Irish Examiner view: Why we all need to plan for the future
HSE chief Bernard Gloster with Safeguarding Ireland chairwoman Patricia Rickard Clarke at this week's seminar launching Adult Safeguarding Day. Picture: Conor Healy
Just recently we were complaining that Ireland is grievously under-prepared for the consequences of our ageing population with a lack of strategic thinking which will damage us in the years ahead.
On that occasion it was in the context of a memo released to the HSE by its chief executive urging more rapid discharge of older hospital patients to nursing homes whether they are convenient or not for individuals or their families.
This week there are more encouraging signs of forward planning by organisations that recognise the challenges to come. Among them is an imaginative plan by Mahon Point in Cork to become Ireland’s first dementia-inclusive shopping centre.
In collaboration with the Alzheimer Society of Ireland, management and staff are to undergo training to provide a more welcoming and positive environment to sufferers and their families. There are 64,000 people with dementia in Ireland, and the number is expected to double to more than 150,000 by 2045. More than 180,000 are currently, or have been, carers for a person with the condition.
A “dementia-inclusive community” is one where people are aware of and understand the condition and where sufferers have choice and control over their day-to-day lives. It is something to which we will all have to aspire in the years ahead.
This initiative is a step in the right direction, and another realm in which we need to make progress is highlighted in news that only 11% of Irish adults have nominated someone to look after their financial and legal affairs in the event that they become incapacitated through, for example, dementia, or acquired brain injury after accidents.
Only 4% of all adults have made a legally recognised plan for their future care and treatment, known as an advanced healthcare directive. Red C research carried out for Safeguarding Ireland shows 72% of adults do not even know they have the option of creating such a plan.
We all run the risk of failing to prepare effectively for bad news, and none of us likes to catch a whiff of our own mortality but, as Safeguarding Ireland chairwoman Patricia Rickard-Clarke says, providing this legal clarity and making our wishes clear is an assistance to our families and helps healthcare professionals to understand what treatment we would want.
It’s sage advice. Each of us would be wise to follow it.
Democracies which debate the limits of peaceful protest, an argument which has gone back and forth ahead of this weekend’s pro-Palestine demonstrations in London, need a sense of history to appreciate what alternatives can look like.
It was 100 years ago this week that the “Beer Hall Putsch” propelled a minor Austrian demagogue to international attention. Until then all eyes were fixed on the Italian Benito Mussolini as the lodestone for fascism in Europe after his Blackshirts’ march on Rome. Insurrection was in the air and the Weimar Republic was torn by hyper-inflation, united in opposition to punitive reparations demanded by France and angry about the French occupation of the Ruhr.
Nationalists were convinced that the Great War was lost because of a “stab in the back” by its own government. Germany’s civilian leaders joined Marxists and Jews in the ranks of what were described as “the November Criminals”. Social conditions and dissatisfaction with the politics on offer were starting to gel in a lethal combination.
In 1923 Adolf Hitler marched at the head of 2,000 members of his National Socialist German Workers Party — the Nazis — through the centre of Munich to a confrontation with Bavarian state police which left 15 of his followers and four police officers dead. Another victim was a waiter who stepped outside his restaurant to watch, and was killed in a crossfire.
The lesson from the past is that at the start of the 1920s nearly 80% of Germans were strongly in favour of liberal democracy. Yet within 15 years a largely progressive, highly civilised, modern country had turned into a brutal dictatorship. Less than 10 years after his failed armed rebellion, Hitler became chancellor of Germany.
We must hope that marchers in London keep to their pledges of avoiding disruption as they make their way to the American embassy and repay the trust of the Metropolitan Police commissioner Mark Rowley who has resisted considerable political pressure in allowing the demonstration to take place. Rowley says the role of an independent police service is that, amidst debate, opinion, emotion and conflict, it remains focussed on the law and the facts in front of it.
“The intelligence surrounding the potential for serious disorder . . . does not meet the threshold to apply for a ban,” he said.
While no one wants to live in a country where politicians direct police decisions, Rowley is taking a serious risk. If the future of protest in volatile times is to be protected it is incumbent on everyone to behave responsibly even in moments of heightened emotions and despite the prompting taking place from the digital beer halls of 2023.
Watch out! That flash of green and red disappearing around the corner in your peripheral vision might just be the first seasonal appearance of the grinch who stole Christmas.
Our consumer correspondent has asked why some visits to Santa’s grotto are costing as much as €100 this year and how it can be justified that adults are being asked to pay up to €25 per head to accompany their young ones.
These are rhetorical questions obviously, although an answer can be found in the description of the chief executive of the Consumers’ Association of Ireland who says such charges are “unfair” and “unnecessary”. Prices vary wildly depending on which part of the North Pole you visit and whether Santa’s little helpers are on the minimum wage or not.
Then there’s the cost of the grain for reindeers going sky high since the invasion of Ukraine.
But this is not the only bah-humbug of the week with Swiss food conglomerate Nestlé ceasing production of not only one, but two childhood favourites. The milk chocolate Animal Bar, which has been with us since 1963, joins Caramac, which has had both champions and denigrators for the past 64 years, in the Valhalla of treats which have passed beyond our grasp. Roy of the Rovers chews, Smiley’s Sweets (still available in South Africa), Secret bars, Galaxy truffles. Gone and we hardly knew you.
