In times of despair, many people still turn to prayer, writes Fintan O'Toole. If they can't find something, Catholics turn to Saint Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost articles.
Catholic websites, especially in America, are still full of testimonies to the saint's prowess as a kind of heavenly golden retriever. Lost keys, lost socks, lost prayer books, lost wedding rings turn up as a result of his intercession. A secretary is about to be fired because she has sent crucial business correspondence to the wrong address but Saint Anthony makes it arrive at the intended destination. A truck driver is in trouble because he can't remember where he parked his rig, but Saint Anthony guides him to the place.
There's a rather lovely prayer on one website that nudges this folk tradition gently in the direction of something larger : "Saint Anthony, perfect imitator of Jesus, who received from God the special power of restoring lost things, grant that I may find (mention your petition) which has been lost. At least restore to me peace and tranquillity of mind, the loss of which has afflicted me even more than my material loss."
I was thinking of how appropriate it was that Saint Anthony's relics were going on display in Dublin last Friday when I read Catriona Crowe's very moving piece in this paper about the death a year ago of her brother Michael, a 46-year-old primary school teacher in Wexford. On the morning of June 5th, 2002, he ran a bath, and was bending over it when his brain was engulfed by an epileptic seizure. His head fell into the running water, and he drowned. His brother found him the next day, the water running cold over his lifeless body.
This is the kind of loss that no saint can repair, and it will probably take many years to restore tranquillity of mind to his loved ones. At one level, it came from a terrible, unavoidable conjunction of affliction and circumstances, epilepsy choosing exactly the wrong moment to strike. But there is a broader sense in which this society wilfully loses people like Michael Crowe. We misplace people like odd socks or lost keys and we don't bother to look for them. And those who need to look often might be as well off praying to Saint Anthony as asking the Government to pay attention.
About a hundred people die in Ireland every year as a result of epileptic seizures, between 70 and 80 of them in the Republic. Many of these deaths are avoidable. A major study in the UK last year found that almost 40 per cent of adult deaths from epilepsy and 60 per cent of deaths among children could be prevented by better medical practice, clear communication and more awareness of the problem. Translated into Irish terms, that's about 30 or 40 unnecessarily lost lives every year.
Unlike many areas of medical care, this is more about awareness than money. Simply focusing on the problem and looking at the way the system interacts with people with epilepsy could make a vast difference. This is why Brainwave, the Irish epilepsy charity, has been lobbying the Department of Health and Children for four years for funding for an Irish study similar to the UK one. The estimated cost is a pittance - €130,000 to €160,000. But the Department has shown no real interest in coming up with the money.
It's as if the State is happy for people to get lost. If a study is published, it raises awareness. Awareness brings demands. We start to see people's lives. Abstract conditions (epilepsy, mental handicap, autism and so on) acquire a human face. A sense of responsibility emerges. And that is bothersome. It is easier to remain ignorant, to keep things at the level of abstraction where, unless you are directly involved, it is hard to sustain interest.
This happens all the time. We have the knack of losing whole groups of citizens. We forget about drug abusers until someone publishes a photograph of people shooting up in broad daylight on the streets of Dublin and we have a brief little festival of outrage before amnesia takes hold again. We forget about the unnecessary misery of people with mental disabilities and their carers affected by cutbacks which deprive them of basic services.
We lose sight of the 200,000 people on low incomes who have slowly drifted above the threshold for a medical card (currently €138 per week) and to whom so many broken promises were made in the Health Strategy. We can't remember where we put the mentally ill people incarcerated unnecessarily in dreary hospitals. We've given up looking for the 150,000 or so unpaid carers whose lives are narrowed because they have to fill in the blanks in the services that the State doesn't provide.
And we've lost other things too: our sense of outrage, our belief in social solidarity, our trust in the public realm, our optimistic notion that if we ever got rich in this country we'd be a model society that would show the world how to combine prosperity with care. Maybe Saint Anthony, restorer of lost things, can help us find these missing qualities so that we can in turn find the lost people of Irish society. It may be a desperate wish, but if we're left to the values of the current Government, we haven't a prayer.