Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Cheers to the unsung and invisible workers who have got us through this dreadful year

Fionnuala O Connor
Fionnuala O Connor Fionnuala O Connor

Hands up if you knew that speech therapists are struggling to meet a Covid-created demand.

Like frontline nurses and doctors, but invisible. Coming home to change all their clothes and put them in the washing-machine and shower before they come near anyone they live with. Some are teaching people whose mouths and throats have been distorted by ventilation, sometimes for many weeks, to speak again. Hear from someone else what her occupation is, and the shy woman encountered in the local park who makes small talk about the weather suddenly looks different.

Speech therapy needs more and better public relations, like lorry drivers. Through experiences that have damaged more lives than they have ended, so many disregarded people have got us this far. So consider this a catalogue as the year ends. Call it a litany, a secular hymn to give thanks and the recognition that many never get in their lives.

A fat lot of good eulogies do for the self-regard of the dead. Pleasing some in their families, no doubt, but sometimes so gushing that they surely have the wrong effect, that every newly-deceased was a hero and also a saint. The problem is that cogs in the big wheel of society are unassuming by nature or by their function. Not for them the faff (and money for simply turning up) lavished on Tory donors and Brexiteer fantasists now dubbed lords and ladies.

The ‘domiciliary care’ workers who visit the home-bound and sometimes bed-bound three and four times a day, at pitifully low financial cost to the state and vulnerable themselves? They’ll be working through the holiday period as usual, invisible to many. The visits some make through the night are sometimes the main contact an immobile person may have.

Staff in care homes have had walk-on walk-off parts in the tidied-up version most of us allow in our head, more than that only if we have relatives ‘in care’ and seen mostly through windows. Much of what medics and others do at the best of times is too disturbing to bring home and talk about. Exceptions are sanitised, like our hands. Some have been trying to shout warnings, without causing panic.

A specialist not given to big statements says ‘but you do feel despair when you see people who could have been fine if they had come to us earlier, and you can do nothing for them.’

Because people are afraid to be hospitalised specialists see them too late; avoidable stroke damage, eye conditions that could have been treated. Inventive measures are trying to get round the fear and to keep people at home for safety sake. Like the hospital-based doctors who now visit some of the dangerously unwell to check medication, symptoms.

It’s the cheerful and hard-working on the other front lines who comfort most people; shop workers helpful despite unpleasant and defiantly-maskless customers, postal workers making good-bad jokes, bus drivers holding a steady speed and their tempers. Pandemic driving deserved awards even before the vista of those lines of lorries with poor guys sleeping, and worse, in their cabs. Delivery drivers cheer the home-working or at least those still spending, takeaways lightening days. Apparently restaurants have been a joy, more power to staff hiding their own terrors.

Cheers should ring out for teachers and especially principals in despair over the nonsense about transfer tests, non-policy on schools opening/closing/online or blended teaching. Seasonal spirit says dig farther down for sympathy. They’ve had a bad press, but some civil servants are struggling through this holiday to turn incoherent political lines into legislation.

It’s harder for some, perhaps, to praise journalists, trying as the media contract to report truthfully and without sensationalising. Harder again to acknowledge that policing is tough; on the ground, and at the top. And hardest of all to volunteer that Stormont ministers, though you only have to look at Robin Swann to see it, have been under intolerable strain. 2020? Bah humbug.