HEART BEAT: Reform is in the air we breathe - it's time to say enough is enough, writes Maurice Neligan
THERE IS so much to write about and so many things to say, that choice becomes a major problem. While pondering this, the merry miners from Sierra are excavating the road outside the house and the clangour of jack hammers and drills fills the air.
They seem to have been doing this most of my adult life. What precisely they are doing or achieving remains shrouded in mystery but one assumes they know themselves.
That might be an assumption too far. I thought of Percy French and the Mountains of Mourne - "they don't sow potatoes nor barley nor wheat but there's gangs of them digging for gold in the street".
I inquired of a young lady in a high visibility jacket and carrying that essential staff of office, a clipboard, as to what might be going on. She patiently explained it to me. It had something to do with expediting the passage of buses through the interchange, I think.
The words "cycle lane" figured also. As a voice crying in the wilderness I pointed out to her that the current cycle lane on the Rock Road, shared with the bus lane, was simply not big enough to accommodate both and was a dangerous conceit.
Her eyes glazed over and without overtly conveying it she gave the distinct impression that this was not her lucky day.
Cycling is good exercise and very commendable indeed. It is not, however, meant to put your life at risk. Calls for children to cycle to school and thus thwart obesity are at best naive and at worst irresponsible. Adults can choose to take their lives in their hands and cycle, best if they carry a donor card, but children should not be pressurised into doing likewise.
By all means, encourage cycling but let us have distinct and separate lanes and rules for cyclists and their interaction with other road users, pedestrians and the soon-to-be extinct motorists.
The infamous budget inflicted upon us had some nonsense about employers being allowed give their workers bicycles instead of wages, or some similar daft proposal; a crumb for the greens.
A much more creative way of problem solving would have been to give all over-80s a free bicycle, without a means test of course. This would have reduced pressure on the medical card system and help to move these troublesome folk along expeditiously. The spin could have been that cycling in advancing years is good for you and helps reduce arthritis, Alzheimer's and all the ills of advancing years.
There comes a point, too often triggered by economic adversity, when people have had enough of capricious, autocratic and vacillating rule. They begin to mobilise and say enough is enough. We have just witnessed this in the US. People expect to be governed wisely and for the benefit of the whole, not just a select few.
This has not been the case here. It is still not the case. In all the disaster scenarios that we are belatedly being fed by those who until a few short months ago told us that there was no problem, there has yet been no effort to remedy the glaring waste at the heart of Government. The "jobs for the boys" and their families attitude still prevails, and if there is belt tightening to be done, that unpleasant exercise is for the rest of us.
If we could see realisation dawn at the centre, maybe even a little contrition and acknowledgement that things were not done wisely, that would help. If there was an effort to reform the centre and eliminate the waste therein, that would be positive also.
In the absence of such, where do the people go? There is anger abroad among all classes of people, those who are losing their jobs, their homes and their savings. There is anger against cutting of front- line health services while the multitudinous administrators remain untouched.
There is anger at all levels in education at the hypocrisy that tells us we must be a knowledge-based economy and yet cuts the roots through which the tree must grow.
I suppose most of us have read Patrick Pearse's poem The Rebel and its warning on misgovernment - "beware of the thing that is coming, beware of the risen people". Sir Henry Wotton, friend of Jon Donne and Izaak Walton, wrote of the newly awakened -
This man is freed from servile bonds
Of hope to rise, or fear to fall
Lord of himself, though not of lands
And having nothing, yet hath all.
It doesn't seem that those in power are listening to the rising clamour or do they think that by compartmentalising individual disaffected groupings that they can mollify the whole? It seems so and yet it is futile. Reform is in the air we breathe and must for our very survival be achieved.
Right now for those of us, the majority, who have no power, the Arabic phrase "El Sharei Lena" or "the street is ours" is pertinent. We're not going away any time soon.
• Maurice Neligan is a cardiac surgeon