felim (Felix).

It is useful to reflect on this question: What precisely is a given person's name? A society in Dublin recently called upon its members to use 'the Irish version of their names'. Surely a name is a name and cannot have versions? In the Middle Ages learned people and Church dignitaries used their vernacular names for day-to-day colloquy but for formal or solemn occasions used a Latin variant. But in law today it seems a person's name is that appearing on his State birth certificate. Owing to the bother and disorganisation often attending a birth, the name intended occasionally appears on the certificate ludicrously garbled, often entered by a careless doctor or illiterate midwife. This sort of error could have serious consequences. If a generous testator left a fortune to a person cited by his reputed, but officially incorrect, name, he might have trouble getting paid. But this is a comparatively recent hazard. Up to some twenty years ago, persons applying for the old age pension had trouble in establishing that they had in fact reached the age of 70, because the compulsory registration of births was not yet at that time 70 years in force. Baptismal and other parish records did not do much to help. A hair-raising recollection of the Night of the Big Wind was sometimes pressed into service.

Questions, their pleasures and perils For years I was in the habit of jumping up in great annoyance and switching off the radio when Question Time was announced from Dublin. I found the stupidity and obtuseness of most of the compet.i.tors very bad for my nerves.

Compere: Number 4, which is the longer, a yard or a league? (Big pause.) No. Four: A yard. (Gong!) All the same, all sorts of quiz programmes are still very popular, not only with many radio stations but also as part of stage shows. The Q and A procedure seems to be a deep-seated human neurosis. Practically nothing else goes on in the courts and, of course, we have Question Time in the Dil itself. Most of us learnt Christian Doctrine through the catechistical method. In regard to that, let me issue a warning. More than once I have heard a heated argument in progress when one of the contestants bellows in a towering rage: 'You see nothing wrong with it? You think it's all right, what? Well if you'd read your penny Catechism, you'd find something different there about it.' I am told that the penny Catechism nowadays costs one shilling and threepence.

Today I am tempted to conduct a small quiz of my own.

Laying Traps.

The ideal quiz would contain commonplace questions to which the answer is obvious yet wrong. Here is one: Q. Before the buses were introduced in Dublin, did the trams go up Grafton Street?

A. Not at all.

But indeed and they did. They left College Green, went up Grafton Street and turned left into Na.s.sau Street.

Q. In what county is the city of Waterford?

A. County Waterford, or course.

No. The Ferrybank part of the city is in Kilkenny. And here is a question which very few people could answer correctly and to which practically everybody would give a No: Q. Was there or is there anybody who had a Dublin street or road named after him in his own lifetime?

There was and, happily, is. In Donnybrook there is a thoroughfare of good, red-brick dwellinghouses named Brendan Road. When the brave Batt O'Connor was not busy with operations against the British, he was pursuing his own business as builder and in fact built this whole road. Presumably he named it just as his son Brendan was born, so that it can truthfully be said that Mr Brendan O'Connor, one of the most distinguished architects at present in practice in Dublin, had a public thoroughfare named after him in his native city when he was an infant!

And that is a quare one.

Some Money-Makers.

There are a great number of questions on which the interrogator can very safely lay small bets and which depend on the principle that n.o.body looks at the most familiar objects which are in use and on view every day. How many chicks has the hen on the Irish penny, for instance? But here is one upon which I have made many frugal shillings myself and not once have I got a publican to answer it. If it is asked in a pub, there must be a preliminary warning that the respondent must keep his back to the shelves: Q. Two firms named respectively Jameson and Power make whiskey. About the centre of the label in each case, two words appear in very large type. The second word is Irish. What is the word before it?

Naturally, there will be a great variety in the answers and the wildest guesses will come from publicans, who have been looking at the bottles in question all their lives. Among the usual words are Irish, Pure, Liqueur, Superfine, Potstill, Best, Guaranteed and Barley. They are all wrong, of course. The word is Dublin.

On the usual packet of Player's Navy Cut cigarettes, are there any ships shown? If so, how many? Is there any land visible on the seascape? Is there a lighthouse? Is there a name on the cap of the bearded sailor and, if so, what name? I won't offend the reader by answering questions so easy.

Here is something of a different kind again, but to be done only in a house where there is a telephone.

You casually announce that you have memorised the entire telephone directory. You will be told, no doubt politely, that you are a liar.

With the Phone Book.

Very well, you say to some individual, get pencil and paper and write down absolutely any four numbers that come into your head. Don't let me see them. Here, I'll sit over here as far as possible away from you. Have you written the four figures? Good. Now multiply that four-figure number by 9. Have you got a result? Excellent. Now add the figures of the result. Now you have another number as a result of that addition? Right, now get the telephone directory.

You pause here, light a cigarette and tell him to get the page in the directory which bears his last number. If, say, it's page 31, count down the telephone numbers till you reach number 31. You then tell him the telephone number and the name and address of the subscriber.

Explanation: no matter what four numbers he starts with, if he does what he is instructed to do above, the answer will be 9, 18, 27, or 36. You have, of course, memorised the appropriate entries on those pages. It is easy to see from afar from turn-over of pages which page he is at but it is dangerous to do the job more than twice because the same final number can keep turning up, no matter what the original four were. Try it!

The great danger of newspapers.

What sort of revolution do we like nowadays in this country? Do we like any, or are we tired of that game? Is it a played-out fancy? Worse is it uneconomic?

It may be the heat but various foreign newspapers in front of me have a strange unanimity. Lurid headlines of vast size tell us what we do not wish to hear and what a lot of us do not really understand. CASTRO GRABS ALL, one headline screams. I need hardly stress the fact that there is comment in the use of the word GRABS. It tells readers that Castro is a barbarian and an outlaw. Is he? The matter following is so confused that it gives me no answer. There are mentions of ill-defined 'oil empires'. There is no news as to who owns or controls them, apart from anonymous company t.i.tles.

In ill-considered small type the reader is told that for the future petrol is going to be either far dearer or far cheaper. Oil fuel for industry or domestic heating and cooking will be un.o.btainable.

More Trouble.

Another paper, quite unrelated, roars VENEZUELA CHALLENGES THE US. A smaller line reads 'Arrest of Four Marines'. The body of the report contains the disclosure that the men concerned were drunk and disorderly and had a.s.saulted a taxi-driver.

Still another paper trumpets the fact that serious trouble, very likely of a military or aerial character, may be expected as between the US and Canada. The pie presented here is a bit mixed. The US insists on dominating the North American land-ma.s.s and objects to protests made by Canadian politicians that they are 'British'. These men have been told by persons of rather indeterminate rank and authority that all that stuff is obsolete and that the continent must be defended integrally. Certain Canadians, no matter how aware of the strategic situation, have replied by singing 'G.o.d Save the Queen'.

Keeping pace with this almost comic ill-humour is the grunting and growling as between Khrushchev and what he calls the West. Mentions of the use of nuclear weapons have become as commonplace in this sort of discussion as the bottom of the garden where the praties grow.

The Poles are re-arming, aided by substantial aid from the US. Several other enslaved countries in Eastern Europe are going to rise simultaneously against their Red masters. Germany is getting ready to resume the role (and always with the consent and a.s.sistance of the British) of a mighty military power in Europe. Thousands of young Germans are being trained in Britain by the RAF. That soldier's best friend, his rifle, is obsolete. A new machine, far lighter and smaller, is replacing it. It discharges a nuclear missile which can kill in one go a platoon of soldiers or knock out the most modern tank. It can knock down a four-storey house. An organised convergence of them could demolish a medium-sized city and kill everybody in it.

The Black and Tans, who were earnest enough in their endeavours, seem very small stuff compared with this. Indeed, the end of the world, as set forth in the Bible, could justly be said to have been considerably underwritten. Is it all true, or even half true?

Let's Face Facts.

Personally, I like to think that most of it is morbid fantasy. It is also modern fantasy and is made possible by comparatively recent advances in the sciences of communication. The primitive newspapers were most unattractive in appearance, hard to read, and usually a few weeks old in reporting events which had occurred in (say) China several months before. n.o.body paid any serious attention to newspapers in the centuries I have in mind. Other organs accessible even to illiterates such as sound radio, TV and the cinema, were yet to come, and still a long way off. An approach to humanity in the ma.s.s was not possible. Crude admonitions such as publicly hanging a man for stealing a sheep were accepted as the best that could be done. Perhaps indeed it was, for democracy had not been heard of and most men had no fundamental rights.

All arguments about the last war apart, I believe Hitler was a lunatic. I believe his astonishing grip on the German and other people was due mainly to the radio. His shrieking was compulsive, and many a time I listened to him myself. His contagion was infective.

But how many of the other lies and fancies I have briefly mentioned above are due to newspapers? I feel the true answer is: Not a few. Reckless newspapers in search of circulation and notoriety can incense bodies of readers to the point of causing a war which would not otherwise, from economic reasons, happen at all.

I think that the record of the Press of this country is clean enough, though it may be mainly because we are a small country and our capacity for originating mischief is small. Still, I think the point I have been trying to make is worth making.

Let's talk of influenza.

An old story invented in America concerned a young lady who had to enter hospital for an operation. When she emerged she told all her friends about it and even some strangers. Naturally they were all sympathetic. But she went on talking about this operation all her life, ever embroidering the recital. Eventually she changed even the nature of the ailment for which the operation had been performed. Apparently she could talk of nothing else and in her old age she had the distinction of being the world champion at the art of emptying a room; people slunk away the moment she appeared.

Well, I have had influenza. Why should I not talk about it this once?

The doctor I called when I noticed my soaring temperature first checked that it was nothing really serious such as pneumonia, and said I had influenza.

'I thought,' I said, 'that the main symptoms of that disorder, fever apart, were a sore throat and muscular aches.'

'Ah, no,' he said, 'that thing takes many forms and there is a lot of it knocking around just now.'

That didn't sound very satisfactory. Happily I have a few medical books and decided to investigate this question myself.

What Is Influenza?.

I have discovered many surprising things. Doctors and scientists have done much research on it during the last 80 years and have discovered very little that is helpful. The name, based on an Italian phrase, was invented by a man named Huxham in 1743 but there is some evidence that the disease is probably as old as man himself. An illness described by Theocrites in 412 BC has been identified by modern commentators as influenza. It is not generally a dangerous affliction and usually does not last long but there is real danger in complications, by no means rare, such as bronchitis and pneumonia.

Influenza is an acute infectious respiratory disease caused by a filtrable virus. It can enter only via the throat. If this virus in solution were injected into any other part of the body, the heroic volunteer would not get the disease. Scientists DID discover that this virus took two forms, which they dubbed A and B. Apparently both forms are equally bad for you.

What did my own doctor do for me? Nothing at all except tell me to stay in bed. That brings us to another astonishing fact. There is no specific treatment for the virus. Those modern 'wonder-drugs' such as the sulfonamides, pencillin and streptomycin have no effect whatever on this bug.

How does one become infected? Doctors are not sure even about that, though they guess that if one is physically near an infected person, particularly one who is sneezing, the air will be filled with the virus. They also mention the danger of dirty, ill-ventilated rooms or halls (this is probably oblique advice to keep out of the pubs!). Attempts have been made to sterilise the atmosphere in public places but that seems to have been ineffective also. No wonder this malady has been called 'the last of the unconquered scourges'.

The incidence and location of outbreaks is also unpredictable. A severe outbreak is usually fairly localised and is called an epidemic. A pandemic could cover the whole world. Many still alive will remember the pandemic of 1918, which spread over the whole northern hemisphere, killing far more people than lost their lives in the world war then ending. The carnage of war and endemic malnutrition may have had a say in that tragedy or was it 'flu at all?

But There Is Hope.

But the picture is not entirely black. Prophylactic inoculation has been evolved, though again there is no sure knowledge of the duration of the protection the serum affords. I must say I never heard of anybody who sought such injection, though it is only commonsense in a time of epidemic. Can it be that many people do not fear influenza since it is not very painful and really entails a rest in bed for a week?

I almost forgot to mention another real peril of this disease. There is every possibility that a pregnant woman who gets it will have a miscarriage, so that infected people who make no effort to isolate themselves are really public enemies.

Let me conclude with another odd fact. Pigs are also subject to influenza. The books say that the pig virus is not transmissible to humans. I wonder how true that is?

It would surely be a nice how-do-you-do if, after your plate of rashers and sausages in the morning, your temperature shot up to F. 104 and the muscular aches set in.

It would be nice to think that there is really no such thing as influenza and that it is merely a word widely used by doctors when they cannot make out exactly what is wrong with the sick person. But that is a foolish optimism. For the future I'll stick to eggs. Mr Porker can stay away.

Dr Livingstone and the Dark Continent.

I hope I offend n.o.body when I reveal that I have been amused by the imperial adventure of the Irish Army into the Congo, though I admit that the newspapers have overplayed the episode so much that it is beginning to be boring. There have been hundreds of pictures of ferociously-accoutred soldiers kissing goodbye to the wife and babes, reminiscent of Tommy Atkins leaving for the 1914 war. When the 32nd battalion paraded in O'Connell Street, Dublin, tens of thousands lined the route on each side, reminding me of nothing less than the funeral of Michael Collins, though this illusion was a bit spoilt by the pipe band, which also departed for the Congo.

The odd thing is that those green troops, probably not one of whom has ever known combat, have no clear idea of what problem they are expected to solve; neither have their relatives and, for that matter, neither have I. The general notion is that Belgium has relinquished her dominion, cleared out and left the Africans to fend for themselves. As I write, they have not cleared out; thousands of Belgian soldiers are still there, armed to the teeth. Nervous whites in the area have fled to Brazzaville, which is the capital of French Equatorial Africa. Are the French to remain in Africa? Are the UN forces going to impose order on the warring African groups and will the Belgian forces shoot at UN soldiers? Let us agree that the situation is complicated and leave it at that.

Some Facts.