GUBU

GUBU
An Irish woman's social, political and domestic commentary

Tuesday, August 26, 2003

David Kelly and the hunt for the scapegoat

Make no mistake: as far as I'm concerned the fault for this fiasco lies at the door of one Alastair Campbell and no one else. He deliberately created this huge row to move the headlines away from the fact that the government clearly had grossly exagerrated the threat from Saddam so the boys could have their little war.

However, John Waters of the Irish Times, whom I generally consider to be completely off his head, does raise an interesting point.

The convention within journalism is that a source must be protected at all costs; otherwise whistle blowers could not come forward in confidence. Yet, there was a general frenzy to discover Gilligan's source and a willingness to publish Kelly's name with no regard for his protection. So why exclusively blame the government for the his suicide? The media participated in the game also.

I suppose the flaw in this analysis is that once the government themselves knew who the source was, nothing more was to be achieved by the press in protecting Kelly. They could only be condemned if the government didn't know who the source was and only discovered it through the media. But at the very least, maybe there is a case to say that the media en masse should have laid off Kelly. Hmmmm.

posted by Sarah | 16:05 0 comments

Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Murder or tragedy?

A son arrives at his parents house in rural Roscommon and finds his parents shot dead. Its immediately clear that his father shot his mother and then himself. A murder and a suicide. And a tragedy. Today, Women's Aid criticised elements of the media for describing the incident in Roscommon as a "tragic domestic incident". They say its a murder. And most female victims of murder are killed by their husbands/partners/boyfriends/ex's. So when does a murder become a tragic domestic incident?

In contrast, also on Sunday a guy is shot in a pub in Dublin. The descriptions used in the media to describe this are: execution, murder, gunned down, and assasinated. These are dramatic phrases depicting a criminal act committed by an evil force. But 'tragic domestic incident' indicates an accident, an Act of God, a terrible mistake. And yet, the wife was murdered by her husband. Of that there is no doubt. Yet nowhere will you read that the husband 'gunned down' or 'executed' his wife before turning the gun on himself.

I believe that the Roscommon incident was a tragedy, but I think its fair to ask why the murder of a wife is treated in a sympathetic, delicate manner and the murder of a man in a pub is dramatised.

posted by Sarah | 14:06 0 comments

Monday, August 18, 2003

Outage in the US

Call me old fashioned, but I always thought that governments were elected and taxes were paid so that basic public services could be provided. Public transport, water, electricity. Services like these should not be expected to make a profit. The profit to society will not appear on any balance sheet but by the creation of an environment in which business and personal lives can prosper.

Surely the inability of the US to provide adequate electricity supplies to its citizens is all the evidence one needs to rethink privatisation ( as if Britain's train system hadn't told us that already). Through financial disaster in CA and techonological on the west coast, it is now clear that privatisation is a disaster.

And here in Ireland we propose to copy these disasters. From the ESB to the buses, not to mention the sneaky goings on in the VHI (premium increases despite increased profits), governments are obsessed with privatisation because they get handy short term windfalls for the Exchequer and the management make a fortune on the buy outs. What eejits are writing the contracts for the management so that they are personally financially incentivised to go private?

posted by Sarah | 15:00 0 comments

Tuesday, August 12, 2003

Turning financial rape to good use

You know how good citizens like myself got completely screwed by buying shares in Telecom Eireann? We bought the shares. I put them to one side to happily wait out the recession. Then Tony O'Reilly got to buy them for half nothing. Then he reorganised the debt to give himself a big dividend but I just lost a load of money.

And to make it worse every quarter I get this pathetic dividend cheque from Vodafone for about 60c which costs me 40c and a load of hassle to lodge in the bank so I never do so Vodafone make stacks of money from the tens of thousands like me who just throw the cheques in the bin. Anyway, finally you can do something good!

If you sign the back of the cheque, you can post it to GOAL, P.O. Box 19, Dun Laoghaire, Co.Dublin. They collect all the cheques they can and get the money. A good deed I think.

No word on the Soleros yet. I'll have to ring them.

posted by Sarah | 14:40 0 comments

Tuesday, August 05, 2003

More on Michael Neary

I remember clearly the case which O'Toole mentions below. Further, I've been reading about Michael Neary for years but nothing was done about him until one brave woman took him to the High Court and they found against him. The Medical Council didn't bar him, until AFTER the court case even tho' they had all the facts and files (except for the 30 which went 'missing') for the past 4 years.

I firmly believe that a case like this, where the consultant was unnecessarily removing the wombs of women, could only happen in the case of obstetrics and I am also convinced that procedures and operations of a lesser but no less unnecessary nature are still taking place on a regular occurrence today.

Every single day women in maternity hospitals are subjected to painful procedures, the most common being the episiotomy, not to mention the high rate of caesarians, and are sent home with major wounds and complications. Before they even get a chance to query these operations they are being told that they should be grateful to the doctors who perform them. Most often they are informed that the doctor just saved their baby's life, which in most cases simply isn't true, or if it is, the emergency arose because a series of other unnecessary interventions intefered with the labour to the extent that the complication could only be managed in an aggressive surgical manner. Its only in this kind of culture that a doctor could perform the hysterectomies and get away with it. In no other area of medicine could this take place.

The women's own instincts are dismissed and the doctors are revered. In the Neary case, he was operating away for 20 years and when the nuns handed the hospital over to the State they demanded a written agreement that no sterilisations would be performed - while under their noses he was sterilising women and claiming credit for it!

Talk to any woman who has had birth in a maternity hospital with an active labour management system and you'll hear her casually discuss the extensive list of 'complications' which arose which meant that the doctor 'had to' perform some procedure or other. The blissful ignorance and subsequent defensiveness they assume if challenged is to my mind, quite extraordinary. Would any man allow himself to be unnecessarily cut? No way! And yet women who refuse to educate themselves and write out cheques to private consultants whom they revere are the very ones who maintain the God culture of the obstetrician. Because they have placed so much faith and so much money in them, and because they can't bring themselves to admit that maybe the year they spent after birth fighting infections and enduring painful sex due to their episiotomy was utterly pointless, they attack anyone who questions the medicalisation of childbirth. Isn't it incredible that the victims of the day to day butchery that goes on are the champions of the butchers themselves?

This point is most vividly illustrated by the fact that when the Neary was first suspended, thousands of women in Drogheda actually marched in his defence!! Denial, as they say, is most certainly not just a river in Egypt.

posted by Sarah | 11:51 0 comments

Michael Neary and butchering women

I'm pasting in the entirety of Fintan O'Toole's column today in case you can't get the IT online.

The ugly politics of the womb

Twenty years ago, while the politics of the womb were dominating public debate in Ireland, Sheila Hodgers went into Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, writes Fintan O'Toole

Sheila lived in Dundalk with her husband, Brendan. They had two daughters, aged eight and seven. They were considering trying for a third child when Sheila discovered a lump on her breast. After a mastectomy, however, she got better. With the help of cytotoxic drugs, her cancer was kept at bay.

Until, that is, she became pregnant. Her medication was stopped, for fear that it would harm the foetus in her womb. She developed severe lumbar pain, indicating a tumour on her back. But this could not be fully confirmed because the hospital would not take an X-ray.

Brendan Hodgers asked that a Caesarean section be performed on his wife, so that she could return to her cancer treatment immediately. The request was refused. She was admitted to Our Lady of Lourdes in agony. As Brendan Hodgers subsequently recalled: "She was literally screaming at this stage. I could hear her from the front door of the hospital, and she was in a ward on the fourth floor."

Sheila Hodgers was eventually moved to the maternity ward. On March 16th, 1983, she went into labour two months prematurely and was delivered of a baby girl the next day. The child died almost immediately after birth. Mrs Hodgers died two days later. She had tumours on her neck, spine and legs.

Padraig Yeates wrote an account of her story in The Irish Times in September 1983. It didn't matter. A few days later the country voted, by a two-to-one majority, to make Ireland an abortion-free zone. The Bishop of Raphoe, Dr Seamus Hegarty, had claimed in August 1983: "A democratically taken decision to outlaw abortion in Ireland would be a shining example to the rest of the world", and a majority of voters clearly agreed with him.

We now know that at the very time that Sheila Hodgers was being crucified on the cross of Ireland's exemplary protection of the unborn, the obstetrician Michael Neary, in the same department of the same hospital where she suffered and died, was deciding that the future children of many of the women entrusted to his care would remain forever unborn. He was, without consent or proper reason, taking out their perfectly healthy wombs.

We may never know why Michael Neary acted as he did or what dark obsessions made him such a danger to women. But such knowledge, in any event, would be largely useless. We can never predict or even fully understand such behaviour.

What we should be able to understand is why Neary was not stopped, why grievous bodily harm could be inflicted on so many women for so long. And in order to do that we have to acknowledge the extent to which a narrow obsession with abortion distorted medical ethics to the point where the real women disappeared.

Our Lady of Lourdes was, from 1939 until April 1997, a private Catholic hospital, run by the Medical Missionaries of Mary.

Consultants employed there had to sign contracts agreeing to abide by Catholic ethics. These contracts were in the ultimate control of the local bishop, in this case the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All-Ireland. The ethical standards were largely concerned with the control of women's bodies: no abortion, no sterilisation, no support for artificial contraception.

Placing consultants in this God-like position had huge consequences for patients. Our Lady of Lourdes was in the forefront of Catholic obstetric practice, including the routine use of symphysiotomy, the permanent widening of the pelvis.

This horrible operation, carried out for largely religious reasons (the fear that repeated Caesarean sections would lead women to use contraception), has left hundreds of women with back pain, incontinence and mobility problems. In Our Lady of Lourdes the operation was performed 348 times between 1950 and 1983. Informed consent was seldom an issue.

While mothers were suffering for the cause of making Ireland a shining example to the world, gross hypocrisy surrounded the veneer of ethics. Between 1971 and 1988 there were more than 50 complaints of sexual assault on boys and young men against a single consultant - not Michael Neary - at Our Lady of Lourdes.

And Michael Neary was removing the wombs of 5 per cent of his patients. The significance of this figure can be gauged by comparing it to a 10-year study of two hospitals in Canada. Neary's rate of Caesarean hysterectomy was 50 per thousand women. The Canadian hospitals had a combined rate of 0.4 per thousand.

In all of this we see the consequences of deciding that women do not have a right to control their own bodies. So long as we hold up that control as a shining example to the world, so long will we remain in a State where, if grotesque hypocrisy were a tradable commodity, our Gross National Product would still be booming.

posted by Sarah | 11:15 0 comments