Mayo doctor leads health initiative
A Castlebar-born doctor, now working in Cork, is helping to spearhead a
campaign to alert sports people and spectators of the dangers of
sunburn.
Dr John Bourke, a native of Maryland and now a consultant dermatologist
at University Hospital in Cork, has linked up with last year’s
All-Ireland winning Cork hurling team to highlight the dangers of
unprotected exposure to sun.
Dr Bourke is concerned at the incidence of malignant melanoma, the most
serious type of skin cancer, which is on the rise in Ireland. It is a
condition which affects all ages and is one of the most prevalent
causes of cancer in young men in the UK.
The main risk of melanoma comes from sunburn, so Dr Bourke and his
colleague in the campaign, Dr Fergus Lyons, stress the importance of
sports people, such as GAA players who mainly play in the summer
months, to protect their skin from the sun.
Equally, they are advocating that team supporters be aware of the
dangers posed by standing for several hours in hot sunshine while they
urge on their favourite teams to success. Spectators, they say, should
use sun block and wear wide-brimmed hats, to protect vulnerable areas
such as the tips of the ears from the ravages of sunburn.
To highlight the campaign, Dr Bourke and Dr Lyons linked up with the
Cork hurling team last week just before their training session at Páirc
Uí Rinn, where the entire squad underwent a screening for skin cancers.
The entire project is being organised by the Health Services Executive,
which has made considerable advances in the Cork region in the early
detection and treatment of melanoma. A dedicated lesion skin clinic at
University Hospital is staffed by a multidiscipline team which offers
speedy treatment of suspect cases of melanoma within seven days.
Up to now, says Dr Bourke, melanoma occurs more frequently in women
than men, but men tend to leave it much later to do anything about it.
Thanks to the co-operation of the Cork hurlers, the aim is to
drastically reduce the incidence while greatly increasing the speed of
response as soon as a melanoma is discovered.
A bad week for the wigs
It has not been a good week for the legal profession. The bungling in
the office of the Minister for Justice which caused such outrage from
the public was mirrored in that damning Prime Time Report on how
solicitors treat their clients.
Prime Time pulls no punches when it embarks on a crusade, and the
special report on the legal profession was no exception. Fearing not to
name names or to quote chapter and verse in relation to individual
cases, the solicitors under scrutiny wisely opted for the strategy of
keeping their thoughts to themselves and their faces away from the
cameras.
It would have been interesting to hear the explanation of how a retired
couple were misled into buying their dream cottage only to discover,
too late, that the boundary of their property actually ran through
their living room.
Another interviewer explained how his solicitors had pressed him to
sign a letter of clearance, drawn up by themselves, when they were
found guilty of charging him illegally for representing him in a claim
against the redress board.
This was sharp practice on the grand scale, and it was left to Ken
Murphy, director of the Law Society, to convince an increasingly
sceptical interviewer that the self-regulation regime of the profession
was indeed sufficient protection for the public from unscrupulous
solicitors.
A gentler Rotary
Castlebar Rotary Club will mark a signal breakthrough this month when,
for the second year running, a lady member will don the chain of office.
Vivienne Kyne, founder and CEO of 21st Century, wrote the first page of
history this time last year when she took the top Rotary post. For many
years, Rotary had existed as a male-only organisation, and it was only
after lengthy and passionate debate that the walls came crumbling down
to admit the fair sex.
Now, Castlebar is set to repeat last year’s innovation when local
restaurateur Dolores Burke takes up where Vivienne Kyne leaves off.
She will have her work cut out to match the work rate of her
predecessor, but nobody doubts the ability of Ms Burke to get the
wheels spinning when she takes up the task. As vice-president last
year, high profile charity events and overseas tours were organised
without a hitch. The coming year will be even busier.
Raising standards, or lowering the bar?
If you come from an era when three honours in the Leaving Cert marked
you out as a star pupil, you might be forgiven for thinking that we are
now rearing a generation of young geniuses.
The huge increase in the numbers of students gaining high points in the
Leaving has led to conflicting views as to where the cause lies.
For example, when the points system was introduced in 1992, only one in
25 Leaving Cert students managed to score 500 points. Today, that
figure is down to one in ten. Last year, 145 students got the maximum
600 points in the Leaving; ten years ago that would be considered a
near impossibility.
One school of thought puts it down to papers being marked more
leniently than before, of high marks being given in certain subjects so
as to encourage greater participation and that the opening of marked
scripts to candidates has made examiners more wary of what marks they
give.
The opposite view – mainly held by the teacher unions – is that marks
are going up simply because teachers and students are working harder.
They dismiss claims that there is a dumbing down of examinations,
pointing out that international comparisons show Irish students to be
among the most literate and best-educated in the world.
Critics of the points system argue that it is not a measure of real
ability, and that it serves purely as a comparative yardstick which
decides who gets into third level, and what career options are open to
them.
Ballina looks for its seat back
Michelle Mulherin can hardly be blamed for her rap on the knuckles for
RTÉ over ‘The Week in Politics’ coverage of the Mayo constituency
battle in the next election.
Granted, the Ballina-based town and county councillor did have an axe
to grind in that she is confidently expected to be on the Fine Gael
ticket when the nation next goes to the polls. But that said, the
programme was notable for its concentration on what might happen in
Castlebar and what impact Beverley Flynn would have on matters as an
independent candidate.
Michelle Mulherin’s claim is that Ballina will be a hotbed of politics
in the coming months, with both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael seeking to
fill the void in Dáil representation. Even more importantly, there is a
palpable desire among business and community interests, and across the
wider public, to see Ballina have a representative in the Dáil once
again. The town is losing out, it is agreed, by not having a voice to
push Ballina interests at national level.
This is not a new song, of course, and Ballina has an unenviable
reputation of throwing out its most influential TDs for reasons which
don’t make sense. Dr Tom Moffatt was the most recent victim of
Ballina’s propensity to cut off its own nose, despite his acknowledged
influence in the corridors of Leinster House. The same fate had
befallen Paddy O’Toole of Fine Gael, a full cabinet minister in the
coalition of Garret FitzGerald, who was unseated by his own in favour
of his party rival Jim Higgins in 1987.
Unsympathetic outsiders say that Ballina deserves what it gets, and if
it is suffering neglect in terms of Government spending and investment,
it has only itself to blame.
All that should change next year when Dara Calleary for Fianna Fáil and
Michelle Mulherin for Fine Gael – should her plans continue on target –
will battle to restore a seat to Ballina. The Fine Gael solicitor can
quite properly claim that her party has the upper hand; taking four out
of six seats in the last County Council election was an achievement of
some merit.
Either way, she has put down a marker to the national media that,
contrary to what Seán O’Rourke might think, it’s not all about
Castlebar and Beverley.
The Fianna Fáil Airport
The aforementioned Paddy O’Toole would have reason to hold bitter-sweet
memories as he surveyed the celebrations to mark the twentieth
anniversary of the opening of Knock Airport last week.
It is easy, two decades on, to forget what an influence the Knock
Airport project had on national politics. Over the six years of its
planning and preparation, it had been championed by Fianna Fáil,
berated by the Coalition government of Fine Gael and Labour, and
sneered at by a Dublin media and intelligentsia which dismissed it as a
total white elephant.
When the late Monsignor Horan invited Charlie Haughey to perform the
official opening of the airport 20 years ago, it was both a calculated
snub to the then Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, and an affirmation that,
had it not been for Fianna Fáil, there would be no airport at Knock.
On September 25, 1980, the then Minister for Transport, Pádraig Flynn,
signed the Government’s approval to the development of an airport at
Knock. It was the culmination of the efforts of Monsignor Horan, the
realisation – or so he hoped – of his dream.
Now, with government backing secured, there would be no looking back.
But he was wrong. Although the bulldozers were on the site within
months of Flynn’s signature, conservative interest in the Department of
Finance were battling against the project. It was a waste of public
money, they said, a scandal, the rabbits would be running across the
runway on which no plane would ever land. The naysayers were thrown a
lifeline when Haughey’s government lost the 1981 election, and Garret
FitzGerald’s Coalition took power.
Labour’s Barry Desmond, an arch critic of the airport, was now at the
levers of power. Come December 1981 and the terse announcement said it
all – the Government was withdrawing all funding from the airport at
Knock.
“That’s an end to the lunacy,” said Desmond. Jim Mitchel, Transport Minister, came down to Galway to rub salt into the wounds.
“Not another penny will be spent on a foggy, boggy hill in Mayo,” he said.
But little did he know of the fighting spirit of Monsignor Horan, and
the strength of the commitment given by Flynn, Albert Reynolds and Ray
McSharry, but also, crucially, by Haughey personally. The day after the
shock announcement, Flynn and Reynolds paid a symbolic visit to the
airport site. There, on the top of Barnalyra hill, they told the
Monsignor that when Fianna Fáil returned to power, the airport would be
finished to the last detail.
The rest is history. This year, 650,000 passengers and 70 flights a
week will provide the proof of Monsignor Horan’s vision. A triumph for
the plain people of Ireland over those who thought they knew better.