Happy Christmas 2010 - thoughts on Round Robins and Recessions

Happy Christmas 2010!

Dear friends,

Family gathering for Jan's birthday celebrations (minus William)

It's that time of year again – the Round Robin's bob-bobbing along to a mailbox near you as yet again the annual missive that is our Christmas Newsletter wings its way around the globe. I just realised that this is the 21^st Anniversary of our Newsletter – the first one was written on a portable typewriter in Iringa in 1989 and photocopied – badly – and sent off to far-flung corners of the globe from the Southern Highlands of Tanzania!

We are coasting downhill to the Christmas and the New Year with more trepidation than we've collectively felt in my lifetime. There's a strong sense of déjà vu – last year was bad but this year Ireland has a post-apocalyptic feeling now after our €85billion bailout by the IMF and the EU – an intervention much denied by our benighted government in the run-up to their arrival. These sheriffs have been and gone but will keep a close eye on us to make sure we're doing as we're told to keep the banks afloat and raise the taxes to do so, all the while paying the lenders enough interest would run the health service every year. The ignominy of having our affairs handed over to outside forces is a bitter pill to swallow as we have certainly lost our financial sovereignty – not quite back to the old colonial days but economically somewhat similar.

The dreaded budget was unveiled on Tuesday – there's a deficit of €6 billion to fund this year, part of the €14 billion we have to find by 2014. The years of wheeling and dealing have finally caught up with a government who had no grasp on economics as they led us into a bubble of property development borrowing from toxic banks that was totally unsustainable. We're all crashing to earth after builder developers abandon the ghost estates that litter the rural hinterland, while the banksters are all exposed as bluffers who profited from the light touch regulation and deference of the government. What it means to me is a drop in take-home pay of around €2K p.a. and that's just speculative – we won't know till mid-January as there're so many new and combined levies we have a job calculating it all till our first paycheques.

Jan and me at his birthday party May 2010

Back to the news from the Rotte-Murray family – and what a year it's been. We've seen the best of times and the worst of times, to borrow a line from Charles Dickens. We were blessed with the birth of our first grandchild, a beautiful little girl, Sofia, born to Shayne and Jany in Cork on February 11^th. She is a joy and delight for all of us, as she grows to a lively active baby, well on the way to being a toddler who'll keep everyone on their toes this Christmas. Then three weeks later, on March 5^th, we were plunged into sadness with the death of my beloved mother at the great age of 94. She had been declining over recent years, and she had a peaceful passing for which we are all grateful – she didn't suffer and I was blessed to be able to spend so much time with her in her last weeks in St. Joseph's Hospital in Dungarvan. It has been an awful loss as we were so close, but these last years have been a long goodbye, with her decline into dementia. She was buried in Lismore with her beloved parents, and Jan gave a beautiful eulogy at her funeral Mass. I have great memories of her, and I can look out our window to the graveyard at the back of our garden where she's at rest, and there's a comfort in that for me. We are all glad that the whole family were together with her a few days before she died, and we took treasured photos of her with Sofia and all of us.

Sofia's Christening Day, 4^th September, with her parents

Shayne and Jany have settled into life in Cork, and they are expecting a second baby next March! Shayne had been working with Concern in direct fundraising but was let go in February. Jany then got a job in Marriott International in April, and Shayne is looking after Sofia and doing a business course – Jan or me babysit on the days he's at college. They are in a nice house in Blackrock, close to shops and bus routes. They went to Holland in August to bring Sofia to see Jany's family and friends. It is lovely having them in Ireland after all the years Shayne was in Spain, and we would miss them so much if they weren't here –so the timing was perfect when they came back – another year and they might have been put off by the dire economic situation. We had a lovely ceremony for Sofia's Christening in Lismore in September – she looked sweet in our family heirloom Christening robe – the 4^th or 5^th generation – and had a BBQ in the garden here afterwards, as we had a good summer this year.

Me and Sofia - October

Martin and us at his MA graduation DIT - Oct. 2010

 Martin has just finished his Master's Degree in Professional Design Practice in DIT (Dublin Institute of Technology in Bolton Street) and we had a lovely day at his recent graduation in St. Patrick's Cathedral. He is still living in Dublin, and is trying to find a job, without much luck so far though he has an interview this week. He enjoyed his MA and it is a damning indictment of the system to see so many well-educated graduates on the dole and unable to get work in their professional field- he has done unpaid interning to get experience for his CV, so I hope it pays off. There's so much emigration now that the government is factoring it into the projections for the social welfare costs for the next four years and they are also claiming the figures on the live register are dropping (the Social Welfare register) – that's all because of the emigration. I don't want the boys to have to go abroad – when we went it was from choice, not necessity. That's a whole different ball-game.

William and us at his BA graduation UL August 2010

William finished his BA in Physical Education and Geography in the University of Limerick and we celebrated with his graduation in August. He moved to Cork when he got a job as a waiter in the Airport Hotel, and as he was getting very few hours there he got another job this week in Amazon in Cork. He has applied for teaching in the UK as there seems very little in teaching in Ireland – the public service embargo is affecting new grads worse than experienced teachers as they are all competing for the few substitute jobs or maternity cover or the private schools unaffected by the ban on recruitment in the public sector. All very demoralising for the lads and their parents aren't too happy either – but we are very proud of all of them for getting to adulthood with a positive outlook on life and not giving up on Ireland – just yet anyway.

Maeve has just had her 15^th birthday with a sleepover weekend here at home with five or six of her friends – we lifted the term-time ban on sleepovers for the occasion and she made the best of it. With her Junior Cert looming in June, she has had to knuckle down to the books – and having to do supervised study doesn't really appeal but it concentrates the study to the afternoon and she doesn't have that much to do after dinner. As we didn't go abroad for holidays this year – sign of the times – she spent the summer camping in the garden in a big tent we got in Argos, and they had good fun with that. I took four of the girls to Dublin for a weekend in July – we stayed in the Skylon Hotel and they shopped till I dropped. They enjoyed it and I was able to drop them to Blanchardstown Centre and spend time with Martin and also visit old friends Tom and Darina.
 
Jan had a very significant birthday this year – he turned sixty in May! All his family came over from Holland for a week and we marked the big occasion with a party in Ballyrafter House Hotel with the family and our friends. I baked a huge cake and we had a lovely night, and he didn't look a day over fifty (!) as we danced the night away to a local combo. The family all stayed in Youghal in holiday homes, and did a lot of sightseeing as well as spending time with us in Lismore during the week – we had a BBQ at home and then hired a bus for a day trip around the Ring of Kerry, which was a highlight for all of us. It was over thirty years since I had been there in my hitch-hiking student days. It's still a beautiful scenic route – a 90 mile round trip from Killarney and some hair-raising bends – no wonder the tour buses can only go one-way! Jan is still active in the local Town Council for Labour and on the national town councillors' committee, as well as Concern's council, and the national festival association.

Shayne, Sofia and Jany

This year's Immrama festival of Travel Writing was another great success, with big names like Ranulph Fiennes speaking about his Boy's Own adventures to various frozen wastes of the world, his self-amputation of his fingers after a nasty dose of frostbite, and other tales of derring-do. Tim Severin was also there, telling of his high seas adventures in the wake of Sinbad and St. Brendan and other great voyagers, and veteran writer Jan Morris rounded off a terrific weekend of armchair travel in wonderful settings around Lismore. It proved a great respite from the recession, and hopefully 2011 will be as big an event – many old faces return for the fringe events, and its international reputation keeps growing. Jan is kept busy as the festival manager, and plans are already underway for next year. We took part in the Seán Kelly Charity Tour of Waterford in August, with Jan doing 90km while Shayne and me did 50km, and Shayne did 90km in the Cork Rebel Tour in September. I got a lot of fun from my birthday present of a lipstick-red hybrid tour/trek cross bike.

I'm still working away in Old Parish area as the public health nurse, although I moved office to Dungarvan in May. With the snow we've had in Ireland in recent weeks – Snowvember as some called it – there have been parts of my area impassable by car, and the coastguard jeep had to do shopping for some isolated folk in the uplands. I don't think Ireland does snow and bad weather too well, as is the norm in so many countries, but we literally grind to a halt when there's more than a few days of snow and ice. We had the Big Freeze in 2009/10 and it looks like it may be round 2 already, with plenty more forecast. I continue to enjoy my job despite the constraints of cutbacks, as the recruitment ban means that posts aren't always automatically filled, and now there're plans to reduce numbers by 6000 in the coming years, half of which may be frontline nursing staff. With beds closing, hospitals overcrowded, and morale very low, it's hard to know where it will all end. There's even talk of returning the beleaguered HSE to the old Health Boards system to improve accountability.

That's about it for our news this year – we weren't away for any holiday, rather the family came to us in May and in late March an old friend Tandy came for a visit – we hadn't met since we lived in Iringa where our kids grew up together, so we'd a lot of catching up to do. We spent some of the time sightseeing around lovely West Waterford and had some knitting lessons – which she has kept up since returning to London. Jany has discovered a previously unknown talent for crochet, and I knitted some funky socks for myself as well as some baby clothes for Sofia. I'm still reading avidly, and in the book club, as well as an online Bloggers' book club, where there's a lot of overlap with the real world club. I enjoy blogging as an outlet for writing – mostly recipes, book reviews, knitting, family events, and current affairs ranting. Check it out – I was chuffed to be shortlisted for two categories in the Irish Blog Awards, even though I didn't win it was a nice accolade.

We're looking forward to having all the family together for Christmas in Lismore, even though it'll be sad as the first one without Ma, and she'll be in our thoughts. May you all have a wonderful Christmas, and drop in if you're around Lismore – we've an open door here and love to catch up on old friends in real time as well as all those we keep in contact with through Skype, Facebook and email, which have all changed the way the world communicates. We wish you all much happiness in 2011 and look forward to hearing from you in the coming weeks and over the festive season.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all,

Love from



Jan and Catherine, Shayne, Jany and Sofia, Maeve, William and Martin, and Ben the dog.

A Farewell Tribute to my Beloved Mother

Last Friday, March 5th, the day I had been dreading my whole life came when my beloved mother passed away - after lingering on for two weeks from the first call from the hospital to say that she was slowly slipping, she finally and peacefully breathed her last, and I was glad to be there in her final hours. She was a great age, in her 90s, and she had lived through so much that I think anyone would be challenged to deal with all she had to cope with in her life. It was great that she lived to meet her great-granddaughter Sofia and this photo, taken the previous Saturday, is one we will always treasure as the whole family surround her for what we knew in our hearts would be a final farewell from our children and Sofia.

I won't go into minutiae here but in a nutshell, she was born during Ireland's colonial era, in the year before the Easter Rising, and she was a child during the struggle for Independence and the Civil War years. Her parents came from Tipperary and Kerry, and my grandfather was a master tailor who had a business in Lismore, to where he moved in 1909. They knew tragedy as they lost their firstborn child, Jack, before his second birthday, a few months before my mother was born. They later had another child, Paddy, who died in 1984 in his late 60s, much too young. My mother was so lucky to live into her 90s and as she was well and active up to her late 80s we have few regrets. She had dementia in the last few years and barely knew me or the family in the past year or more, which made for a long goodbye, and it is difficult now to recall when she started forgetting who we were, it was so gradual a decline.

She married relatively late in life, and was widowed only four years later, when I was nearly three. She was then pregnant and my baby sister also died at a few weeks of age, which was a double whammy for her. She'd lived in Dublin when married, but moved back to her family home here in Lismore to take care of her widowed mother until her death some years later. So there was only Ma and me for most of my life, which made us extra close. Of course in my teenage years that level of closeness was claustrophobic in that she kept far too close an eye on me, keeping my wings clipped beyond what I felt was justifiable - as a mother of a teenager now I can totally empathise!

She was extremely unselfish without being a guilt-tripping martyr, as she gave me her blessing in most of my wayward ventures over the years. It can't have been easy for her to see me leave home at 17 for nursing school in Dublin, and even harder to see me leave for Bangladesh five years later. Communications weren't what they are now, with email and blogging and Facebook, so we probably had three or four phone calls home in that two year period, each of which entailed pre-booking the calls a couple of days in advance. On the plus side, we have a wonderful archive of letters as she kept every one of my letters, as I did hers, which give a great narrative of both our lives as she was a wonderful letter-writer. I owe her for any skill I have in that line, even though I rarely write letters nowadays, having diversified into email and blogging, with the odd bit of memoir writing along the way.

I returned to Ireland with a Dutchman in tow, and she welcomed her future son-in-law as the son she never had, despite the misgivings she must have had before meeting him. They remained close right to the end, a period spanning almost three decades. Jan wrote a beautiful eulogy which he read after her funeral Mass and which moved the congregation to tears and laughter in equal measure. He's agreed for me to post it as a permanent memento to Ma, and I hope it conveys what he intended it to be - a fitting tribute to a great lady. I will post it in a separate post as it deserves its own space.

Her four grandchildren and her brand-new great-granddaughter Sofia are her legacy and I know our children loved her as she was an indulgent and loving granny who wasn't beyond telling me how best to raise them. She must have had lonely days as most of our lives were spent overseas in development work, yet she had a generous and kind heart and was very proud of our work for the less well-off. We came home every year from Africa for a month or more, so she could see her grandchildren growing up, and she was delighted when we moved to Ireland for good in 1997. She spent a lot of time with us between Lismore and Dublin where she went back to live in 1978 when I went to Bangladesh, as she loved the buzz of life in the city. She lived there until 2002 when she moved back to assisted living in Lismore and gradually as she got more frail she moved into increasingly dependent care, and ended her days in St. Joseph's Hospital in Dungarvan, where she had excellent loving care right to the end from the wonderful nursing and care staff, all of whom I am proud to call colleagues.

"May Quinn was a lady" - that's what I kept hearing over the days of the funeral - in the typical Irish tradition it took place over three days. It was a traditional Catholic funeral for a woman to whom her faith and religion meant everything over her lifetime, and she would have been delighted to see all the old-timers who came to pay their respects. Not that there were too many of them as she had outlived most of her peer group, and we often laughed about that together in her good days. She was a very stylish lady indeed - she loved her style in clothes and make-up, and often despaired at my total lack of interest in clothes and style as she saw it; jeans were anathema to her and she always wanted to give me a makeover, about which we had many a laugh. She was struck with the odd pangs of Catholic guilt for what she said was her vanity, but thankfully it never lasted too long!

For those who aren't familiar with the Irish funeral ritual - she was brought to the funeral home where Rosary was said the first night, and then the Removal to the church took place on the second night, when people came to pay their respects to us all. She remained before the altar until the Requiem Mass on the third morning, after which she was buried in the local cemetery with her beloved parents, on a beautifully sunny, cold and cloudless spring day . When I sit in our sunroom or on the patio I can see the yew trees of the graveyard behind our house, separated by a field from the end of our garden.

So while it is a sad time for me and all the family - it's been cathartic to write this as I am at home on a week's bereavement leave from work - and I hope she is looking down from her heaven on all her family and loved ones, and continuing to give me her blessing for these few words in her honour. I am proud to be her daughter and to have known such a wonderful mother, and I know the rest of the family will miss her as I do and we will long treasure the wonderful memories she left us.

Thank you Ma - we love you and will miss you always.