According to a report in this paper the other day, we have become a laughing-stock in Romania since being gulled by a group of 37 Romanian choristers. Having been invited to Ireland in all innocence by the organisers of a Sligo music festival, these people had their visas and permits all in order - but 25 of them demanded political asylum as soon as they arrived.
Not before time, the scandal reveals the sinister nature and dark underbelly of the choir movement worldwide. For far too long, we have been duped by the term "choirboy looks." Choirs have traded shamelessly on their image as living symbols of nicely-dressed harmlessness, spreading vague joy-to-the-world messages, clappy-happy nonsense and radiant handholding innocence. We need to wake up to the reality, particularly as Christmas - the chorister's favourite season - draws near, and be on our guard.
According to the newspaper report, many Romanians were amused that suspicions were not raised by the name of the suspect group - Dorul, meaning desire, yearning or longing. We can hardly all be fluent in Romanian, but even if we had known, that is just the sort of airy-fairy Celtic-swirly-wirly name we would expect a folk choir to have. Had it been "Rapper Bitches Comin' from Hell" singing, in close harmony, tracks like You Dissin' Me, White Boy? we might have guessed something was up.
We will just have to be more careful from now on - and keep an eye out for the missing 12 Romanians still legally here on their 90-day visas, and probably setting up a breakaway choir, no doubt to be called "Gooey Happiness All Over the World" and crooning sickening ditties like "No One Dies Ever". All of this is only to reassure Public Enterprise Minister Mary O'Rourke that there is little danger of us journalists losing our cynicism. Speaking at the national media awards lunch the other day, Ms O'Rourke remarked that cynicism was a necessary tool for every journalist: it was "the AK47 of the profession".
It is too. Anyone looking for work in this office gets sent down to the Irish Times firing range in south Wicklow first thing. We have everything from hand-guns to heat-seeking missiles down there, and you can forget about a career in the media if you are at all shy about using them. It's about getting down and dirty and only the toughest last the course.
Trainees are severely tested under fire. Hardened old hacks put the youngsters under fierce mental pressure, using heavy sarcasm and terrible cynicism and saying really nasty things, a lot of which aren't true at all. Even the most thick-skinned are made to feel the pain.
Innuendo and slander and gross libel meanwhile are kept for the advanced journalist "rangers" course. But very few who start out on this treacherous test ever receive the coveted pink beret. Blind alleyways, false leads and misinformation litter the route. You have to crawl through tunnels lined with the most mind-numbingly banal press releases, the most excruciatingly tedious government statements. If you get that far, you can however pick up extra marks for undermining your own colleagues' efforts to succeed (Now that is cynical).
ALL right. Enough codology. There was an article about the nurses recently which quoted a few lines from W.H. Auden's poem, "Surgical Ward": They are and suffer; that is all they do/A bandage hides the place where each is living/ His knowledge of the world restricted to/The treatment that the instruments are giving...
Not many people know there is a vast library of hospital verse, little of it in general circulation, apart from the Auden poem mentioned and our own Patrick Kavanagh's piece about how he "fell in love with the functional ward of a chest hospital."
Most poets spend time in hospital at some time of their lives - they are rarely noted for healthy lifestyles - so it is more or less inevitable that while lying in bed with little to do (not that this is much of a variation from their usual life) they take a turn for the verse.
The thing has got very specialised, of course. Since his great poem quoted in part above, Auden has had the surgical ward area entirely to himself. Kavanagh, the common man, naturally chose to record his poetic reflections in a public ward, and this field is well populated. The isolation wards are great favourites with the less social type of poet.
However, for aspiring hospital poets, ward-smiths (sick) with a good range of dramatic imagery, there are still attractive openings in Accident and Emergency. Musings in the maternity wards are naturally confined - sore to speak - to female poets, but the best opportunity is that occurring in the waiting areas of our public hospitals. All human life is there, and prosaic as much of it might be, it still deserves to be recorded poetically.
E-mail: bglacken@irish-times.ie
