STORIES FROM MY GRANDMOTHER
By MARGARET E. WARD (note: spelling incorrect in Irish Times archive)
1482 Words
29 October 1996
Irish Times

GRANDMA was a jailbird. The confirmation of this fact, a few months ago, was strangely comical and I laughed nervously as I read the document in my hand that confirmed it: “Prisoner Index No. 13286, O’Toole, Maggie, Tomduff, Borris, Carlow”.

Still doubtful, I checked the Kilmainham Gaol register and found an inquiry after her from March 26th, 1923. This was apparently one of many letters written by her mother, my great grandmother, Mary Anne Murphy O’Toole, in a campaign to have her 14 year old eldest child released from prison.

Hold on a minute. How could this girl possibly have grown to become my 88 year old grandmother, who lives in the US and whose greatest past offence, in my mind, was providing me with forbidden butterscotch or mint sweets?

This sense of confusion began the moment I stepped off the plane in June 1995, armed with 50 or more hours of interviews with my grandmother and a deep curiosity about my parents’ and grandparents’ emigration to New York. Although I’d travelled to Ireland over a dozen times as a child, this time I was here as an adult to write my grandmother’s life story and I was deeply sceptical as to the accuracy of the interviews.

There was no doubt she was a captivating storyteller, but journalists and biographers usually find that many stories are false; merely a combination of gossip, half truths and misinformation. My numerous discoveries over the past 16 months concerning Margaret O’Toole Rice, the woman for whom I was named, have made me put aside my scepticism and reassess my attitude towards the truth in ordinary lives.

While I was growing up in New York, I’d heard grandma tell her story about running dispatches during the Civil War but I thought it was just that: a story. She lived on the third floor of our house in Long Island and although I was frightened by anyone without teeth, a decidedly American obsession, I found a solution to the problem in order to hear her tales. After dinner each night, I ran up the stairs shouting: “Grandma, put your teeth in, I’m coming up.”

There she sat, as if she’d never moved from the day before, in her armchair crocheting an afghan for one relative or another. I’d pick up one of the brightly coloured balls of yarn from her basket, sit on the floor next to her and ask her a question: “Who is this afghan for, grandma?” or say “Tell me again what it was like in prison”, knowing full well that it would release another tale of that strange country where my parents were born.

According to my grandmother: “In Kilmainham, I got this itch, some sort of rash between your hands. I was the only one who got it, because I was younger, or whatever. I had to be isolated from the others, getting soaks and baths, and you had to scrub yourself and it used to bleed. I was about three weeks on it, and that’s all on my own. I got to choose my own cell, because they were idle. I chose the one where Count Plunkett and his daughter in law were. The moon shone in and you could see Mary painted on the wall, with the light from the outside shining on it.”

Once I absorbed her words, I decided to reenact her experience there, even though I was twice her imprisonment age. Last spring, I stood alone in that freezing cold cell and imagined the stern faced Maggie O’Toole praying, as she would, to the religious mural on the wall, with only a candle for warmth and light. The sense of desperation and loneliness I felt in five minutes was overwhelming and my toes were so frozen I thought they’d snap off if I took even one step. I quickly moved to the comfort of a warm room off the cell, to re-read her interviews concerning Kilmainham, making my attempt at reliving the past even more pathetic.

Despite the warmth of my grandmother’s voice when she spoke, there was an “Are you listening to me girl, because this is important” urgency in the telling. I admit that sometimes I wasn’t listening but instead floating on the melodious intonations of her voice and the very roll of the words from her Irish tongue. When the crochet needles fell silent, I knew I was being reeled back in for the climax of the story. Looking up, I’d see my grandmother’s dour stare give way to her greatly mischievous laugh and a nod of acknowledgement before she fashioned the grand finale.

According to my grandmother, this gift for dramatic storytelling was inherited from my great grandmother, Mary Ann O’Toole. “My mother could read books, and she could sit there and tell you from A to Z. After my father died, her oldest brother used to come up with the horses for a couple of days to help us put in the crops, and she’d start telling stories, and the stories that she read, like Cusped Hands and Lady Isabel and all that. Well, she’d stare at that book, and we used to be so quiet because we couldn’t stir, we couldn’t make a stir while she was telling the story.”

In 1908, the year my grandmother was born, this same Mary Anne O’Toole obtained the Scottish Widows’ Fund Calendar and Diary 1908 and started recording important family events within its pages. This index finger long and two thumbs wide book was lovingly maintained by my grandmother’s late sister, Katherine, and was loaned to me recently by her daughter, Betty Ryan Costin of Kilcock, Co Kildare. One of the first entries says: “The first child was born August 20, 1907 an [sic] died a son. The second child was born 2nd August 1908 a daughter baptised by Father John Beechman p. priest of Rathanna the 9th day of August 1908, sponsor Micheal Murphy DMP and Margret Doran of Sisken an called the child Margret.”

Over a year after my grandmother was released from prison, Mary Ann wrote one of her last entries in that tiny book: “Maggie O’Toole left Tomduff 13 day October 1924 for London” then finally, “stopt their till 3 Nov an sailed to New York in 1926 wrote by her mother Mary An Toole”.

Little did she know that Maggie would return to Ireland in 1932 married, against her mother’s wishes, to a man from the parish in Rathanna named Arthur Rice and holding the first of an eventual total of seven children. Although Arthur was the youngest son, he had inherited their new home, Rice’s of Ballinvalley, from his mother. Unfortunately, Arthur maintained his rambling ways and, although my grandmother continued to love him, things were very difficult for her working the farm with the children.

By 1959, with Arthur gone for good, she followed her grown children to the US: “We did auction and when I left the road gate the morning we were moving out I thought my heart would break and oh Lord, I cried and cried all the ways to the train. And when I look at that now I say God knew so well that it was hard at that time like everything was. God directed me. But it was hard, and I loved every grain, every blade of grass that grew on that farm.”

Ballinvalley, the farm my grandmother loves so well, was never sold and is now being refurbished by the family. Today, at 88 my grandmother has outlived her husband, her siblings, three of her seven children (including my mother) and most of the people she was imprisoned with in Kilmainham. She stopped crocheting the afghans and working her full time job as a nurse only a few years ago. In August, her physical health collapsed and now she lies semi comatose in a hospital bed in Andover, Massachusetts just a few minutes away from her only son Thomas and his family.

Although I have a lifetime of listening to her stories and I’ve been researching them for the past year and a half, I find that it is only when the people we love are silenced that we really begin to listen. A few years back, Grandma told me she learned how to crochet from her mother but perfected the craft in Kilmainham Gaol as a way to pass the time while telling stories. I still have the little pink, white and blue baby blanket she gave my mother before I was born. If I ever have a daughter, I wonder how many stories that blanket will whisper to her as she sleeps?

“Do you have an iPhone?” and “Have you seen this cool new app?” are phrases that have the relentless pester power of the childhood mantra “Are we there yet?” That kind of ongoing consumer validation is a marketer’s dream, but it comes at a price. A product that has as much power for a love-in, also has that same opportunity to become a target of downright hatred.

Many iPhone users are positively evangelical in their praise of the phone. Haven’t you heard through the grapevine and news reports that this brand of mobile phone can save your life, help when you’re lost, make you laugh and communicate all of life’s most important events?

When a happy slappy iPhone user takes out their iPhone to show their latest app I roll my eyes, sigh and watch the parental glee in their eyes. I feel like screaming but I’m also tempted to go buy one because apparently, iPhone-a-phobes like me are really bad people.

Saving lives one app at a time
American filmmaker Dan Woolley claims that an iPhone medical app saved his life after the Haitian earthquake disaster. He was in the country shooting a documentary about Haitian poverty. When the quake struck, he was buried in rubble. Luckily, the iPhone first-aid app he’d downloaded showed him how to make a tourniquet for this leg and stop the bleeding from his head. It also led him to a safe place and allowed rescuers find him.

For some, it’s love at first sight. There’s a guy on twitter who uses the @iphone moniker and says he’s just “a dude with an iPhone who likes stuff from Apple”. What have they put into this phone that makes people become slaves to its charms?

Some people can’t stand touchscreen functionality. My non-touchscreen business phone and I are really quite happy together. It’s easy to use for phone calls, email and internet access. It doesn’t demand that I caress its screen or zoom in to view photos of other people’s babies. I never use the music or camera functions and I’m quite happy with my uncomplicated relationship.

But now that iPhone app save lives my stance is a bit like despising Lassie and Florence Nightingale. In word of mouth marketing though there’s always a place for the haters and, on the flipside, you can read Twitter postings from @ihateiphone.

This seminal phone from Apple has also been targeted for satire. American comedy site landlinetv.com has a spoof ad claiming Google released a new f*** you iPhone app that drives iPhone users crazy.

No matter where you fall in this debate, the recently-released Vitrue Social Media Index 2009, the iPhone was the most talked-about brand on the social web last year.

The internet has revolutionised word of mouth. Not only can brands benefit from positive buzz online – Daft.ie became one of the most visited sites in Ireland despite spending almost nothing on advertising and marketing – but they can also produce viral media, such as videos or Flash games, that is specifically designed to get people talking on email, Facebook, Twitter and so on.

But it can take a brave brand to push word-of-mouth marketing. Viral campaigns and customer-generated reviews can work wonders for a brand, but they’re risky. Recent research by information management firm Convergys found that a negative review or comment on Twitter, Facebook or YouTube can lose companies as many as 30 other customers.

And that could be an under-estimate. When Sacha Baron Cohen’s film Bruno opened in July 2009, it made $14.2m on its first night, but ticket sales fell drastically the following day, leaving overall sales for its first weekend as much as $20m down on expectations. What happened? Negative word of mouth. Time magazine said the following week, “Bruno could be the first movie defeated by the Twitter effect”.

Be credible, not clumsy
So you want to use social media to generate word-of-mouth marketing? Use social media first. Understand it. Do your research. It’s not enough to jump in, pushing a company’s product or services. That’s just annoying and intrusive to other users.

You have to be properly involved, discussing relevant issues, making special offers and helping customers. The tone must also be right. It must be honest and credible, not patronising or “sales-y”.

Notoriously, Habitat got Twitter very wrong. It began to tweet last year, but instead of using relevant hashtags (words preceded by a ‘#’ to help users track topics on Twitter) such as #furnituresale or #homefurnishings , it used popular hashtags, such as #iranelection and #iphone. Twitter users were outraged and much negative press followed, leaving the company to apologise profusely and reassess its social media use.

Using social media is a high-risk strategy. If you get it wrong, the online world can quickly turn on your brand, heaping scorn upon it and ripping it to shreds. Almost worse, it might just ignore you.

Success comes from engagement
You can encourage it and facilitate positive word of mouth. Give customers something good to talk about , listen to what they have to say and engage with them. In the US, blue-chip companies like Ford and Coca-Cola have teams that monitor what is being said about them online and, crucially, respond personally to that feedback. As Andy Sernowitz, recognised as the leading American word-of-mouth guru , says:  “People are already talking. Your only option is to join the conversation.”

Haiti survivor praises iPhone app:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/haiti-survivor-iphone/

“Google” releases new f u iPhone app: http://landlinetv.com/?p=189

 The combined forces of slashed communications budgets, job cuts and a renewed focus on the competition have many firms in a panic looking for the next cost-effective tool. But, it’s like your mother always said: “Would you jump off a bridge just because John is doing it?”

Checking the top and bottom togs
Blogging is a simple, inexpensive way to share information with colleagues and employees. The author simply types up the message, posts it online and readers take a look. Blog messages can be top-down (nothing to do with convertible cars) or bottom-up (definitely not associated with after work drinks).

Internally, executives often use top-down blogs to communicate strategy, announcements or company status and to build team spirit within an organisation. Bottom-up messages are more community spirited and can be written by anyone from managers and project coordinators to new recruits. 

When done properly, blogs can actually replace the thousands of screaming “urgent” and “important” emails that employees ignore each day. Ideally, in-house blogs are a corporate collective brain housing memories of experiences, events, lessons learned, successes, failures and general information.  

Blogs have many benefits — from project management, team building and communication to idea development and knowledge sharing — but they need to be developed using realistic strategic thinking.

Hot or cold audience?
Corporate culture is a very specific thing. It trickles down from the top and is often based on leaders’ personalities: formal/ informal, jargon-happy or straight-talking, conservative or experimental, old or young, technology competent or newbie.

Leaders who are secretive, formal and unwilling to share details on the inner workings of the organisation are unsuitable candidates for a blog. Blogs should be open, honest, interactive conversations that invite comment. They’re more like a roundtable discussion than a passive lecture.

Shallow or deep purpose?
Good communications have specific objectives and blogs are no exception. They can be a short, sharp information tool. This might include a blog that reports – in an interesting way – on the progress of a short-term project or goal. Or it could be a HR blog that acts as an internal bulletin board or the “what’s on?” section of a newspaper. However, these blogs will struggle to attract repeat readers unless they are written in an entertaining way and provide information that’s important to the audience.

Deeper blogs need short, medium and long-term goals. Maybe a newly appointed CEO needs to raise her internal profile or a manager needs to bring together diverse teams?  Blogs like this must be carefully planned and constructed to ensure they get results.

Taking the plunge: top tips
1. Know the blog’s purpose. Internal corporate blogs should be linked to specific corporate strategic goals. Don’t just start a blog because it’s the new technology, someone thinks it’s a brilliant idea or because your competitor is doing it. Your blog must have a focus and a strategic communications purpose.

2. Find and maintain a voice. Blogs must have a recognisable human voice. Although some internal blogs are ghost-written by marketing staff on behalf of an executive, it’s important that they use the “real” voice of this person. Authors should think like a speechwriter: follow the person around for a day or two taking notes of their turns of phrase and speaking patterns.

3. Be open and transparent. Blogs are designed to be interactive so you should invite comments. It’s essential that the blog responds to, or manages, both positive and negative reader opinions. If it does not address the hard questions, it loses all credibility.

4. Have clear terms and conditions. Blogs are not a free for all. They’re a place for controlled but open discussions. Develop clear written policies on anonymous or defamatory postings and stick to them.

5. Be timely. You can’t expect staff to keep checking the blog hoping that something new has appeared. Announce your publication dates and stick to them.    

6. Plan, plan, plan. Although corporate blogs might seem like a few informal scribblings written when the author has a few spare minutes, they’re definitely not. A good blog is a strategic corporate communication that is planned to within an inch of its life. All good writing takes time, planning and effort.

It’s ok if you don’t have an internal blog. They’re not for everyone or every company. Some people never learn to swim and, for them, there should be no shame in being wise enough to get the towel and go home.

Margaret E. Ward is managing director of Clear Ink, the Clear English specialists, and a blogger www.stronglanguage.ie.

Well, if President Obama’s opinions are anything to go by it’s not much.  Today he told an audience in downtown New York, where Lehman was  headquartered, that:

“Unfortunately, there are some in the financial industry who are misreading this moment. Instead of learning the lessons of Lehman and the crisis from which we are still recovering, they are choosing to ignore them,” he was quoted as saying in the Irish Times. “So I want them to hear my words: We will not go back to the days of reckless behaviour and unchecked excess at the heart of this crisis.”

Ah yes, reckless behaviour and unchecked excess. That would mean three things: the outrageous bonus structure, insufficient risk controls and lack of regulation.

Bonus bingo
Let’s start with the bonus structure. Even when I was there (working in marketing so not eligible for big money) it was normal for traders and sales people to have a relatively low base salary and a POTENTIAL bonus that was many, many multiples of that number.

For example, someone who made a 75k base salary knew that if they hit certain targets they could make up to 250k. Each year, the potential for larger bonuses multiplied. Year two it could be 350k or 500k or any “monopoly money” amount.

This was very, very seductive. As incomes rose, most people increased their spending so all those Wall Streeters have an addictive  lifestyle habit to support – private schools and ski holidays for the kids; big suburban houses, flash cars and servants for the spouse; exclusive golf club memberships, holiday homes and designer clothing, cigars and single malt Scotch for them. (Lots of my friends in New York live this lifestyle so I ain’t making it up!)

The point is that it became both very difficult for people to leave the industry - would you leave 500k sitting around for someone else to take? – and almost impossible to keep reaching the new targets. Plus, most of their friends worked at the same thing so the lifestyle – and the conflicts – seemed normal.

Playing risk roulette
When a shopkeeper runs out of things to sell, he needs to get some more. On Wall Street, they simply start to make new stuff up and call them derivatives. These financial instruments are bits of this and bits of that combined to create something new like: asset-backed securtites (See Sub-prime time or Abbatior of Debt story on this blog).

To feed the increasingly voracious market for derivatives, financial product designers went wild and created things that not even a nuclear physicist could decipher. It’s a bit like those mad outfits you see on the catwalk during London Fashion Week…entertaining and outlandish but with no tangible value in the real world.

Because these things were so darned complicated no one was able to assess their REAL risk.

Ropey regulation
Finally we come to the policemen, the gatekeepers, the regulators. They were duped but they were also incredibly lazy. If they did not understand how something was valued it was their JOB to keep asking questions. They failed us in so many ways. (See post on this blog: Toxic tips from D’Oh School of Economics)

So, if we have learned something from the collapse of Lehman Brothers we should see changes to the financial sector such as:
1. Total product transparency with clear description of risks
2. Abolition of bonus structures that reward unrealistic risk taking
3. Proper regulation of financial markets
4. Regulators who have the ability to understand – or demand explanations for – the products they are regulating

Don’t hold your breath!

 “Mouse, I can’t take it anymore,” she said in a ragged whisper. “Please kill me. PLEASE.”

 “You’re crazy. What are you talking about mum? It must be the morphine making you talk like that,” she said.

 It was a terrible situation for anyone to be in. A nightmare of the worst imagining. That teenage girl was me.

Versions of this story are more common than you might think. The only variables are age, illness and relationship. Many of our friends and neighbours are caring for terminally ill – pain ridden –  husbands, wives, parents and children with little support from the state or others. For some, the agony is too much to bear.

Choosing to die
In July 2009, the British conductor Sir Edward Downes and his wife Joan ended their lives at a Swiss assisted suicide clinic in July. Lady Downes, 74, had terminal cancer and the 85-year-old conductor was nearly blind and increasingly deaf. He had been forced to give up conducting and relied heavily on his wife’s assistance but he was not in any pain.

Announcing their death, the family released a statement that read, “After 54 happy years together, they decided to end their own lives rather than continue to struggle with serious health problems. They died peacefully, and under circumstances of their own choosing, with the help of the Swiss organisation, Dignitas, in Zurich.”

Although the case conjures images of Romeo and Juliet it raises many issues not just because it was assisted suicide – which is illegal and many feel is morally wrong – but because Sir Downes was not terminally ill. Did both of them have the right to choose death? Should it only have been an option for her because of her terminal illness?

 Suicide support groups say people generally think about ending their life because they see no way out. It is important to show those who feel suicidal that they have choices. Surely, Sir Downes had the option of a live-in carer or others way to get through his remaining years without his wife?

 These difficult questions need public debate. If, for example, you legally take away a person’s right to die then, as a society, shouldn’t you take responsibility for the dignity of their natural death?

Dignity in dying
How do we wish to die? In 2004, the first Irish survey on death and dying found that 67 per cent of those interviewed wanted to die at home, pain-free, conscious and surrounded by their loved ones. Of the 30,000 people who pass away in Ireland annually only one-third get their wish. The rest – 20,000 – die in hospitals.

Would you like to pass away alone on a trolley in A&E while a drunk vomits nearby? This is an extreme example but many dying people occupy hospital beds on busy wards and do not receive the care and respect they deserve in their final moments.

Do we have a right to choose dignity in our dying? The hospice movement, and society, seem to believe that we do but our government’s policies do little to respect that notion. 

 Hospice care, a health service focusing on dignity in dying, is generally only available to those who have cancer and it is largely funded by voluntary contributions, not government funding. Why?

 End of life care
According to an article in the Irish Times “the average Irish person’s lifetime expenditure on health services is about €300,000 and almost 25 per cent of that sum, €70,000, is spent in the last year of life. More than 40 per cent of that is spent in the final month. Spending on patients in that last year is estimated at 10-15 per cent of a country’s total health budget. In Ireland this would amount to €1.6-€2.4 billion of the total health budget of €16 billion. And yet the current budget for hospice care is only €75 million, less than 5 per cent of the entire budget.”

End of life care (palliative care) depends on your diagnosis and where you live, according to Eugene Murray, chief executive of the Irish Hospice Foundation. The group is working to change this situation by offering palliative care to patients with conditions other than cancer and to expand their network but, of course, this will take time and funding.

Back to reality
The reality is that there are thousands of people in Ireland who do not experience a dignified death because the resources, and will, are not there to provide it. Thousands more families are struggling to care for and support dying relatives and friends. They lack proper supports from government, the community and society. Under that kind of mental, physical and emotional strain it’s likely that – in their rare quiet moments – they ask themselves if anyone cares about their loved one’s dignity in dying and what lies ahead for them at the end of their days?

Useful links
Living with dying and dignity, Irish Times
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2008/1213/1229035646035.html

Dying for guidance, the Guardian
http://www.cardi.ie/node/2390

Suicide prevention groups
Samaritans jo@samaritans.org, www.samaritans.org, 1850 609090 (Republic of Ireland) or 08457 909090 (UK including Northern Ireland)

Aware Defeat Depression, www.aware.ie, info@aware.ie, 01 6617211
1890 303 302

Your local doctor, listed under ‘General Practitioners’ in the Golden Pages or visit www.icgp.ie. Go to, or contact, the Accident and Emergency Department of your nearest general hospital.

International care perspectives
UK green paper on funding care for older people, Guardian article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/jul/14/green-paper-care-system-elderly

Holland’s care budget offered to older people instead of a place in a care home. Nearly 100,000 people have taken this option. Daily Mail report: http://www.seniorsworldchronicle.com/2009/07/uk-care-for-elderly-should-allow-us-all.html

 Today, family-sized and snack-size packaging and health benefit claims are the cornerstones of international food marketing. Harmless, right? Well, maybe not.  A growing body of international research says that food marketing to kids may actually contribute to obesity and illness.

Expanding waistlines
It used to be fun to laugh at the tubby Americans and their kids who visited these shore on their vacations but now our waistlines – and packaging sizes – are catching up with theirs.

Why? In the last 30 years we’ve morphed from a nation raised on the limited food we (or our neighbours) grew ourselves  – vegetables, milk, eggs, meats – to convenience food reliant, supermarket-loving consumers.

Sugary treats are now a birthright for many children and their size is growing. Recently, new “family-sized” bigger packs of M&Ms, Revels and Malteasers were launched here.

It’s no surprise that one out of every five Irish kids is overweight or obese. If those 20% of kids maintain their current eating and low activity patterns they’re possibly heading for a fat adulthood, a good chance at type two diabetes and lifelong behavioural problems.

Big business
Food marketing to children and youth is big business. International spending estimates range from $1.2 to $2 billion a year. In 2007, Kellogg’s spent a staggering $32.8 million on marketing Cheezits, a mini cheese cracker, according to the author of Food Politics, Professor of Nutrition and Food Policy at New York University, Marion Nestle.

In Ireland, around €130 million is spent on food and drink advertising. The vast majority of these products – 88 percent – are high in fat, sugar, salt, or all of the above. Obviously, food producers are not spending their cash on marketing fruit and vegetables but that may be changing as more ethical marketing practices are being forced upon them.

Health claims
Consumers are confused by nutritional labelling but strongly influenced by health claims. In 2004, sales of probiotic yoghurts and drinks alone were worth about €46 million in the Republic. Figures have risen steadily since then.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has doubts about some foods claims and is now clamping down on unproven health benefit claims by marketers. The body is targeting nutritionals, or “better for you products” whose supposed benefits are determined by the company itself and not independent researchers. For example, Sugar Puffs are promoted as a source of fibre, vitamins and iron but contain 35% sugar.

The EFSA recently studied almost 50 of the most common nutritionals – from cranberry juice and black tea to fish oil supplements and probiotic drinks – and rejected most of the claimed health benefits. For example, fish oil supplements were not found to improve brain growth and probiotic yogurt drinks did not help gut health.

Parents want to do right by their kids and many look for health claims on packaging – rather than the nutritional labels – before placing it in the trolley.  Even the most health conscious parent may be disappointed to find what’s really in their child’s lunchbox. SafeFood Ireland research found that smoothies are worth only one fruit a day, not the two claimed by the company.  Cheese Strings, clearly marketed at kids, have 24g of fat per 100g and far more salt than recommended for children. Bord Bia’s nutrition literature does not recommend the sweetened fruit drinks popular with kids but milk or water.

Ethical marketing
Do we have a responsibility to children when we market to them? Currently, food marketing to children relies on three basic rules – get them young, rely on pester power and differentiate kids’ food from adult food says Professor Marion Nestle. 

The Institute of Medicine (IOM), in the US, says children are targeted too young and they believe its “worth considering restrictions or bans on the use of cartoon characters, celebrity endorsements, health claims on food packages, stealth marketing, and marketing in schools, along with federal actions that promote media literacy, better school meals, and consumption of fruits and vegetables.”

 That message seems unlikely to filter through here any time soon. Over one-fifth of the population in Ireland is under 14 and their buying power is significant.  According to Shelflife, the retail industry website: “A 2008 report by Mintel states that the increasing influence these children and teenagers have over home mealtimes makes them a demographic worth pursuing. At the same time, due to the alarming increase in obesity among young people in recent years, pressures from the government and other groups has made many food and snack manufacturers wary of how they market their products. In spite of this, new products aimed at teens and kids abound in the snack and food aisles, and all evidence shows that this will continue to be the case.”

 Margaret E. Ward is a journalist and managing director, Clear Ink.

Oct 6, 2001
By Margaret E Ward

Sculptor Michael Richards spent his last evening on top of the world. After watching Monday night football in his studio on the 92nd floor of One World Trade Center with fellow artist Jeff Konigsberg, he knuckled down to the work at hand.

Richards’ two new sculptures, which revisited his favourite themes of flight and injustice, were nearing completion and he was determined to continue through the night.

The 38-year-old artist had previously cast life-size African-American figures from his own face and body, sometimes with aeroplanes jutting out from their abdomens. Now they took form as World War II pilots falling from the sky, tumbling into debris or riding flame-tailed meteors. As Richards worked, an autumn storm illuminated the distant Statue of Liberty and streaked the large studio windows with rain.

The next morning, Richards vanished along with his installations and thousands of other human beings. He was one of dozens of well-known modern artists whose masterpieces were destroyed in the September 11 terrorist attack, but the only one to forfeit his life.

Somewhere among the rubble and lost lives lay works by Auguste Rodin, Joan Miro, Roy Lichtenstein, Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson, their combined value in the region of US$100 million. They were part of New York City’s proud public and private art heritage. The twin towers served as a huge art gallery as its walls and plazas were lined with works commissioned or purchased by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

When the buildings were under construction in the 1960s, the organisation set aside 1 per cent of the cost for public art and later produced photographs of the collection in the book, Art for the Public.

Many visitors and locals enjoyed, or were puzzled by, some of these modern pieces. Anyone traipsing across the expanse outside to buy half-price theatre tickets at TKTS in the lobby or to catch a subway saw installations such as Red Stabile, a 25-foot work by Alexander Calder at Seven World Trade Center or Fritz Koenig’s outdoor revolving globe.

Inside, on the mezzanine of Two WTC, Joan Miro’s 1974 World Trade Center Tapestry was on display. Elsewhere, paintings by David Hockney and Roy Lichtenstein and sculptures by Masayuki Nagare and James Rosati intrigued and tantalised viewers. All are gone.

Many Wall Street companies and law firms located in the twin towers and nearby adorned their spaces with original and rare pieces of art. The best known was the ‘museum in the sky’ in the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm on the top floor which lost almost 700 of its 1,000 employees.

The company’s founder, B Gerald Cantor, was famously “touched” by the Hand of God, a marble sculpture by Rodin, during a 1945 visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. A year and a half later he owned a bronze version, and went on to add almost 750 more sculptures, drawings and memorabilia to the Iris and B Gerald Cantor Collection. This was the largest and most comprehensive private collection of works by Auguste Rodin in the world. Most were given away to museums, but more than 350 that were in the WTC are missing.

AXA Nordstern Art Insurance, the world’s largest art insurer, has said losses will top $100 million. AXA, which insured the Rodin sculptures, has set aside $20 million for its share of the claims. One art expert has placed the value of Red Stabile alone at $25 million.

Some pieces have managed to survive. Roy Lichtenstein’s Modern Head, a 30-foot sculpture is covered in dust and debris but largely intact. An art restorer has said she saw one of Nevelson’s works as well as a piece by Dubuffet in the rubble. Louise Nevelson was one of America’s most renowned Jewish female sculptors, but it is not clear if the piece is Sky Gate, an interpretation of the Manhattan skyline at night made with painted wood chair slats and barrel staves. It was her largest work in wood.

One hugely popular outdoor sculpture has been visible in newspaper photographs and TV reports. Double Check, a bronze sculpture of a middle-aged businessman peering inside his briefcase by J Seward Johnson Jr, was a favourite repository for notes and sandwiches before the disaster.

Now the Merrill Lynch-commissioned figure looks like an old man, his hair and suit powdered an ash grey. Flowers sit in his lap and candles at his feet — an unofficial memorial to the dead office workers and rescuers. A note taped to the top of the briefcase reads: “In memory of those who gave their lives to try and save so many.”

The names of individual fire-fighters, police and emergency medical service workers have been added to the single sheet of paper.

The loss of these artworks is incomparable to the suffering of the thousands who died and those who unwittingly bore witness to it. This has been acknowledged by the artists who worked alongside Michael Richards in the space provided by the World View programme, a joint project between the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) and the Port Authority of NY and NJ.

Only two of the 25 artists with studios in Tower One were there that morning. Vanessa Lawrence had gone in at 6am to paint the city below in the early light but went to the lobby to phone a friend before the first plane hit. All the World View artists, including Lawrence, have lost their work but more importantly they are missing a friend. The artists told the online publication, Artswire that such devastation puts everything in perspective. Some felt their work was frivolous. Monika Bravo was initially unable to go back to work, and wondered if she really wanted to be an artist any more.

Bravo, who uses video recordings, reviewed images of the city she recorded from her WTC space over several hours on the evening of September 10, a record of its last night standing. “These images depicted a thunderstorm in progress; the raindrops falling on the windows allude to the trillions of tears as if the buildings felt that it was imminent,” she told Artwire. But she is one of the lucky ones. Although many of the artists in residence lost all of their life’s work, Richards lost his life and the opportunity to create anew.

Days after the attack, many creative people started working again with a determined focus. Museum curators saw a shift from artists’ hopelessness to a desperate need to contribute something to society. Directors at the Whitney Museum and the New Museum of Contemporary Art fielded many calls from those who wanted to create memorials. The art community felt a new sense of purpose and acknowledged that art is the best way for them to express their feelings about the world, both good and bad.

New York City is looking for inner peace following the tragedy — and many people believe the arts are the best way to pull the nation together to heal its collective soul. The city carefully dismantled the remaining metal arches of Tower Two for possible use in a memorial.

For many, Jamaican-American Michael Richards’ work on the Tuskegee Airmen gives form to these losses and would be a fitting tribute to those who died. These airmen were a segregated unit of African-American pilots, which was awarded more than 150 Flying Crosses for valour during World War II. They suffered great injustice and discrimination at the hands of their colleagues and members of the public.

Like Richards’s two lost works, previous airmen sculptures were bronze or steel cast from his own body. Tar Baby vs St Sebastian depicts a fully uniformed airman with hands at his sides, chin titled skywards, palms helplessly turned out as small planes impale his body. His feet are several inches from the ground, as if he were levitating like a saint or martyr ascending to heaven. In the context of September 11, it looks hopelessly poignant.

A Richards sculpture at the Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota Are You Down? portrays three seated black men slumped over with their backs to a bull’s-eye target.

The Village Voice newspaper reported that Richards composed an artistic statement on his computer and passed it along to a friend. He said the Tuskegee Airmen fought for democracy in the sky, but faced discrimination on the ground. “They serve as symbols of failed transcendence and loss of faith escaping the pull of gravity, but always forced back to the ground, lost navigators always seeking home,” he wrote.

Experts say art can speak of tragedy and loss as effectively as it can of beauty, but it rarely predicts the future. One of the most famous horror-based works is Picasso’s Guernica which was inspired by the destruction of this town in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War.

Declan McGonagle, the Irish curator and writer says: “It’s very rare in the modern era for artists to pick up a subject and attempt to describe the horror of conflict or pain and suffering.” Violent imagery might be a curious way to offset the potential reality of what could happen in the world.

McGonagle said Francis Bacon, whose work deals with the edges of experience and reality, once commented that life always leaves art behind when it comes to horror. Artists find it very difficult to deal with the enormity of incidents such as war, the holocaust or the attack on the twin towers.

John Hock, curator of Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota, who met Richards when he was an artist-in-residence, says great art can predict the future and expose the truth. “I hate to think Michael’s art became this absurd reality, but the work we have, and his others, show how artists tap into the collective consciousness.”

Some political artists tend to raise the flag and show the warning signs of things to come — so perhaps he was seeing something we couldn’t, said Hock.

Originally published in The Sunday Business Post, Ireland
Sunday, September 16, 2001

Freckle-faced, red haired Shannon Koch sat in her ambulance outside the centre waiting for the call that never came. Her Princeton, New Jersey, first aid and rescue squad truck was one of about 40 emergency vehicles which had come from as far as Boston, Philadelphia and the far end of Long Island. Each was marked with white tape as “BLS” or “ALS.”

Koch and her team, who had been there since the previous day, explained that dispatchers used the letters to determine which teams could perform basic life support or advanced life support functions. Following a medical assessment, any victims brought here would be tagged: black tags marking those who were beyond saving, red for critical and yellow and green for the walking wounded. The system was ready-to-go but was being closed down due to inactivity.

“Thousands and thousands are already dead,” said Koch. She thought Ellis Island was being used as a morgue, with barges transporting the bodies across the water.

At the firemen’s assembly area around the corner, a member of the New Haven, Connecticut, fire department said: “There is nothing for us to do.”

One woman handed out pamphlets to the hundreds of walking, cycling, roller-blading New Yorkers who had migrated lemming-like to the apocalyptic site. It said: “Unite tonight 7pm. Come outside. Wherever you are tonight at 7pm, stop and step outside or pick a place to gather with others for a citywide moment of silent prayer and hope.”

The people milling about were largely silent, few exhibiting New Yorkers’ naturally loud, gregarious ways. There were no opinions, judgments or demands. Animation returned only when cheers and applause erupted as fire trucks, police cars and ambulances approached. “You saved us. You are our heroes.”

Along the police demarcation line at 14th Street, people did their best to get closer to the scene. Down here, the air was acrid and caught in the back of the throat and nostrils. No mask, water or sweets could soothe the discomfort or wash away the charred smell.

Some individuals wearing masks and stethoscopes produced medical identification cards but Brooklyn detective Paul Carpentieri, covered in dust, told them to turn back, their help was not needed now.

Carpentieri was one of the first on the scene the previous morning. He told of seeing blood staining the sidewalks and body parts, decapitations too awful to describe. When the towers collapsed soon after, the recognisably human elements were covered with dust, thick as a blanket of snow, comprising the ashes of hundreds if not thousands of New Yorkers. He was breathing them in.

At the hospital closest to the scene, St Vincent’s, relatives gathered with photographs of their loved ones. They milled between hospital officials and a cordoned-off press area.

“Have you seen my husband … daughter … colleague? I last saw them on their way to the stairs … at breakfast … on the train … at home. They were wearing …”

The same conversations were taking place over New York’s phone lines as the closely-knit financial community rallied around neighbours, school friends and golf partners. As suburban churches’ missing lists grew, tragic stories began to circulate, particularly about the guys from Cantor Fitzgerald.

“They called their wives and fathers from the roof, they couldn’t get down. It was one man’s first wedding anniversary that day.”

 Uptown, the New York Blood Centre was on high alert as the community tried to help its own. Linda Levi, director of communications at NYBC, said some people waited for up to eight hours.

“There were no complaints and that’s unusual for New Yorkers.

“People were shocked and exhibited great spirit and generosity. They felt it was something tangible they could do.”

In two days, more than 10,000 pints of blood were collected, triple the normal supply. An additional 3,000 pints arrived from other areas of the United States.

Shop windows were adorned with the Stars and Stripes, while cafe chalkboards said “Give blood, save a neighbor” or “God bless America” above the list of daily specials.

On the upper east side, a shop assistant in a small candle shop refuses to play CDs over the sound system. “Silence is the greatest respect we can offer them,” she said.

Margaret E Ward is a New Yorker