Myles Away From Dublin Part 10

Could you perhaps buy a whole collection of things in total worth 300? Without hesitation I would say NO. It is all very well to lay out tenpence on a quarter pound of Marie biscuits, 3d on a bar of chocolate and one and eightpence on postage stamps.

Perfecting such transactions takes time, and that 24 hours can be a viciously narrow term. Even if it wasn't you would lose count.

In a last desperate plunge, when in a state of collapse from fatigue and worry, you would probably buy a radiogram, bringing your grand total to 315, with the taxi to pay on top of that.

My own choice in a situation of this kind is automatic. Give me, I say, what I am well used to by now and am no longer terribly afraid of. I mean poverty.

The night that I nearly died Here you are Hilaire Belloc wrote many years ago twenty-one years of age and you've never written a dictionary. Yes, I suppose that shows a certain laziness, a want of enterprise. But let me myself make a comparable but perhaps more serious complaint. Here you are, I say, now around 50 years of age and you've never had a heart attack!

Does such a situation call for ... shame? The reader must decide that question for himself but most doctors find that a heart attack is not the result of organic disease or an actual cardiac lesion but due to physical stress to the heart-owner making unreasonable and sustained demands on his most precious of physical machines. Such a person is usually far more fastidious as to the care of his stomach, which is really a crude sort of a bag and fairly well able to put up with abuse; and even when it does go on strike, its owner may not feel very well but at least his life is not in danger. The heart is a different and much more delicate matter.

Needless to say, I am not raising this issue from the academic or literary standpoint. It is prompted by an alarming experience of my own dating back to a few weeks ago, and I might be doing somebody a service by giving some brief account of it here.

One night, feeling a bit tired, I decided to go to bed early and by ten p.m. was snugly ensconced in my luxurious pallet with that most cheerful of sleeping inducements, i.e. a good book. I was alone in the house but felt restful and at peace. Just what happened next it is not easy to say. I think I was leaning outwards to extinguish a cigarette in a bedside ashtray. Apparently in the middle of doing so I pa.s.sed out and fell bodily out of bed on to the floor on my face. When my be-na-tee came home later, she found me thus unconscious in a heap, the region of my right eye and ear now turning black from the contusion of the fall.

Frantic telephone calls to a number of local doctors brought no result, though the time was perhaps 11.30 p.m. and not really late. Eventually a man was contacted comparatively far away and he came promptly.

'A ma.s.sive coronary, I'm afraid,' he said, after a brief examination. 'We must get an ambulance at once.'

This was done and, attired in pyjamas and dressing gown, I came bleakly back to life in a hospital a considerable distance outside Dublin. Curiously, the doctor I found confronting me wore no white coat and no stethoscope protruded from any pocket. Also, I found it hard to understand what he was saying. But as my mind gradually sharpened, the truth dawned on me. He was a priest and he was administering the last rites.

Dear reader, it can be a scaring experience.

When the doctors, three of them at least, got to work, they were not long in coming to the common conclusion that I had, in fact, had no heart attack, coronary or otherwise. What then had happened? Well, first, there had been some sort of kidney failure or infection. This in turn led to contamination of the blood, and the sudden pa.s.s-out exploit was due to the supply of the wrong sort of blood to the brain.

After some days I managed to arrange a transfer to a better-organised and more convenient hospital, and it is from there I send these notes. I now feel fine but the doctor says that, after innumerable tests of it, there is an alien substance in my blood-stream. The immediate problem is to find out what is causing it. And I have been given to understand that such a problem is no push-over joke. And if I leave hospital without knowing the remedy, I am liable to another similar collapse. I seem to be in a mess that is not a little bit ridiculous.

It is commonly agreed that the man who talks about his illness (or more usually his operation) is a fearful bore. Well, I honestly claim that what I have written here is useful. Why is that? It happens that I am a member of The Voluntary Health Insurance Board, whose address is 9 South Leinster Street, Dublin 2. The Board will send any applicant a brochure explaining its activities but they may be very briefly summarised as follows: a client may buy annually, according to his means and needs, a varying number of units covering (a) accommodation in hospital, and (b) medical attendance; no benefit is payable unless in respect of expenses incurred within a hospital.

I will conclude by saying, testily, that any decent, ordinary person who is not a member of this organisation is an improvident fool!

Getting well is plenty of trouble My disclosure last week on The Night That I Nearly Died (absolutely genuine) brought no telegrams of sympathy and encouragement and I did not notice any flowers or wreaths arriving on the offchance of a funeral. Of course my report was preliminary and incomplete and I must now be careful to avoid becoming the cla.s.sic nuisance who bores everybody he meets to tears with a long detailed story of his operation (in my case, operations).

Yet one, em ... incident I absolutely insist on recounting, giving my reason for doing so afterwards. Ever hear the word biopsy? In meaning it could be said to be the opposite of autopsy, which is the examination of specimens from the body after death. With a biopsy you want for examination a bit of a man's body while he is still alive, in my case a specimen of my kidney tissue.

How is this got? Easy, man. The surgeon drives a thing (which I haven't seen) known in the trade as a 'needle' into the patient's back, far in until it reaches and penetrates his kidney. That the word 'needle' is misleading is plain enough when I reveal that it is hollow so that it can extract a specimen of the kidney tissue and so, if plain language be sought, it should not be a needle but a neat dagger.

A local anaesthetic is used for this job. I felt the little p.r.i.c.k betokening the entry of the anaesthetic fluid but almost immediately, before that fluid had time to act, I felt the 'needle' being rammed in through my sensitive, n.o.ble flesh. Inward and onward, and boys-a-dear, I can certify that no word in print could describe what I went through or, indeed, what went through me. I was flabbergasted to be told afterwards when back in bed in a state of collapse that the mastermind of a surgeon had in fact 'missed the kidney'. My miraculous feat of endurance had all been for nothing.

And what is my reason for revealing that extraordinary occurrence here? Just to ask why it should be allowed to happen in a closed and private operating room rather than (in the best traditions of cine-variety) on the stage of the Ritz, Carlow. Surely some magician has already sawn a woman in half there?

Well, I quickly left that hospital and went home before I heard somebody say, 'Ah well, we'll have another try.' How am I now? I feel quite well, can eat my dinner like a man, but clinically I might be still at death's door. Somehow, I feel there is an obligation on me to DO SOMETHING, though I'm not certain what. I have been ill. Very well. Is it not the obvious thing to reconcile myself to a period of convalescence, like Mr Harold Macmillan? But that is easier said than done. I cannot remember ever having been convalescent before, and I find the very word awkward to spell.

I know that nowadays it does not mean a bath-chair, a nurse, a diet of beef tea and gruel. (That would just make me sick.) No, our modern idea is brighter, bigger, more courageous. Even that 'long sea voyage' of Queen Victoria's day is out of favour but how about a recuperative trip to the United States?

Well, here we have to pause. As I write two distinguished Irishmen have recently returned from the United States the Editor of this newspaper, and our Taoiseach, Mr Sean Lema.s.s. I think a lot depends on the capacity in which you go to the States, perhaps more on the capacity in which you are received.

To judge from his despatches home, our Editor refused to be harried and probably was never in a helicopter in his life, no more than I was. He was looking around with astute observation and talking only to the people who interested him. But Lema.s.s, if the radio accounts can be trusted, was being boiled, stewed, grilled, roasted and filleted for about 18 hours a day, compelled to make a great number of solemn speeches and eat countless dinners.

He was getting a treatment stepped up in intensity to twice what President Kennedy got in this country and two days and nights of that sort of thing would KILL myself. Nothing would entice me to visit the States.

But where else is there to go where else is there that is safe? Killarney is always there, by kind permission of the Germans, but it is always raining there. All the seaside resorts are locked up and gloomy at this time of the year. Even a winter trip to London would entail the risk of getting mixed up in some awful scandal. And the south of France is out because I can't speak the sort of French the people there can understand, and anyway I can't play cards.

The last resort (no pun!) seems to be Dublin: get digs there for ten days or so and make day trips to great centres of art and enterprise such as Guinness's Brewery, the Galleries, the Library, the Museum, the Esso Petroleum works, the Gasometer and ... well ... the most famous of the hospitals.

At one of them I might even be privileged (provided I looked sufficiently like a rubber-necking American) to be a witness at a biopsy operation. Heavens, what strange bliss that would be!

Risks we take on Sunday morning A peculiarity of the Catholic religion is that Sunday morning congregations show a reluctance to disperse. Could it be a weakness for prying into other people's prosperity or the lack of it as exhibited in their Sunday morning exhibition of themselves in their best attempt at dress? Or could it be a thirst for scandalous gossip?

A forlorn curiosity about what was the outcome of that coursing match held the previous day ten miles away? No, I think this tendency to dawdle is innocent, a sort of genial weekly pause on life's journey, an opportunity to ask some fellow-dawdler how his wife is keeping. (Yes, that's the phrase as if his wife was some sort of a mummy, kept presentable by preservatives but liable to go bad at any moment!) Yet, innocent though the pause be, it can be dangerous or to use a rather milder word alarming. It happened myself a few Sundays ago, and I cannot do better than set down in terse language what exactly happened, with no flourishes or hyperbole. The dead honest truth can be more terrifying than anything connected with Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

I was just standing there, looking around me. For the moment I hadn't a care in the world, though a very dirty letter from the income tax people had arrived the day before. What is Sunday morning for anyway, if not for delusions of immunity, peace, happiness ever after? Isn't a man ent.i.tled to his Sunday morning?

Another character of my own type approached. I knew him well and saw him every Sunday. He remarked that it was a lovely morning, thank G.o.d, and asked was I going to Croke Park. I told him I wasn't, that I thought people who had an interest in games should play them, not just gawk and then write angry letters to the papers. Anywhere else that uncouth answer would have started an argument but not on Sunday morning. It seems the wrong time for profitless snarling. What was the use? Some other place, perhaps, with a few pints to encourage rhetoric, some other occasion.

On this particular morning we found a large man in an expensive belted coat bearing down on us. I knew him slightly and had long put him into the mental bracket labelled TYc.o.o.n. He had a pleasant way with him. He produced cigarettes and said it was a pleasant morning and how about a drive cross-country to get a breath of fresh air. Neither myself nor my friend saw anything wrong with this. Why not indeed? Both of us knew he had a large powerful car. After a bit of a walk we found it and got in.

Let me tell this little story as it gradually stole upon us. As we got into the country, our driver-host asked us how we thought the country was making out. I personally answered that I did not pretend to know, but that I seemed to be getting bills oftener. Though a perfect gentleman, the driver seemed to be a bit unnecessarily ferocious in his conversation. Did we know what a gallon of petrol cost?

We had to say no. Did we know the duty on tobacco? We didn't. I can only say that this tour, which seemed aimless, was an occasion of non-stop indignation, with the driver's speed increasing in direct ratio to his temper.

But he slowed down to a placid 20 m.p.h. or so to ask us in a steely voice what we thought the tour of Taoiseach Lema.s.s in the United States had cost, and how many people were with him. We, ignorant of the price of petrol, did not know that either, but I was foolish enough to add that I thought it would be paid for by the State. The needle showed we were now doing 86 m.p.h. and about to enter Wicklow town.

I said I would very much like a cup of coffee and did in fact induce the host to pull up at a quiet hotel. He did in fact order a cup of coffee for me, a bottle of stout for my friend, and whispered the name of his own medicament into the ear of the waitress.

Slightly later he fired a piece of paper on the table, inviting us to have a look at that! It was a demand for 65 from the Dublin Corporation for rates on his private house.

'We are roasted first by the Leinster House crowd,' he roared, 'without any regard to the fact that we are due for another roasting by your men at City Hall.'

This remark showed myself up in the queerest att.i.tude I could ever have adopted. I scarcely believed it was myself talking. I defended the rating authority. Central taxation, I said, was a severe but nebulous impost. You didn't know what you were getting in return. Sending troops to the Congo I supposed that was fair enough but it was a remote thing.

But rates? You could see and feel the results. You had roads, footpaths, sewers, a water supply, public lighting, poor relief, mental hospitals, street signs even a system of warning against hydrogen bombs. I excelled myself almost to the point of making it uncertain whether I was right for a lift home.

I do think that we should be at least polite to the rate collector. After all, he does not strike the rate, and we should not provoke him to strike us!

Hospitals offer poor fare If a man repeats himself, you are inclined to say he is repet.i.tious. That is, if you are a mild-mannered and easy-going person. But you are more likely to say something worse than that.

But the law of charity should prevail, for there may be a good excuse for saying the same thing a second time. For example, if nothing happened after you said to a barman, 'Give me a gla.s.s of whiskey,' you would be justified in repeating yourself. I have nothing so trivial in question here today. I feel my theme touches on the supernatural, for the occurrence seems to be outside the ordinary sequence of human affairs, far beyond anything that may be expected, extraordinary to the point of being frightening apart from being physically very painful.

Readers will remember my recent articles wherein I told of a sudden illness, my journey to hospital, and my slow recovery there. It's not a polite subject for literature one's ills, tribulations and crises. Most people don't want to hear anything about them, having enough troubles of their own to get foostered about and being anxious to do nothing but mind their own business.

That's fair enough, but there might be a wider public interest involved in what I have to say the question of hoodoo, a mysterious personal curse, black magic or the secret incantations of witch-doctors. Just because we in Ireland don't live in the jungle is not to say we are free from occult and evil forces. I do not want to dismay or alarm anybody, but strange forces may be at work among us, and to be warned is to be fore-armed. Let me tell of what happened last Sat.u.r.day.

I was in good form, bright and cheerful, and made a slight trip to buy papers and also some of those pernicious things called cigarettes. To a large extent, all was right with the world. My humble purchases completed, I took a bus home, and indeed arrived at the bus-stop which was my destination. It was then Force Sinister took over.

I can't describe in immediate detail what happened. In a way, it was pleasant. A nice rosy glow seemed to come over me. I wasn't in the least bit worried or upset. I felt things were being looked after were in good hands. Indeed, I felt sort of happy.

But gradually, the image and the feeling changed. I found I was more uncertain of myself. I was in bed, but obviously not my own bed. Two men were doing something to my right leg and, unless I was mistaken, that new sensation I felt was extreme pain.

Well, time pa.s.sed and, gradually, the story was pieced together. In getting off the bus, I had stepped on a stone or something of the kind, broken my leg at the ankle, fallen, and fainted away. I will probably never know what happened directly after that. Probably some pa.s.ser-by raised the alarm and rang up for an ambulance.

The ambulance men brought me unconscious to a hospital not far away, where I was X-rayed. It was when two doctors were putting a temporary bandage (not plaster) on my leg that the light of sweet reason returned. I broke the same leg, almost at the same place, fifteen years ago, and I knew what I was in for: an initial period of extreme pain followed by a time the length of which n.o.body could foretell of complete immobilisation in a plaster cast. There is an immense difference in the time different people take for broken bones to 'knit'; on the previous occasion I had been 9 months out of action.

It is a woeful and dismal prospect, and I feel that ill-luck is not quite strong enough a term to denote this repet.i.tion of a major reverse in health. I feel I have done nothing to deserve it.

Initially, at least, it means life in hospital. No matter how considerate and kind the nurses, this is no joke. The awful bang-bang starts at six in the morning, perhaps only an hour after the patient has managed to lapse into an uneasy sleep. Hours of turmoil follow, with fuss about was.h.i.+ng and shaving and even saying prayers. For those in extreme pain it can be very trying. In fact it can be brutal.

There is one last thing which must be said, not about any particular hospital, but about them all: the food is terrible. Not personal experience alone justifies this dictum; many, many other people have been forced to the same conclusion.

The general feeling is that while hospital staffs big and small have given minute study to medicine, surgery and nursing generally, they have given hardly any attention to the extremely technical science of ma.s.s catering. No restaurant which dispensed 'hospital food' would last a week.

There is another source of intense suffering in hospital, even in a very small ward. I mean the other fiendish patient who has brought a radio in with him and insists on having this thing blazing loudly all day no matter what the condition of his fellow patients. The extraordinary thing is that hospital authorities do nothing to stop or restrain this horrible practice. In the modern hospital, of course, each bed is connected to a central radio installation, and each patient provided with headphones if he requires them.

I cannot forget what one man told me he saw happening to a fellow-patient; this unfortunate man was anointed to the lilt of 'The Blue Danube' and later died to strains of 'Smoke Gets In Your Eyes'.

I hope most of my own convalescence if we call it that will be spent at home. Radio there is completely under control, unlike myself in the use of my legs.

Mind your language!

Just imagine this situation: it is raining in torrents and on the road there is a man with a car. The car is stopped but the man has the hood up. WOULD YOU PITY HIM?

Not so simple, that question. The answer depends on the country nay, the hemisphere in which the scene is laid. If the man with the car is in the United States, then he is in a mess, for there the word hood means what we call bonnet, and obviously his engine is banjaxed. In pa.s.sing, let me record my own sense of nostalgia at mention of a car's hood.

It seems to evoke the ghost of the Model T and that fearsome thing presented by other makers in the early days the One-Man Hood. The name suggested clearly that you could put the thing up yourself quite unaided, even on a lonely country road in a rainstorm. What it did not say was that you were expected to have the personal qualities of Henry Ford himself, the great funambulist Blondin, Jack Dempsey and Houdini.

I say it seriously when I express conviction that many an owner-driver (another obsolete term) met a lonely and terrible death in the thrall of a One-Man Hood. Compared with it, single-combat with an octopus was kid's stuff. Suppose, for argument's sake, you did get the thing up. How then could you be expected to drive the car home with two broken arms and a strained spine?

That was one of the menaces our fathers faced. Could there be any connection between the word hood and hoodlum?

This subject of divergency as between the English and the American languages was touched on last week by colleague Jack Juvenal. It is an interesting theme, and one that has been studied quite a bit by inquirers at the scientific level. Let us therefore have a glance.

At the time of the first verified white migration to America, it was a departure to the other side of the world.

The English language which emigrants from this part of the world brought with them became petrified, and many words and phrases still commonly in use in the States, by us regarded as American even Hollywood slang, were genuine English in use in Shakespeare's day. Such was, for instance, the phrase 'I guess', and genuinely ancient are such words as flap-jack, jeans, cesspool, greenhorn, bay-window, stock (meaning cattle) and fall (in the sense of autumn).

But the subject is complicated because the immigration of English speakers from Britain was followed by other immigrations from France, Germany and Holland, and all those people brought their linguistic furniture with them. But everybody freshly arriving in the New World was confronted with plants and animals that he had never heard of and was forced to adopt rough versions of Indian words: whence we have opossum, racc.o.o.n, woodchuck, moccasin and even tapioca.

But perhaps the most important factor in this situation of lingual flux was the fact that the English language is uniquely a.n.a.lytic (as distinct from being inflected like many European tongues indeed, it has little more than the pathetic remnant of who, whom and whose) and it is infinitely versatile and twistable. Any foreigner can master what is called pidgin English in a few weeks, and to a large extent every man is ent.i.tled to make his own English.

In addition to that, the modern America is infinitely resourceful and even witty in inventing new words. We, pompously running to Greek, talk of the cinema but the Yank, far more adequately, talks of the movies. We have no equivalent of such words as dawnburster, rubberneck, bootlegger, triggerman, convertible and sedan (cars), fall-guy, lame-duck, hoopla, s...o...b..z, tammany, or even shaymus (meaning an Irishman). Even in serious, objective writing, Americans make very little distinction between slang and respectable improvisation in language. 'A.B.,' you may read in a State doc.u.ment, 'seemed a good guy but he was yellow.' At least n.o.body is in any doubt about the meaning of that. And there really isn't much difference between a trolley and a tram, or a lift and an elevator.

I feel printers and also careless writers have a lot to do with the formation of language. In Dublin there is a well-known amateur boxer who, though I believe of Irish birth, has a German name. I cannot say for certain what that name is, or what to call him in conversation. In countless newspaper articles he has been called (within the same article) Tiedt and Teidt.

I know enough German to be sure that IE has the sound of EE in the English 'seed' and that EI has the sound of the English word EYE. Therefore our boxer is either Mr t.i.tE or Mr TEET.

But where does it end? For weeks in this very newspaper Richard Lea has been calling certain cows FRIESIANS. In fact they are FREISIANS, and on this occasion we can forget the p.r.o.nunciation.

Upbringing, uplift, uproar As I write these lines the morning paper records that on the previous day in the Dil a Government deputy had complained that Mr Dillon had called Government backbenchers 'gutties'. In return he said that deputies in the opposite side of the House were nothing only a lot of 'plucked roosters'.

If any of the rest of us had a choice, I think most would elect to be a gutty, however much the term lacks precision. He may be badly dressed, loud and sometimes profane of language, but you no longer find him standing miserably at street corners. Indeed, the cornerboy is now largely obsolete as a social type.

The gutty is usually found indoors, sheltering behind a pint, and even looking sourly at television. A plucked rooster does not seem to have anything better to look forward to than the oven.

The question is, however should dialogue of that kind take place in the Dil at all? It is a deliberative a.s.sembly, concerned with the quiet and orderly presentation of views on important public issues, arrived at by members after objective cogitation, a.s.sisted perhaps by research in the library. The Standing Orders which guide the Chair make no allowances for interruptions, bellowed shouting, sneers, challenges or showers of personal abuse.

Needless to say, fisticuffs or gunplay (not unknown in similar other a.s.semblies abroad) is absolutely out of order. Sometimes but not too often a Dil deputy is 'named' for disorderly conduct, which means that there and then he has to leave the Chamber.

For all we know he may say to himself, 'Aw to h.e.l.l with it, I'll go down to the bar and have a drink and maybe I can contact a few of the lads and get a game of poker going in a committee room.'

n.o.ble rhetoric of the kind used by Burke and Grattan has fallen into completed disuse, very likely because Dil deputies are quite incapable of it, and the only man who attempts old-style oratory, with variations of pitch and a wealth of florid gesture, is James Dillon, who can be a fascinating and impressive speaker and get punches home without appearing to be dealing in dirt at all.

But debates on the 212 per cent turnover tax were occasions of terrible scolding and scalding, with abuse and insults hurled readily across the floor with the greatest of freedom and violence. What are we to think of this? Must we conclude that many of the deputies are genuine gutties in upbringing, and that they are in their natural element in rows blistering with recrimination and threats?

The daily papers give such scenes great prominence and 'play' because readers demand a verbatim account of anything resembling a 'heave' or 'barney' at Leinster House. Usually however the report is accompanied by an austere editorial paternally reproving the main performers and denouncing such goings-on as 'disedifying', sometimes even 'disgraceful'. They deplore affronts to the dignity of parliament and moan of lapses in ordinary manners. Is that a parade of hypocrisy?

It is certainly not a realistic att.i.tude in the world of today, when proceedings in any parliament minutely affect the lives of everybody. Deputies who betray bad temper at least give evidence that they understand what is under discussion and have strong feelings on the subject.

Their manner of speaking their minds may sometimes be unfortunate but surely lively debate is better than droning monologues and the featureless drool one has come to a.s.sociate with the House of Lords at Westminster?

And is it reasonable to expect polish, reticence and delicate debating punctilio from a House that is largely composed of farmers, not a few of whom have handled the gun as well as the plough? Hardly. That is Ireland.

What one should rightly deplore in those 'exchanges' is the almost total lack of wit. If you call me a gouger, I'll call you a bowsie but where does that get either of us? Too much of that sort of wordplay and both of us will come to be regarded by those present as bores who carry on our shoulders completely empty heads, people quite unfitted to be deputies. The fact is, of course, that prospective deputies are picked out at election times for their personal popularity in their home districts, for a known att.i.tude of helpfulness, or indeed a man could command wide admiration for his skill with a fis.h.i.+ng rod, or putting a horse at a fence.

The last quality considered is his potential as a parliamentarian, and in fact his ability to expertly judge public issues need not be called in question at all; under the party system he is just a vote, and undertakes to do as he is told.

A curiosity about Leinster House is the public gallery. It is cut off from the Chamber below by a screen of fine-mesh steel netting, no doubt giving some visitors the impression that they are beholding and hearing a den of wild animals. But such impression may be mutual, the deputies feeling that they are reasonably protected from those dangerous, unpredictable beasts, the People of Ireland.

It is painful to hear the Dil now and again denounced as a 'talking-shop'. That is exactly what the word PARLIAMENT means.

Talking turkey Christmas Day can have its little tragedies, too, and this year I was myself at the receiving end of what seems to be a ma.s.sive threat to us all on a grand scale the production and distribution of non-food. For many years an old friend has been sending me a turkey as a Christmas present. The turkey arrived this year as usual but hey! it was in a special sort of a box! My ben-a-tee raised the alarm, said it was frozen, and that she had no idea of handling such matters. Nor had I. But the best that could be done was done, and the centre-piece of the Christmas dinner to which we all sat down was a generous portion of old bicycle tyres. I suppose I should not write with such precision, since I've never actually tried to eat old bicycle, but that turkey tasted as old bicycle tyres should. All the parsley sauce and salt in the world made no difference. It was awful.

Three things are possible. One unlikely is that the bird was a normal one from an Irish farm which had been killed early in December and frozen to guard against delays in marketing. A second possibility is that it was a 'battery' bird, artificially incubated, never released from the hatchery, fattened on synthetic food and chemicals, then killed and frozen. The third possibility was that it was a turkey from the real deep freeze which means that it could be a warrior who perished as long ago as 1958.

One way or another, the supplier was guilty of plain fraud. What he supplied and was paid for was not a turkey as people understand the word.

Yet the shock of this most unfestive encounter perhaps shows that I am as innocent as a child behind it all. In newspaper reports about the turkey market in London I had read references to 'ma.s.s-produced' and 'oven-ready'. I take that last term to mean what most of us understand by the word turkey, and that the other two are spook-turkeys full of chemicals and carrying bogus meat, possibly poisonous.

I did not think that this could happen in Ireland in the case of Christmas turkeys but this business, ghastly and probably dangerous to health as well, has been going on for at least a year in Dublin and the larger towns in the case of chickens, usually dubbed 'broiler chickens'. These are on view all the year round in the shops of grocers, butchers, fish-merchants and publicans, priced 7/6 and 12/-, ready to take away and pop in the oven (if raw) or put straight on the table for a cold banquet if already done to an enchanting brown. In some of the more opulent pubs, indeed, there is a spectacular revolving spit on which a chicken is being grilled as you watch.

I am told that the entire production procedure is automatic and that chickens of the desired weight are turned out by the 1,000 merely by controlling certain switches, dials and gauges after the machine has been charged with eggs, 'food' and certain varieties of 'nouris.h.i.+ng rays'. The chicks when they emerge see neither mother nor daylight, ingest chemical nourishment and bogus fattening substances and are ready for slaughter also mechanised IN THREE WEEKS! To try to eat a chicken which has never seen a blade of gra.s.s or chased a worm is quite an experience but not one that any sensible person is likely to attempt twice.

Can this atrocious debauchment of nature also be undertaken with cattle? Could a calf be artificially suckled, reared and fattened in a magic manger or electronic stall to provide, ultimately, uneatable laboratory beef?

And pigs? Can those brutes be managed, by means of a diabolical machine, so that by pressing a b.u.t.ton an endless string of unearthly sausages come pouring out of the end of the humming installation?

I will not press this line of thought by inquiring whether human beings could be looked after this way also but I say it is amazing and shameful that public health authorities, central and local, have so far taken no notice of a money-making activity which may well be a threat to the well-being and even the lives of the people.

Many stupid, ignorant and unnecessary things are said in the Dil. How about our hard-working deputies giving their attention to this sort of menace?