SCOURGE bullying can take a serious mental and physical toll on victims. As the recent ‘Would You Believe’ programme revealed, it can even be fatal.
Bullying questions left unanswered County View
John Healy
THE problem of bullying, once called the silent epidemic, was given another airing last week by way of a stunning RTÉ programme in the ‘Would You Believe’ series.
The harrowing story of 18-year-old Leanne Wolfe from Cork who took her own life courageously took on a disturbing theme, but it left as many questions unanswered as it gave explanations for what had happened.
On the morning of Leanne’s funeral, her sister Triona discovered the terrible truth behind her death. She found a collection of diaries and notebooks detailing the six years of constant abuse and bullying she received at the hands of her so-called friends – bullying that eventually cost Leanne her life.
The subsequent coroner’s inquest delivered a verdict of death by self harm, but the Wolfe family want it to be recorded that bullying was the underlying cause of her death.
The programme was a sensitively made but somehow intrusive investigation into an event that the Wolfe family will never forget. The bereaved parents spoke with quiet dignity and an almost baffled acceptance that their daughter had been the victim of something deeply malicious and evil. They did not seek to portray Leanne as a faultless angel, because she was as volatile and unpredictable as just about any other teenager. However, they seemed genuinely unable to understand the taunts, the verbal violence and the physical attacks that in the end made life not worth living for their daughter.
They revealed that they knew the identities of several of the tormentors; that they found it necessary to warn off some of them from attending the funeral mass; that they had approached the parents of the offenders but had never received anything by way of remorse or apology from families who could not but have known of what was going on.
And yet for all the interviews with family members, for all the dramatic re-enactment of Leanne’s last days writing her torment into her diary, this was a curiously incomplete programme.
At no stage was the viewer shown Leanne’s friends or her daily activities outside the home. It was never made clear whether she was at school, in a job or attending some form of training. We were never shown where she socialised or the kind of circles she moved in. We were given no pointer as to how she would have fallen foul of associates who would physically assault her on a regular basis. There were no interviews with teachers, youth leaders, clergy or Gardaí, no attempts to give any rounded picture of this girl or of what had led to such a situation.
Only when Dr Mona O’Moore came on the programme to explain the insidious nature of bullying and discuss a pilot school project in Donegal that had achieved dramatic positive results did the report finally began to take some shape.
This ‘Would You Believe’ took on a major issue, but it didn’t seem to be quite sure as to where it wanted to go or what it wanted to achieve. In the end, the viewer felt that the private grief of the Wolfe family had been intruded upon with little of substance to show for the pain suffered.
Why Leanne died and what could have been done to save her was left unanswered. Not one neighbour or friend or community leader was prepared – or perhaps was not asked – to come before the camera and say what was wrong with this dysfunctional neighbourhood that a young woman should be bullied to death.
Bullying is a hateful, mean, despicable form of control exercised by one person over another.
The pity was that ‘Would You Believe’, having reopened the wounds, added nothing to the sum of human knowledge on this dark topic.
Mayo’s loss, Sligo’s gain? THE shock news today that, in the words of TV3, Mayo General Hospital had conceded defeat in the campaign to retain cancer services in Castlebar rather than see them transferred to Galway, comes at an interesting time.
Forget for a moment the public utterances that the die is cast and that everything is set in stone; there is still plenty to play for before the final block is put in place on the National Cancer Strategy.
For Sligo, the withdrawal of Mayo from the contest will make for happy reading. There is not the slightest doubt that, in due course, some hospital in the sprawling Connacht Ulster hinterland will be given the task of supplementing the already stretched resources at the designated Galway Centre of Excellence.
Right now, Sligo is in pole position, and the combined political clout of Junior Minister Jimmy Devins and the still-formidable Ray McSharry will be enough to clinch a deal that Professor Tom Keane will be able to live with and that will retain for Sligo its status as a top-quality medical centre.
Sligo too had always enjoyed a geographical advantage over Castlebar in making its case for the retention of cancer services. Now that the senior personnel at Mayo General have conceded that retaining surgery at Castlebar does not make sense with Galway so close, Sligo can argue that its greater distance from Galway makes it imperative that it continue.
And, most crucial of all, the campaign for Sligo still continues.
In the meantime, this column – not given to wild predictions – once again makes a forecast: Many a spring will come and go and cancer surgery will continue to be performed both in Castlebar and Sligo.
And why? Because Galway is so devoid of the capabilities and resources to deal with its existing patient throughput – let alone the massive upsurge in cancer-patient numbers that the closure of smaller local hospitals will trigger – that the powers -that-be will be only too happy to see the excellent teams at Castlebar and Sligo continue to do what they have done so well down through the years.
Mary White’s ambitions MARY White, outspoken senator, Fianna Fáil member and successful chocolatier, has let it be known that she will be seeking her party’s nomination, when the time comes to run for President of Ireland.
There is nothing like getting your word in early, of course, and Senator White has never been found waiting when it comes to making her ambitions known.
Fianna Fáil headquarters will remember that she was one of that small but feisty band who refused to toe the party line and who voted against the express wishes of the party leader, Bertie Ahern, by opposing the expulsion from the party of Beverley Flynn.
Not that a thing like that would come against a party member later down the line – or would it?
And surely Bertie will have long since forgotten who it was who stood up for Beverley Flynn as the guillotine came down.
Or will he?
Shoddy treatment at Achill WHAT a shoddy way for the 36 jobless staff at Contact 4 in Achill to have been treated by their close-shop-overnight employers?
And what a poor attitude by Údarás na Gaeltachta that the agency did not step in, reimburse the workers their rightful wages and then turn their attention to clawing back some of the public money squandered on such a threadbare business outfit?
Is it not incredible that the workers in Achill had gone for as long as seven weeks without a single euro in wages, with nobody to ring the alarm bells until Contact 4 turned up to say they were leaving and wouldn’t be coming back.
On radio, one employee described being left in the lurch for €5,000 – not a lot to Údarás, not a lot to business people who talk big talk, but an awful lot to a man who has to pay the rent, put food on the table and clothe his family every week.
Questions abound: Who ran the rule over Contact 4 before the company was grant-aided to set up in the Gaeltacht? What level of due diligence was applied to a company whose area of activity was the volatile mortgage market? How could employer be allowed to welsh on his weekly wage bill?
In the meantime, the aggrieved employees are taking a chance of travelling to Scotland to try to hunt down their fugitive employers and recover what is rightfully theirs. It’s a mission for which they will need all the luck they can get.
Minding the green vote
THERE is a sharper edge to that seesaw battle for the US Democratic nomination over the past few weeks, and it seems that nothing is too trivial to go undisputed in the increasing hostility between Hillary Clinton (pictured) and Barack Obama.
Senator Clinton’s understandable desire to be associated with the successful Northern Ireland peace process has been pounced on by Obama as totally inflating the importance of what she did.
Fair enough. But it’s only when Irish politicians north and south begin to take sides that you begin to wonder just what is going on.
David Trimble (remember him) has come out of oblivion to assert, in a letter to ‘The Daily Telegraph’, that Mrs Clinton did nothing more than accompany her husband on visits to the North.
This view was immediately challenged by Gerry Adams and, even more forcefully, by former SDLP leader, John Hume, who opened a long endorsement of Hillary Clinton by saying “I can state from first-hand experience that she played a positive role for over a decade in helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland.”
And when Senator George Mitchell, the man who patiently chaired the long talks leading to the 1998 agreement, added his voice of commendation, it began to look like Hillary Clinton had won the battle for the Irish vote by a fairly comfortable majority.
