The Roscommon Response.

"How could this not be noticed or seen?" Judge Reynolds asked. "Why did nobody do something? These children were failed by everybody around them. No right-thinking person could or should stand idly by and watch without doing anything."

It's interesting to read the fallout- or the start of the fall out- from the Roscommon case I blogged about yesterday. Interesting and a bit shattering. Judge Miriam Reynold's questions are good ones, indeed the most apt. Why did no one do anything?
This forty year old woman had family, the children went to school, the HSE were involved from very early on, the patrons of the pub she drank in most nights would have known her mothering skills were lax.
Yet no one did anything about it.

"Yesterday locals in the Roscommon village where the mother (40) subjected the children to six years of depravity admitted that "everyone knew" the children needed help but nothing was ever done to help.
" ( Irish Independent)

If that is true, and I can see no reason to believe it is not, then I hope a lot of people stand before a mirror today and look themselves in the eye.
I've said before on this blog that it's hard to step out of the herd, it's hard to kick up a fuss. Most of us just want to live and let live, make sure we don't rock the boat too much as we make our journey through life.
But there comes a time when as decent human beings we must be prepared to speak out when we know in our heart of hearts someone is doing wrong. Especially if the wrong doing involves children.
Of course nobody wants to point an accusing finger at an innocent person, nobody like to be the lone voice in the twilight, but fortitude and valour are not flaws. Being compassionate and brave enough to put other's suffering before your own fear of mistake is not an ill judged cause.
If only one other person had stepped forward earlier, maybe those children could have had some years shaved from their torture. If only one person had reared up and said they would not cease until that dreadful woman was fully investigated. If only the school where the children attended- cold, riddled with lice, in ill fitting clothes, with all the behavioural signs of breakdown- had intervened. If only the WHB had challenged the High Court Order. If only Mena Bean Ui Chribin had stayed her hand and kept her nose out of the WHB business.
A lot of 'if only'.
And none of it makes the slightest difference to the lives of six vulnerable children who were so badly let down.
They say it takes a village to raise a child. Well, if that's the case this particular village is guilty of neglect.
I hope those children find some peace in their futures. I hope for their sake the can move beyond this terrible start to life. They deserve a chance. I hope lessons have been learned from the whole sorry saga. But I can't help feeling we'll be all sipping our coffees and shaking our head at some other travesty in the near future. Unless as people we are unafraid to speak up before the fact and not after, that possibility is always likely.

Jobs I hate/most cranky.

All righty then, We all have them, the little jobs we do that no one else seems to do. These things are essential and they fall to us and we do them. Normally we do them unasked and under appreciated. but what are they?
Well I"m gonna give you my top five most FUCKING hated jobs that I do on a regular basis.
1-Cleaning out the litter trays. Bleaugh!So minging it is monk to the core.
2-Washing out the kitchen bin- Bleaugh.
3-Hoovering- I hate the sound of a hoover. It drives me nuts, but at least the one I have now doesn't fall apart like my last one, which used to drive me into spasms of rage, until I dragged down many flights of stairs threw half way across the street one Saturday, this was after the head fell off it for the one millionth time.
4-Having to ring people about stuff. Any stuff, especially work related stuff, I just hate it. I have email for a reason. I hate phones.
5-cutting hedges.


The last one is new, and I didn't realise I hated cutting hedges until I was forced to don gardening gloves the other evening and go out into the wilderness we call a garden and try to reclaim some of it. The warm weather, sunshine and abundance of green mature bushes has caused an explosive amount of growth and something had to be done. Three hours later and I could no longer lift the secateurs, but a vast mountain of chopped stuff lay about the place. All that remained then was to rake it into a pile and dispose of it.
I raked it up, then I went in for a drink and a think. How the hell am I supposed to dispose of a mountain of branches and hedge? It is illegal to burn it, and leaving it piled like a green sugerloaf in the middle of the lawn/meadow is not the way to go about it.
Right, I called on my neighbour-who has a wonderful garden, complete with actual lawn and raised flowerbeds, with FLOWERS!!- and he informed me I have no option but to chop it all into tini-tiny pieces and bag it up and transport it to some recycling place down in Crumlin somewhere.

Great. It's going to take forever and that pile is FULL of spiders and bits of nettles.
So that's today's plan. I'm refusing to work because for some reason I"m typing everything backwards. I typed have as ahve and later as alter and, well I ALWAYS make a haymes of because-becasue. But it seems especially bad today so I'm not doing it.
Also, while I'm having a rant, I do not see the point of people who hit the snooze button on their alarms more than once. Just fucking sleep the extra half hour and then get up when the alarm goes off, waking and hitting snooze and waking and hitting snooze is VELLY annoying and creates shadow sleep, where you're neither one nor t'other. It's totally pointless and really cross making.
And another thing.
Let me just say this because this is my blog and I can say what I want.
What happened to that family is Wexford is very sad. It is always very sad when two innocent children are killed by those who should offer up their lives to protect them.
But If I hear one more middle-class angst riddled wanker waffle on about how 'it's society's fault' and how 'we don't care for others we only care for material things' or my personal favourite, 'we are all to blame', I will implode and explode at the same time.
Fuck off with yourself, gobshite. Who the fuck do you think you are kidding? Do you think people didn't kill themselves before now? Do you think us being supposedly wealthier is the fucking cudgel you were all looking for to beat yourself over the back with. 'OOOH we're so wealthy, mea culpa mea culpa, my faux memory of a simpler time, a picture perfect Ireland from days of yore leads me to believe that we-as a society- don't care any more.'
Don't care anymore about what? You po-faced moss licker. Fuck off, you're sitting there on your computer talking to bloggers from all over the country and the world but you're wringing your hand about isolation and 'the change'. If anything people are less marginalised now. And you know what? Even if every person was living up every person's own arse in a compound, some people would still kill themselves. Its fucking sad, it's fucking tragic and it's fucking unstoppable. But what it's isn't is 'all our faults' and like I said the other day, YOU don't get to talk for me. And if you're so worried that your kids are not 'mixing with people from different socio economic groups', yank him out of Gael School, drive little Dymphna of Rocco down to The east wall or Limerick or where ever the fuck and enroll him/her in there. Let the kid mix freely and learn a whole new set of skills. You can call it something wanky like 'organic self awareness' or some other trite shit like that.
But if you're not going to do that-and we all know you're not- shut the fuck up with the bleating and the hand wringing.It's boring as hell and hollow as a length of Wavin pipe.
There. Now I"m off to have toast and chop wood.