December 28th, 1999

Three days left of the twentieth century, and two thousand years.
Goodbye to the twentieth century. The good and the bad times, the glad and the sad times, the wars and pestilence, to man's inhumanity to man; to brutality and torture, to poverty and disease, to racial hatred and intolerance. To child abuse and child labour, good riddance to the master and servant class, to the bad times when only the privileged and the rich obtained an education. No matter how clever the underpriveleged child.
Still, not all gloom and doom.
Welcome to the second half of the century. The wonderful advancement in science and technology, the eradication of killer diseases such as tuburculosis, which was prevalent in the 1940s, At that time I worked at Galway hospital in the west of Ireland. There were special wards for T.B patients. Day after day, young people were admitted to die eventually, always young, it was also very sad for us young workers who talked to them every day. In the children's ward I saw this lovely little girl, she looked so well, I asked the nurse in charge, that beautiful child suffered convulsions and she died that night, There were so many awful diseases at that time. Polio, which left many young people crippled, and diphtheria which devastated our school when I was a child, of the five children who caught the disease, only two survived. No penicillin then.
Thank God we were a very healthy family, we only had the usual coughs and colds.
Two of my best friends, aged twenty-one and twenty-four died of T.B.
At that time, people were ashamed to admit to the disease, as if it were a disgrace.
Now cancer has taken over the role. Perhaps one day with the help of science and technology a cure will also be found for cancer.
We have a great debt to Aneurin Bevan and the National Health Service, instituted in 1948 which gave every person, young and old, a right to free health care. It was the envy of the world.
In the fifties and early sixties, I had my eight children and the medical care I recieved in hospital and the care and attention at home was equal to private care today and was second to more.

In the sixties, science and technology enabled man to explore space, in 1969 men walked on the moon, "a small step for man, a giant step for mankind" and yet there is no solution to child poverty and disease and pollution in the big cities of the world.
Medical science has advanced in leaps and bounds in the last twenty or thirty years with open heart surgery, heart transplants and test tube babies, but no cure for the common cold and asthma still affects a great number of people.

Now we have the computer age, with the 'web' and the 'net' - a complete mystery to people of my age. I might still learn it. If you can't beat them, join them.
Nobody writes letters anymore.They send E-mail. My grandchildren use it all the time, I got my Christmas and birthday cards from my son Martin in Brazil by E-mail. I hope pen and paper does not become obsolete in the 21st century.

I cannot let the 90s go without a mention of the blessed Maggie, who thought she was God.
You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

In the early part of the century, match making was a fine art in rural Ireland. It probably had gone on for hundreds of years. The fathers or uncles of the proposed couple met and discussed terms and argued over the dowry. Sometimes the match was made between a young girl and a much older man, and the girl had little say in the matter. Perhaps she had to go live where there were already brothers and sisters and sometimes the parents of her husband. And worse luck for the girl whose people couldn't afford a dowry. She continued to live at the family home, where her brother brought his wife, and she slaved for the new family and helped to rear the children. She had no money, no status and little respect, and she grew more bitter every day. There was always the exception where the woman lived happily with her brother or sister's family. Perhaps she was glad to have escaped the marriage market; she had her children to rear and no responsibility for the roof over her head. This is from life in my village.
The girls of my generation didn't hang around for a man. We got the hell out of it and found jobs. I worked at Galway hospital with dozens of young girls, the work was hard and long, but who cared, we had a day and a half off in the week and we finished at six with the beach ten minutes away.
We went to dances in the town at the weekends. The hospital gates were locked at 10:30! So most times we were locked out. No problem. If we couldn't sweet talk the gatekeeper, we climbed the wall, it was six feet high but when one is young and fit, it was a daddle. Much harder to avoid the night sister. We had to watch her movements, until a friend inside, opened a window to climb in. Would the young people believe that today.
Visits back to childhood are not always happy. As a family, we were very clever and intelligent young people. We all attended a national school in a rural area, until the age of fourteen which was leaving age. There was no further education without money or influence and there was little of that. I have always felt the lack of a decent education. It is like a hunger.
Welcome to the new woman of today. The woman who has it all. A decent education, career, husband, children and home. Probably an au pair or live-in housekeeper.
Then the single career woman with her own flat, friends and social life. Women who work in every profession, with a wonderful university education and all thanks to a wonderful band of women who worked and suffered, been divided, pushed and spat upon, taken on by the government and the police, been sent to prison and force-fed more than once and eventually won and gained the vote for women. And there are thousands of women today who can't be bothered to vote.