Brexit border implications never even entered some minds

Reviving memories of troubled times at the Irish border last year

In recent weeks, as Britain has hurtled towards a seemingly uncertain Brexit, many politicians in the United Kingdom have shown little or no interest in recent Irish history - or memory of the anguish of those who lived through 30 years of conflict.

Unlike those living along the 300 mile Irish border, who are waking up with increasing alarm as to the reality of what a “hard Brexit” actually means with every passing day.

People remember Bloody Sunday.

They might not have been in Derry on that terrible January afternoon, but they remember the black flags flying from houses all across the country, the sense of hopelessness, anger, and despair.

Bad enough that 14 innocent people were gunned down, but when the atrocity was committed by the State – the very forces who were supposed to protect ordinary people – the sense of isolation, of a city under siege, was palpable throughout the nationalist areas of Northern Ireland.

And the IRA described the atrocity as the greatest recruitment drive they could have hoped for in the province’s second city. Young men were queuing up to join.

Atrocities such as Bloody Sunday prolonged The Troubles

People remember Ballymurphy in Belfast, 1971.

Even though they may not have been told about it at the time.

Six months before the slaughter of innocents in Derry, British soldiers ran amok and massacred 11 people in two days.

Only nobody knew the full extent of the massacre, until a brave British TV crew put all the pieces together for a Channel 4 documentary 47 years later.

The inquests into those shootings, set to take place this coming November, will open up old wounds. How in the late 20th century the slaying of innocent people in their own housing estate could be spun into a grotesque parody of the truth.

The devastation of the Miami Showband Massacre.
Photo courtesy of Stephen Travers. 

People remember the Miami Showband massacre.

Talented young musicians, Catholic and Protestant, travelling home across the border after a wonderful gig in Co Down. Their music brought communities together at a time of too much polarisation and division.

Three men were hauled out of a van, gunned down at the side of a lonely road, after an attempt to frame them with a bomb. Their band mates left to die.

Collusion? That attack was all about the Irish border. It would have been so much easier to persuade the Irish Gardai to ramp up security at the 300 mile long border if people believed young musicians were driving around with bombs in the dead of night.

To this day, the survivors of that 1975 atrocity have never got justice or the sense of peace which comes with finding out the truth.

People of a certain vintage remember . . . and this week they have been choking on their breakfasts as Tory Brexiteers tell them that Ireland would be better off rejoining the United Kingdom and leaving the European Union.

“Re-joining the UK is the only way to reunite Ireland and the British Isles. Brexit makes Irish EU membership less logical,” tweeted one of them this week.

Irish people may have reservations about the growing power and bureaucracy of the European Union, but you would be hard pressed to find too many people who would countenance a new political union with the country which colonised our island from 1169 to 1921.

Talk of rejoining the old colonial power would be hilarious if it was not such a tragedy, if people did not worry that the Brexit drama was playing with people’s lives.

A mural in Belfast recalling one of the worst atrocities of 'The Troubles'
15 people - including two children - were killed at McGurk's Bar

Many British Brexiteers have no idea regarding the impact their words and deeds are having or the impact the return of border posts and checkpoints would have on people all along the 300 mile frontier.

In less than six months, Britain is due to have left the European Union and, already, the Irish Government has begun recruiting 450 customs and veterinary inspectors.

British politicians like Jacob Rees Mogg, Boris Johnson, and Nigel Farage do not seem to give a damn about the impact a “hard border” will have on ordinary people.

Instead, they rail against the EU for daring to contemplate splitting up the UK, seemingly with no memories of the damage caused to communities along the 300 mile long Irish border by the partition of Ireland.

Try telling a person who lives in Newry and works in Dundalk about what life will be like if he or she had to face border checkpoints every day.

Try telling young people living in Inishowen in Co Donegal that a trip to the cinema or a night club in Derry is set to become a logistical late night nightmare. After all, the border was never a ‘”real” border – it cut places such as Derry and Strabane off from much of their natural hinterlands.

Northern Ireland was created from six of Ulster’s nine counties in order to have an artificial two-thirds Unionist majority and the experience of being treated as second class citizens led the nationalist minority to rise up in search of civil rights in the late 1960s.

Of course, the British were not solely responsible for three decades of ‘The Troubles’. Far from it, in fact.

You only have to list the names of places – Omagh, Enniskillen, Manchester, Warrigton, Guildford, Mullaghmore, Kingsmill – to recall some of the terrible atrocities committed by the IRA in the name of Irish “freedom”.

Belfast's famous murals are now seen as a tourist attraction

But the British state played a huge part in creating the conditions which led to The Troubles and prolonged the violence by committing atrocities of its own.

Without Bloody Sunday, Ballymurphy, and the internment of young Catholic men, would so many young people have joined the IRA?

Would the conflict have gone on for so long?

And how can the concerns of people who have genuine fears of a return to violence, the hated border posts giving dissident republicans the motive they require, be dismissed so lightly?

People remember border checkpoints, watchtowers, and aggressive searches from gun-toting soldiers every time they popped across the road to a neighbouring town or village.

And they wonder if those awful scenes will return.

Belfast is now a fantastic place to visit, thanks to a fragile peace process.
The Titanic Quarter is now a 'must see' for tourists from all over the world

They remember the sense of elation which followed the Good Friday Agreement, the first sightings of tourists on the streets of Belfast, and how deserted those streets used to be after 7pm in the bad old days.

Not only did that historic vote bring about peace, it gave the unionists of the north a cast iron guarantee that they will never be steamrolled into a United Ireland against their will. It showed that, for all our differences, ordinary Irish people value peace and compromise over ancient tribal divisions.

Now the murals on the Belfast walls teach tourists about a bygone era.

Now people flock to the wonderful Titanic Belfast, because it's one of the most amazing attractions in Europe. Tourists in Belfast . . . what a strange concept that would have been three decades ago!

People have had 20 years of a fragile peace now and they cannot believe how quick jingoistic politicians in London are to dismiss their concerns.

Such as Jacob Rees Mogg MP, who said there was no need for him to visit the Irish border in order for him to understand it (although he was shamed into finally doing so in July).

Or his Conservative party colleague Boris Johnson, who pointed out that there was no border between two suburbs of London as some sort of a valid contribution to the “hard Brexit” debate.

Or Nigel Farage, of UKIP, who called on the Irish people to leave Europe when he visited Dublin in February of this year. He accused the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, of “taking Brussels’ side against Britain”, which was not “in the best interest of his country”.

Not for them concerns that 56% of the people of Northern Ireland voted against leaving the EU, that 3,600 people died in the conflict, or that peace remains fragile in a place in which two communities largely live their lives apart from each other, in terms of schooling, housing, or even where they socialise or work.

Twenty years after the Good Friday Agreement brought a welcome peace, transforming life in the North completely, 90% of the housing estates are still segregated; and nationalist and loyalist communities are divided by 90 “peace walls”.

The European Union underpinned the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which is tied into 142 areas of north-south co-operation, and yet blustering Brexiteers are claiming that the EU should have no role in the future of Northern Ireland.

It’s not nice to realise that you are seen as peripheral, that your concerns don’t matter in the corridors of power in London.

People in Northern Ireland look around now and see a place brimful of hope, of normal life, with tourists enjoying themselves from all over the world, and wonder how anyone could even countenance a return to a “hard border” and the hated signs of division they were sure they had left behind.

And all because some people in Britain were so keen to break their ties with Europe that the implications for Ireland’s border communities never even entered their minds when they voted for Brexit two years ago.


Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and digital storyteller, based in Galway, Ireland. Find him on Facebook at http://facebook.com/ciarantierneymedia/

Welcome to the wonderful 'Regime Radio'!

Welcome to ‘Regime Radio’ … right here on your dial every Saturday and Sunday morning.

Giving you all the information you need to know your place in this big, bad world.

You know you should 'rat' on your neighbour, you
really should ... for the greater good!

 . . . First up this morning we have a Government Minister to tell us about his campaign against welfare fraud. The frightening underclass among us are ripping us off for millions and he wants you to “rat out” your neighbour if you see him going on holidays or buying a new car.

Funny that he doesn’t have statistics to back up his claim that welfare cheats are milking the system or that he’s launched his hate campaign against the poor just when he’s aiming, too, to become leader of our land.

And we won’t bother asking him about banker fraud, because we don’t get “sexy radio” out of that kind of white collar crime.

 . . . Now, next up in the studio we have a ‘Senator’ from outside the Pale. And not just any old Senator, but a former successful businessman, until he went bust, who will tell us all about the wonderful committee he chairs.

He’s a great man to talk, this Senator, especially about himself and his wonderful political connections.

What we forget to mention, though, is that he wasn’t actually elected to the Senate by ordinary or normal people like you, dear listener. After failing to win a popular vote, by a complete miracle he was nominated by the leader of a party who bankrupt the country a few years ago.

But we don’t talk about things like that here on Regime Radio!

Or we won’t talk about his old company, and how it survived for so long on subsidies from that same – once disgraced, but now resurgent – political party.

Sure, they are on the way back, we’ve completely forgotten that they brought the country to its knees, and so is our wonderful Senator.

And we only back winners here on Regime Radio!

 . . . Next up we have a wonderful former Government Minister. Wonderful, because he likes the sound of his own voice so much we have no problem inviting him onto the radio, to talk about anything at any time.

We only back winners ... here on 'Regime Radio'!

He’s from deepest Tipperary where they know a lot about the kind of neck it takes to get to the top in Irish politics.

He’ll tell you how he did this and he did that, and he was the first person to raise this or that issue in the Dail. We love big egos here, to match our massive salaries on your favourite Regime Radio!

We won’t ask him much about how his party collapsed after turning their backs on the working class or how one of his colleagues referred to the poor among us as “the f---ing dregs”.

We try to be positive here on ‘Regime Radio’!

 . . . And now we have a communications expert, who will laugh and joke about how she prepares her political clients for grillings on this very type of show.

She’ll defend the indefensible, as long as the price is right. Mind you, she might storm out of the studio if we ask the wrong question. She won't let us talk about nasty religious orders, who have refused to compensate abuse victims after causing them decades of pain. They're great clients, you see, and she's coached them on how to avoid pesky questions.

But, sure, we wouldn’t want to ruin your weekend morning by talking about such horrible issues here on the wonderful, positive 'Regime Radio'!

 . . . And now we have another Senator, a superb male expert on female bodies. We won’t talk about the fact that he was “elected” by a tiny pool of University graduates, or the fact that his beloved Institute seems to have been on the radio more times than we’ve had hot dinners this year.

He’ll give you the courage of his convictions and, sure, if he’s not available this Saturday we will replace him with another member of his Institute who bemoans the biased “liberal” media while she writes a national newspaper column every week.

 . . . We have a special guest this week, a senior Garda officer. We won’t ask her about the corruption, the smears, or the fabrication of evidence which has undermined your faith in the Irish police force; instead, we will guarantee her the easiest interview she’s had since she entered the service at Templemore.

Let's not talk about the viciosu smears, which almost ruined the
life of an honest whistleblower. Sure, it'd ruin the dinner!

. . . And we’ve time for one more superstar, a “celebrity” guest from the heart of Dublin 4. She’ll remind you how insignificant your little life is out there on the West coast, you consequential little peasant, as she gives us “the goss” on “celebrities” you’ve never heard of.

We’ll celebrate the pending arrival of the summer, loike, with our tales of the hardship of camping in the VIP section of a sold-out music festival. There’s no mixing with the plebs for us, here, when we have such access to the stars on ‘Regime Radio’!

There’s no better way of feeling like an outsider in your own land than listening to a lovely group of South Dublin people gossip about other South Dublin people.

Just to remind you how “out of the loop” you truly are down there in darkest Donegal or gloomy Galway.

If you are lucky, yes really lucky, we might have a time slot to feature one of our colleagues just up the corridor, after nailing him or her in the ‘Regime Radio’ canteen. There’s hardly a Saturday or Sunday goes by that we don’t interview one of our own colleagues, just to justify all the money you spend on the licence fee.

We are so glad to bring this dizzying array of high profile guests to you here on ‘Regime Radio’ every Saturday and Sunday. It’s such a stressful job that we have to take about ten weeks holidays a year.

. . . Of course, if you want to find out more about our wonderful station, you might learn more by looking at the people we WON’T put on the show this week or any week in the near future!

 . . . You won’t hear from the young mother from Cork who walked all the way to Dublin because she wants to use medical cannabis to treat her daughter’s severe form of epilepsy.

Her seizures stopped when she got access to medicinal cannabis, but her mother was made to feel like a criminal when she was forced to import the drug from overseas. We can’t have anyone who challenges the law of the land contaminating your little West of Ireland minds!

 . . . You won’t hear from the bank executive turned whistleblower who reported breaches in liquidity to the central bank a year before the nation’s entire banking system collapsed. He might just have saved the State a few billion euros if anyone in authority actually listened to him back in 2007.

He wants to know why no action was taken to deal with his concerns, or why the State contrived with developers and bankers to help out a rotten banking system in a ‘bailout’ which resulted in a cost of billions of euros to the Irish taxpayer.

The authorities have never explained why they didn’t act on his urgent warnings. He hasn’t worked for years, but his voice is not the kind we want to hear to challenge the cosy consensus here on ‘Regime Radio’.

Our readers don't really want to hear about the mum
in Direct Provision who couldn't afford a taxi at UHG

 . . . We won’t hear from the mother who carried her child home from a Galway hospital last week, because she couldn’t afford a taxi on her weekly allowance of €19.10.

We don’t want to upset your dinner by discussing the terrible Direct Provision system – not while we are highlighting the plight of “our own” undocumented Irish fearing for their lives that Donald Trump will expel them from the United States – here on ‘Regime Radio’.

 . . . And we won’t hear from the single mother who has been living in a hotel with her daughter for a year, because the homelessness crisis might also upset our listeners as they prepare their weekend dinners here  on your favourite radio show.

 . . . Or the teenager who was hauled out of his bed at dawn for daring to sit down in front of a Minister’s car during a protest in Dublin. He’s too articulate, too angry, too intelligent and too much of a threat to the widespread view that those awful Irish Water protesters are nothing more than the “sinister fringe”.

Sometimes, you see, you learn more about what’s going on in the real Ireland by looking at the stories we don’t feature here on your beloved ‘Regime Radio’.


Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and Digital Storyteller, based in Galway, Ireland. Check out his Facebook page here He admits to having a sense of humour and denies being a member of the "sinister fringe"

Breaking down the barriers

When I was a youngster, the only British people I knew wore uniforms, pointed guns, and seemed to have hatred in their eyes.

For a couple of years in the 1970s, my parents lived right beside a militarized border which contained watch towers, a barbed wire fence, and was patrolled by heavily armed soldiers.

Crossing the bridge between Donegal and Tyrone was an ordeal; my parents and their friends had to psyche themselves up for routine journeys to places like the nearest supermarket or dentist's.

On one occasion, I remember my father being hauled out of the car by the men in uniforms after he dared to speak back after a long and tiring day spent visiting cousins in Monaghan.

The people of Lifford never knew whether or not they would be hauled out of their cars at gunpoint by young men from places like Sheffield and Sunderland who probably hadn't a clue why they had been sent to Northern Ireland in the first place.                          

Nigel Farage MEP addressing the European Parliament yesterday

Even though I was only five or six years old, I can still remember the agonizing fear in the car as we used to approach the border; our parents cajoling us to be as quiet as mice in the back in case we'd antagonize a hostile, or perhaps even trigger-happy, young soldier.

I remember a customs post up in flames or bombs going off, lighting up the night sky across Lifford and Strabane.

Some neighbours used to celebrate terrorist murders because some of them really believed that the victims deserved to die and you could almost feel the tension and hatred in the air.

People never mixed with the "other side". They'd go to separate schools, play separate games, work in different places and live in different neighbourhoods.

"Our" side had the GAA and Catholic schools, "their"side had cricket or rugby. To this day many people in places like Derry cannot bring themselves to support the Northern Ireland football team which is why James McClean, from the Creggan, plays for the Republic even though he grew up North of the border.

Two teams, a nation divided, and yet we live in peace in 2016.

In the 1970s, some members of my tribe, the Catholics, used to claim that there was no point in even looking for a job because discrimination was institutionalized. In those days it was almost impossible for a Catholic in Derry to get a Council home.

When 14 unarmed people were shot dead during a Civil Rights march my parents decided they'd had enough and they managed to orchestrate a move back to Galway. They did not want their five children to grow up in such a tense environment.

That tension was still in the air when I used to travel to Derry to cover Galway United games for my local newspaper in the 1990s.

You always felt fear or discomfort when you crossed that border and watched the military helicopters flying over the Brandywell on Sunday afternoons, even though the Royal Ulster Constabulary (the deeply unpopular police force) had an unwritten agreement with Derry City that they would not enter the football ground.

Years passed before I really got to know English people. Even when, as a third level student, I spent lengthy summer holidays working in London, I only really mixed with the Irish or Jamaicans; there was a lot of distrust of the Irish, while the IRA "campaign" provided a negative backdrop to our experiences as young migrants in the British capital.

It was in London that I first encountered casual racism, but I knew that didn't mean there were more racists in the UK than back home in Ireland. In those days, you could probably count the number of black people in Galway on two hands.

For me, strangely, the catalyst for change was my love for scuba diving. My two regular diving buddies on the west coast of Ireland both had young families and didn't have the time or the money to travel with me on my underwater adventures.

So I booked the first of many holidays to Egpyt and - shock, horror - found myself on a boat full of English people. I braced myself for a tense week and, yes, sometimes there were cultural misunderstandings or comments made through ignorance rather than hatred.

My fears were unfounded and I even began to make life-long friends who would contact me twice a year to see if I'd like to join them on trips to the Red Sea. By mixing with each other, by sharing our passion for a wonderful hobby, we broke down barriers which we had allowed to build up over generations.

During a wonderful gap year in 2010, I became a professional scuba diver. Every day I mixed with English people at Blue Planet Divers, some of whom had military backgrounds and had even served on tours of duty, pointing guns at Irish Catholic people in Northern Ireland.

Some of them also became life-long friends.

At the turn of the Millennium, I also renewed my love affair with Liverpool FC, honed as a child in the 1970s back in Ireland. I travelled all around Europe with Scousers and could not feel more accepted or have had more fun.

I'm never going to sing 'Rule Britannia' or 'God Save the Queen', but by mixing and having the 'craic' with English people I have completely banished the prejudices I built up in my mind as a child.

With the Brits having voted to leave the European Union this week, Ireland is in shock as many of us worry about an uncertain future as an isolated island off the north-west coast of the vast continent.

Everyone is focusing on the perceived racism and xenophobia of some of those who voted for Brexit last Thursday.

How quickly we forget how undemocratic, or even anti-democratic, the EU has become.

When our parents voted to join it in the 1970s, the European Economic Community led to economic prosperity on an island which had been ravaged by decades of stagnation, unemployment, and hopelessness.

They didn't vote for a system which would allow bureaucrats in Brussels to bully small countries such as Ireland, Greece, and Portugal.

They didn't vote for a dictatorship which would tell the Irish people that they made the "wrong" choice when they rejected the Lisbon and Nice treaties.

They didn't vote to impose severe hardship on the Greeks or to make a murky deal with an awful Government in Turkey, just to keep the migrants out in the face of growing racism across many of the 28 member states.

They didn't vote for the annihilation of Irish fishing rights or a loss of power by nation states which ensures that the Irish Government no longer seems able to decide whether or not it can abolish deeply unpopular water charges.

They didn't vote for a parliament which refused the right to Irish MEPs to comment on a vote which will have more of an impact here than anywhere else yesterday. Luke 'Ming' Flanagan MEP, from one of the most remote regions in Europe, claimed that he and the other MEPs from the Republic were effectively being 'gagged' yesterday.

But Brexit proved one thing, emphatically - ordinary people across Europe feel alienated from the EU institutions which govern them.

The EU needs reform, it's just that people like the racist Nigel Farage MEP (UKIP) and opportunist Boris Johnson MP (Conservative) are not the ones to provide the solutions.

It's a sad day for Ireland when our nearest neighbour and biggest trading partner leaves the EU, but in all of the noise over xenophobia and racism let's not forget that there were very valid arguments about how undemocratic the EU has become during the Brexit debate too.

This is a time for healing wounds and building bridges.

Nobody wants to see a militarized border separate the Republic from the North again.

Luke 'Ming' Flanagan MEP,
not allowed to speak yesterday

And few want a divisive vote about a United Ireland right now, either. Not while a million people see themselves as British, even if the Britain they know seems to be falling apart.

Before we talk about that we need to start following the same teams, drinking in the same bars, living in the same neighbourhoods and mixing with each other to break down the barriers.

I had to go all the way to Egypt and Thailand to learn that I could make friends with ordinary English people, and be accepted for who I am, yet how many of us have made no effort to find out about the "others" who live just down the road.

Racism and xenophobia only fuel ignorance and offer no solutions, while isolation is simply impossible in the 21st century.

I do think British people made the wrong decision last Thursday, but only a fool would claim that the EU is not in need of sweeping reforms.

As for the border; well, nobody, but nobody, wants a return to the dark days of the 1970s and 1980s. There are too many connections between our two islands and our communities within this island to allow that to happen.

It's a time to build bridges, not to put up new fences, customs posts, passport controls, and watchtowers, long after many of us were so happy to see them being dismantled.


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Trip to the hospital ... and learning about acceptance

Four days in hospital taught me so much about acceptance this week.

I had so many plans for the weekend. My cousin was coming into town for the big Galway FC game at Terryland, and we had planned to attend the play-off on Friday evening with a few friends. On Saturday, there was going to be a huge protest against Irish Water in the city centre. A cause to rally around, and perhaps some material for my blog. 

On Sunday, my entire clan was set to gather for my dad’s 90^th birthday, with people home from London, Tipperary, and Dublin to celebrate a significant milestone.

And, on Monday, I was set to start the full-time Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) course which would help me start a new life overseas – and get over the post-redundancy jitters!

I was excited by the prospect of getting out of my comfort zone, meeting new people, and trying something totally alien to me by becoming an English teacher.

But sometimes fate likes to throw a spanner in the works of the best laid plans and I found myself going to the doctor with an infection on my shoulder which appeared to be getting out of hand. By Wednesday, it was the size of a red tennis ball.

On Friday, fearful that the TEFL course was so near on the horizon, I found myself sitting in the A&E Department at University Hospital Galway (UHG) at 2.30pm. Armed with a book, an iPod, and a bottle of water, I expected to be there for about three or four hours. I had been referred there by my GP and hoped to be out for the big soccer game.

Instead of a quick visit, I got my first (and hopefully last) experience of overnighting on a trolley at the Emergency Department at UHG. It’s something I had written about countless times for the newspaper – patients lying on trolleys all night because there were no beds for them in the hospital. 

It still seems shocking that it happens so frequently in 21^st century Ireland and the numbers are documented every day across the country thanks to the ‘Trolley Watch’ figures compiled and circulated by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO).  

The lump which caused all the trouble!

By 10pm, when the doctor told me I would have to stay the night, on a drip and on a trolley, the only thing that kept me going was the advice of older and wiser patients. They told me not to fight it, not to over-analyse it, but to read my book, relax, and simply accept the way things were.

Halloween night was spent on a trolley, watching the odd drunk girl being escorted along the corridor in the early hours, and then began another long day of waiting. Conversations with patients from Connemara and East Galway, dignified people who bore their frustrations with such grace, forced me to question my own despair.

They told me about their lives as emigrants in America, their families and neighbours, their health problems, and I suddenly began to appreciate just how friendly and down to earth West of Ireland people, my people, can be.

Suddenly, in the midst of pain and boredom, I began to truly realise how pointless all my fears over taking redundancy had been over the previous weeks. I had been full of fear even though I had my health and new-found freedom.

I fasted all day Saturday, in case of surgery, and felt like I’d won the lottery when the nurses found me a bed in a ward at 4pm. Family members came in to help out with clothing and reading material and, as I began to talk to the patients from Donegal on either side of me, I began to realise how lucky I was.

The Donegal man next to me had fasted for eight days in a row, ready for surgery that never went ahead. He was too far from home to receive regular visits and bore his predicament with a grace which confounded me and questioned my own self-pity at the same time.

After a series of tests, I was told I’d be operated on the following day. That meant missing the family birthday celebration but, as the hours passed, I began to see how much pointless anxiety I had put myself through over the previous weeks. Leaving a job can be traumatic, but it is certainly not the end of the world.

On Sunday, I read the ‘paper from cover to cover and managed to concentrate on the FAI Cup Final for two hours. I strolled up and down the corridor a few times and realised how much more fortunate I was than the lads who could not get out of their beds. 

I kept thinking of a friend of mine who survived a horrific motorbike crash ten years ago and how he bore his pain, and months upon months in hospital, with such dignity.

The doctors opened my shoulder up with a local anaesthetic on Sunday afternoon, but soon realised that I would need a full operation. My neighbour doubted the prospect of the surgery going ahead that evening, based on his own experiences, but I was finally operated on after 10pm that night. 

It dawned on me that, even though I had seen little of them, the doctors had been working incredibly long hours all through the weekend.

By Monday, a whole new sense of acceptance had come over me. Yes, I had missed my father’s birthday and had to withdraw from the TEFL course.

Despite all the waiting and frustration, there were valuable lessons to be learned. In hospital, I practiced mindfulness breathing and banished pointless anxieties about the future out of my mind.

It’s amazing how a little kick up the rear end can put previous troubles in their proper perspective.

As I made my way out of UHG on Monday evening, I realised how few troubles I really had in life as long as I had my health. 

That doesn’t excuse the inefficiencies at the hospital. Nobody should have to overnight on a trolley in the A&E department or spend eight days waiting for a routine operation, fasting every day, in the year 2014.

Especially not in a country which spent so much money on bailing out bankers and bondholders at the expense of ordinary, dignified people. I’m not blaming the doctors or nurses, who could not have been more professional, but I got first hand experience that there is an awful lot wrong with our public health system over the weekend.

Yet even the inefficiencies, the boredom, the pain, and the incredibly bad timing of the whole episode, taught me a very valuable lesson about my own life.