Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

VOICE OF EXPERIENCE:In a health service so maligned and under threat, there remains some small triumph of humanity

IT WAS only after my second or third time in St Monica’s that I had a sense I had been there before. Not inside exactly, but outside certainly. From the haze of childhood memory, I vaguely recall sitting in a parked car outside the home while my mother visited a friend, Angela Crowley. The bleak facade of 60s concrete and brick seemed, even at my young age, an affront to the Georgian elegance of the adjoining Mountjoy Square, and there seemed to be an opaque gloom about this forlorn corner of 1970s north inner-city Dublin. In my childish imagining, this, of course, seemed the perfect location for a nursing home.