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Sometimes our next-door neighbors don’t realize how good they are.
For very obvious reasons, most of the attention is currently being absorbed by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. From his position on the bridge, he swears that the destination ahead is Sunny Uplands. But as it gets closer, there is a chance it will turn into an iceberg.
The heavens delivered a much more powerful vignette last Tuesday morning. At 6.30am, wearing the distinctive T-shirt she had been given to replace her pajamas, Margaret Keenan became the world’s most famous vaccine recipient.
The images of the injection administered in a Coventry hospital were guaranteed to be seen in all parts of the world. The British government’s army of special advisers could easily have found a conservative with connections to the central role.
Instead, a frankly speaking 90-year-old woman who had worked until the mid-1980s as a jewelry assistant and whose childhood years were spent near Belcoo, Co Fermanagh, on the border with Blacklion, Co Cavan appeared.
When Margaret was questioned by reporters wearing masks, she identified an essential element of the magic potion she had just received.
“It’s free,” he told them.
Margaret Cassidy (her maiden name) was 18 on July 5, 1948 when Aneurin Bevin, Clement Atlee’s government health minister, introduced the National Health Service. His revolutionary proposals had been rejected by the British medical system.
The booklet produced in bulk to explain the NHS said: “It will provide you with all medical, dental and nursing care. Everyone, rich or poor, male, female or child, can use it or any part of it. There are no charges. Except for some special items.
“There are no insurance ratings. But it is not a ‘charity.’ They are paying for it, primarily as taxpayers, and it will ease their financial worries in times of illness.”
In its first year of operation, the NHS provided dental services to eight million people and delivered six million pairs of glasses.
The revolutionary policy initiative, free at the point of delivery with need-based access, was a government’s way of thanking its citizens for the sacrifices they had made during World War II.
It was the recognition of real life injustices and the lack of medical care that AJ Cronin had exposed in his novel ‘The Citadel’ a decade earlier.
The NHS really was an example of how Britain leads the world. It pioneered a policy of providing a comprehensive health service free of charge. Over time, other countries would use the UK NHS template and develop a version of it.
Seventy-two years after the introduction of the NHS, the powerful United States still has nothing to compare.
Although the UK is our closest neighbor and across the border we have the example of the NHS, last year our Health Insurance Authority said that 2.2 million citizens, 45% of the population of the Republic of Ireland, they took out private health insurance.
Sláintecare, the plan to develop an Irish version of the NHS, received support from several parties when it launched in 2018. But it is still in the small steps stage. A distant dream.
The history of emigration
Maggie Keenan’s niece, Geraldine McHugh, lives in Tempo, Co Fermanagh. According to her, among the family members, Maggie is known as Peggy.
He had four older brothers and sisters, Joe, Tommy, Mary, and Lily. The Cassidy family lived in a small country house on Enniskillen Road. His father worked on the border as a butcher at the Greens of Blacklion.
Maggie / Peggy first moved to Belfast for work purposes and then she and three of her four siblings would emigrate to England.
Maggie’s nephew, Lily’s son, Tommy Nolan, was killed in Belfast during the early days of the riots.
Geraldine was delighted to see her aunt appear on television on Tuesday. The last time he went to see her in England, Geraldine flew with her three children to Birmingham. Maggie insisted on making the trip from Coventry with her daughter and grandson to meet them.
Geraldine described her aunt as very active and independent who enjoys painting and gardening. She lives alone, although her daughter Sue is close. He was in his 80s when he left his part-time job at a jewelry store.
Belcoo’s four Cassidys were like hundreds of thousands from the island of Ireland who crossed the Irish Sea in search of a new life and better times in Britain. Some found jobs in car factories in Midland cities like Coventry and Birmingham.
Some endured the devastating Luftwaffe bombing raids on Coventry during World War II.
Some remember the IRA bomb that attached to a bicycle in Coventry in 1939, killing five people, after which two of the accused and convicted were hanged.
Being Irish in England was sometimes difficult during the decades of unrest, as in 1974 when IRA bombs in two Birmingham pubs caused 21 deaths.
Maggie Keenan had no indication that within a week of her 91st birthday, in the midst of a pandemic, she was about to become a celebrity.
His story would have brought a smile to Aneurin Bevan, the Welshman who founded the NHS. He was one of 10 children. He dropped out of school at 13, worked as a miner in his teens, and died of stomach cancer at the age of 62.
The vaccine Geraldine received was developed in Germany by a Turkish émigré, Uğur Şahin and his wife, Ozlem Terici.
After month after month the world fell to its knees from a virus, there was something lyrical about the vision of a 90-year-old Irish immigrant to Britain receiving the first dose of a miracle vaccine created by Turkish settlers in Germany.
For a pandemic that knows no borders, it was the perfect answer.
Gift or hospital pass?
Throughout the week, in a parallel universe, the EU and the UK could barely agree to disagree as Brexit negotiations remained stalled. Things threaten to get ugly. Increase the possibility of a complicated divorce.
Part of the complexity is that this has never happened before. So far, for the European Union, the challenge has often been deciding who to accept from the long list of applicants.
In the case of the United Kingdom, while he has experience lifting clubs from territories in different parts of the world, he has never before retired from a club significantly bigger than him.
The Northern Ireland Protocol, negotiated by Brussels and London during Leo Varadkar’s tenure as taoiseach, has been resurrected. As a result, there will be no border on the island of Ireland. Instead, some version of a border will be created in the Irish Sea.
Brexit is proving to be a very uneven blessing for the Democratic Unionist Party. The Ulster unionists could not decide where they were, so the DUP was the only one of the five major parties to campaign to leave the EU.
Westminster mathematics and infighting among the Conservatives gave the DUP deputies temporary importance and influence. But after the DUP clashed with then-Prime Minister Teresa May, the tide was turning.
Boris Johnson was delighted to use his “friends from Northern Ireland” when their votes were helpful. Once the math changed, the temporary fix died.
In the House of Commons for the week, Jeffrey Donaldson must have longed for the times when the DUP was in a trust and supply deal with the Conservative government.
Beside him, on the green benches, the plaintive screams of his colleague, Sammy Wilson, were delivered into a nearly empty chamber.
The customs infrastructure under construction in the ports of Larne, Warrenpoint and Belfast is the responsibility of the DUP Minister of Agriculture, Edwin Poots.
It’s a challenging time for DUP leader Arlene Foster.
The ‘regain control’ slogan, so successfully promoted by Dominic Cummings during the Brexit campaign, has left the leader of the Fermanagh-based party vulnerable to factors over which she now has little or no control.
The UK will be out of the European Union next year.
For the DUP, will the Brexit project you supported and helped deliver a perfect gift or hospital pass in 2021, the centenary of the founding of Northern Ireland?
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