I’ll be honest – and this isn’t a popular stance if you’re a sailor – I’ll find it hard to donate to the RNLI again. In 2003 I ran the Dublin marathon for three charities – the MS Society, the RNLI and Lohada, a small Tanzanian NGO I helped set up as independent back in 2001.

Of the three, the RNLI were positively ignorant about the donation I was trying to give them. The MS Society wrote to thank me, I was sent a hand-made card by one of the kids in the Tanzanian orphanage. The RNLI were obstructive from the start (as I wasn’t running solely for them, they had no way for me to fit into their system), and were completely ungrateful upon receipt of the cash.

I handed them just over €1,000, and was met with a ‘right, whatever’ response.

And at the dinner this weekend, their speaker, who was gifted the MC role at the event, seemed arrogant in her assumption that she had a right to demand money from us, as we were all marine-related folk gathered in one room.

All of which made me very angry indeed.

The old mantra of no shirt, no service, is a manners thing. If you can’t be bothered putting on a shirt to show me some respect, I can’t be bothered serving you food.

Same goes for NGOs. If I go out of my way to raise funds for you, it probably means I’d do it again. I’m a renewable revenue stream.

No thanks, no donations. Simple.

ISA Youth Awards Intro from Markham Nolan on Vimeo.

Rory, who works for the ISA and features in the video, had seen the aul social media guru vid from last September and wanted some of the xtranormal.com animation used at the start. The remaining 80%  was cut together from training videos of Philip that Rory had shot on the water. All we had to work with was pics of Finn so they had to be made work to tell his story. I edited the whole thing in iMovie. This was my first editing job ever, so I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

On the whole, this was low-budget, low-tech. Rory was sitting on a kitchen chair in my garden shed office. I hung a black sheet behind him and sat him with a window on his left (camera right) so we had nice soft, natural light.  On advice from Adam Westbrook, I had splashed out on a Kodak Zi8 HD Pocket Video Camera to record the interviews with Rory (a whopping €130). The Zi8 has a microphone line in, so I nabbed a cheap lapel mic, and the sound quality is great as a result. (I’ve worked with the Flip HD too, the Kodak is nicer, but a little bigger in the hand).

I coached Rory through what I wanted from him, and we taped his notes (scribbled in marker on the back of a plane ticket) to the tripod just below the camera so that he had something to cog from. I downloaded a free converter to convert Rory’s .wmv and other Windows-format videos, and nabbed a song from Mr Scruff.  All in all, we recorded three minutes of chat with Rory, which was more than enough.

There are some things I’d like to be able to do that iMovie won’t permit, like layer audio from one slide over another, but for free software it’s remarkably easy to use, and the end results are great if you put some thought into it.

“NGOs that are really good and efficient should survive and grow, and those which really don’t add value and can’t be competitive should wind up. You’re wasting money that could be applied to the poorest people in the world in a much more efficient way. Unless you can do it efficiently, I don’t think you should be in this business.“

Sunday Business Post, August 3, 2008

CHARITY IN A PC WORLD

Cormac Lynch’s charity supplies computers to the poor in Africa, but he admits his capitalist instincts are the reason for his great success.

The Irish love to play games that involve degrees of separation. For example, plenty of us can map out, in three or four steps, a link to the likes of Bono with little effort. Dubliner Cormac Lynch, founder of Irish charity Camara, is a master of the art – taking us from the world’s poorest people to the world’s super-rich in two short steps.

Step one goes from Ethiopian schoolchildren directly to Lynch. His charity, Camara, takes secondhand computers from Ireland, refurbishes them and installs them in African schools, providing training and teachers.

Step two goes from Lynch to his former boss Nikolai Tsvetkov, a Russian oligarch and head of investment firm NIKoil, where Lynch worked as a financial adviser.

Tsvetkov, worth $8.4 billion at last count, is a former air force colonel who fought for Russia in Afghanistan.

Among Tsvetkov’s colleagues is fellow oil magnate and the world’s 16th wealthiest man, Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea Football Club. That’s a big leap.

Having once balanced the books of billionaires, Lynch now collects what they throw away, makes the best of it and passes it on to the needy – a sort of Robin Hood binman.

In his former life, he was headhunted for his experience in the oil industry and put to work in investment banking in the oil sector. But in 2004, after two years of going back and forth, Lynch wanted out.

‘‘You’d be dealing with the owners of the companies, billionaires who had, you know, got these companies very cheaply,” he says.

‘‘Sometimes they’d be pretty generous with money, sometimes they’d be pretty mean with money. They were all clearly very aggressive businessmen.

‘‘I ended up commuting almost every weekend between Dublin and Moscow and, after about two years of that, I had had enough. I’d leave on a Friday from Moscow and get into London that evening and then have to get the first flight out to Dublin the next morning. Then, on Sunday afternoon, I’d leave and wouldn’t get back to Moscow until five in the morning on Monday and grab a couple of hours sleep before starting all over again.”

With a family in Dublin, Lynch said nyet to a life among Russian oligarchs and petrodollar finance, enrolling in a Development Studies course at UCD.

‘‘I came back and I wanted to do something in the developing world,” he says. ‘‘I always had an interest in that. One of my aunts has been a Medical Missionary of Mary for about 50 years and had been in Africa for that time, so I always had that link growing up. She came home every few years and told us about her experiences in Africa.”

But charities are funny beasts. Lynch set about looking for work in the development sector, only to find out that MBA-holding oil financiers who handled the affairs of billionaires are under-qualified when it comes to running charities.

‘‘I did try initially with Irish Aid and certain development organisations to get a job, but my background wasn’t suited to what they were looking for in terms of experience in Africa.

‘‘I thought they were wrong. I thought I could have done a good job but I couldn’t even get in the door.” The only option was to set up on his own.

Lynch hit on the idea of sending second-hand computers to Africa after a research trip to Ethiopia. While still studying in 2004, he founded Camara to that end, and since then it has grown from a back room in a Dublin pub to fill an industrial production line and training facility in Thomas Street’s Digital Hub.

The computers donation came from an internet cafe¤ that had gone bust. Lynch was given a day to remove the 30 units and find somewhere to store them.

‘‘I got the family car, went around and with a cousin we loaded them in. Some guy offered me a room at the back of Pravda pub and that’s where we started.

‘‘Our very first job was to clear four or five skiploads of rubbish out of that room.”

Camara’s full-time technical director Eoghan Crosby was drafted in as a volunteer, and has stuck with Lynch ever since, sharing a common love of motorcycles and building the agency to a point where it can now process close to 1,000 discarded computers a month.

Each one is wiped of all its data to military standards of security and reformatted with a version of free Linux software. Camara’s own HIV/Aids software and a recent static copy of the free online Wikipedia resource are added, and the computers are then packed into boxes.

Crosby, an enthusiastic techie, enthuses about the benefits in cost, virus-resistance and practicality of free software and is the computing brain behind the charity.

At the far end, Camara technicians train African teachers in computer maintenance, set them up to teach children, and provide regular services and updates. Lynch, on the other hand, works the numbers – just like he did in Russia.

Known by his classmates in UCD as a realist in a group of idealists, his business nous has allowed him to approach partner organisations with corporate savvy rather than a begging bowl.

‘‘We charge companies for taking their computers,” he says.

‘‘We charge roughly €20 per computer. They’d have to pay more than that to have the data erased and the computer recycled – some companies may pay €50 or €60. They can pay us instead, and that money goes towards getting the computers out to Africa.”

Keeping costs down and asking volunteers to fund themselves has meant Lynch can maintain efficiencies.

‘‘It probably costs us €50 to €60 to collect a computer, erase the data, refurbish it, pack it and send it out to Africa,’’ says Lynch. ‘‘That makes it affordable for African schools to get a computer. The alternative is you can buy them the cheapest new computer, and that’s €500.”

Camara’s approach even undercuts the much-vaunted $100 laptop – now close to $200 – once hailed as the solution to computer illiteracy in developing countries.

It is proof that those who knocked him back early on had him pegged all wrong – Irish Aid, which handed Lynch a rejection letter just four years ago, now funds 40 per cent of the operation he runs.

And it’s when you press Lynch on the business of charity that the hard-nosed capitalist in him comes through.

Lynch believes charities should live and die based solely on their tangible merits, rather than their good intentions.

‘‘I do believe that NGOs that are really good and efficient should survive and grow, and those which really don’t add value and can’t be competitive should wind up.

‘‘You’re wasting money that could be applied to the poorest people in the world in a much more efficient way. Unless you can do it efficiently, I don’t think you should be in this business.”

Lynch believes charities should pay top dollar for managers who can make every euro carry its weight. ‘‘At Camara we are approaching where we can pay people what they’re worth, and that’s the only way you can be sustainable. You can only keep people for so long on goodwill.”

The question for Lynch – who once had his pay cheque signed by oil barons – is whether a good job well done provides its own reward? ‘‘It’s not even worth comparing,” he smiles.

What about if your doctor had been awake for 57 hours – would you let them take out your appendix?

Didn’t think so.

Sunday Business Post, August 07, 2005

Working around the clock, grabbing a snooze when there’s a lull in the action, going without meals and pepping themselves up with caffeine – how long can Ireland’s over-worked junior doctors keep going under these conditions? ‘You wouldn’t want your mother or fathe r on that operating table,” says the junior doctor, yawning down the phone.

When pressed for detail, there’s a long pause before she can recall her weekend with any clarity. She is shattered. For 57 hours, or almost twoand-a-half days, she and her team worked without once leaving the hospital. In scattered catnaps, she snatched three hours of sleep here, one or two more there. She got a total of eight hours sleep over nearly three working days. Somewhere around hour 53, she was called to an emergency appendectomy with another surgeon on her team, their third of the weekend. Exhausted, she left hospital for home at 6pm on Monday, having arrived for work at 8amthe previous Saturday.

In Ireland, junior doctors work an average of 75 hours a week. A significant proportion of them work much longer hours. Many hospitals rely on junior doctors for on-site medical cover at night and at weekends. There are about 4,000 junior doctors in Ireland delivering frontline services in more than 40 public acute hospitals and in numerous other health agencies. The reality is they work around the clock, grabbing a snooze when there’s a lull in the action, going without meals and pepping themselves up with caffeine.

“Come Monday morning I didn’t get a chance to go back to bed,” says the junior doctor. “I had three cups of coffee in a row before ward rounds, so was really buzzing until noon. After 12 it hit me like jet lag,my legs felt heavy. “The day after any call [an oncall shift] is bad. It feels like you’ve run a marathon, you’re on your feet all day, you get calluses and blisters from walking around so much.”

Not only is such a punishing work schedule dangerous for doctor and patient, it’s also illegal. This month marks one year since the European Working Time Directive came into effect for junior doctors in Ireland. Non-cons u l t ant hos p it a l do c tor s (NCHDs) work an average of 75 hours a week. But as of August 1, 2004, it was not legally permissible to require them to work more than 58 hours in aweek. The Working Time Directive came into being to prevent people from working to a level that impacts their health and wellbeing. In Ireland, it took the form of the Organisation of Working Time Act, under which employers must restrict their employees’ working hours to stipulated levels.This will taper down gradually to a maximum 48-hour working week in 2009. In addition, the directive stated that a worker must be allowed at least 11 consecutive hours rest in any 24-hour period.

However, failure to comply with the act will not land the employer with a fine or indeed any sort of charge. In fact, nothing at all will happen until an overworked employee demands the protection of the directive fromtheir employer. If the hours worked continue to exceed those stipulated in the directive, the employee must make a claim against their employer and follow that claim through, which is a difficult thing to do if you’re a doctor working a 75-hour week,with the odd 57-hour weekend thrown in.

The directive was meant to address the much-vaunted concept of work-life balance, but for hospital workers it should have positive impacts for safety, too. Because by consistently going without sleep and missing meals, hospital doctors are building up what specialists term “sleep debt’‘.

A report by Stanford University fatigue specialist Dr Stephen Howard examines the long history of linkages between tiredness and industrial accidents. According to the report, the risk of an accident “increases exponentially with each hour of work’‘. After 24 hours of constantly being awake, the effects of tiredness on motor skills are equivalent to having a 0.1 per cent blood alcohol level, which is above the legal limit for driving a car. For hospital doctors, the buzz of the emergency is often what gets themthrough their shift. Having been on the job since 8am on Saturday,our junior doctor finally gets to bed at 3am on Sunday morning. She doesn’t remember if she had dinner or not. Four hours later, she is called back to the ward to deal with a patient. From the ward it’s straight to the A&Eto deal with a head injury. There’s no time for breakfast, either, because her team hasmorning ward rounds to cover and by midday it’s time for appendix removal number two. The surgeon she’s assisting didn’t have the luxuryof four hours sleep.Aroad traffic accident kept him in the operating theatre all night.

“Four hours sleep, that’s pretty good going,” the junior doctor says. “I’ve had calls where you only get two. I didn’t get time for lunch on Sunday and kept going until about 11.30 that night’‘. That’s 19 hours work on Saturday, followed on Sunday by over 16 hours work without a break or a meal. She had four hours sleep in between, but has had to deal with a full patient workload all day Sunday on an empty stomach. Her responsibilities don’t stop with the patients either. Despite being a junior doctor, her official title is Senior House Officer, which means she’s also teaching, and responsible for her students’ mistakes. “We’re supposed to help the interns,” she says. “We’re teaching on the job,while being on call. I’m obliged to come to the ward if the intern has any difficulties.” The doctor has an assistant surgical role; however, sleepy mistakes could be just as critical in other areas of her work. “I don’t have that much responsibility in theatre,” she says, “but I do have responsibility when admitting patients in casualty.You can’t miss anything when admitting and ordering medication, but it’s so easy tomake mistakes when you’re tired.”

Jo Harkness,policy officer of the International Association of Patient Organisations, says shorter working hours are in the best interest of patients as well as doctors.

“For patients to trust their health professional requires a level of understanding and communication,” says Harkness. “It’s not just about time; it’s also about the frame of mind that the doctor is in. If they’re tired, it may be harder to communicate and listen and exchange information in an effective way with the patient.” According to Dr Howard, “error rates in the sleep lab go up significantly after 17 hours of continuous wakefulness. Error rates go up in clinical areas as well.” He suggests that, while doctors may realise they are tired, their tiredness also negates their capacity to make decisions on their capability to perform. “This is about physiology and our attempts to ‘overcome’ it,” he says. “The longer you push your physiological capability, the greater the likelihood that you will make an error or have an accident.In that situation we have no good way of telling how alert or sleepy we are, so we should be the last to judge.” Without the implementation of the working time directive, decisions about long working hours remain in the doctors’ hands.

Under the legislation, individual doctors must ask their employer to bring their working hours in line with the provisions of the directive, ensuring they work no more than 58 hours per week. If the employer refuses, the doctor can take their claim to a rights commissioner and on to the Labour Court and the European Court of Justice. With many hospital doctors continuing to work well above the 58hour limit, how many of them have actually asserted this right? According to the presidentof the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO), Dr Asam Ishtiaq, none of the union’s members has looked for its help on the issue. “There has not been an avalanche of people coming in saying ‘I want to be protected’, because at the end of the day,what is the aim of a doctor in the Irish health service?” he asks. “We are professionals. Our aim is not to create trouble,we are trying to finish our training, continue the quality of training and be of service to the patients and the system.”

Reducing the working week of hospital doctors to 58 hours represents a loss of 22 per cent on current capacity, something that the health system as it stands could not support. “We either have to find a new way to conduct business and how to do things, or we have to employ a large number of doctors,” says Ishtiaq. “But option two does not exist.” The Hanly Report on medical staffing, published in 2003, laid out a blueprint for such a transition. The implementation of its findings, while essential for achieving crucial improvements in the healthcare service, met with widespread opposition.The political will to invest in the major changes evaporated and working hours subsequently were not reduced. When the Working Time Directive was first negotiated, the governments of Britain and Ireland successfully sought to have doctors-in-training excluded from its scope.That exclusion was revoked by further legislation passed in 2000,which brought junior doctors under its full protection in autumn last year. Despite that, Ireland has yet to fulfil its obligations and remains in breach of the legislation. However, the medical unions must shoulder some degree of responsibility for the lackof progress.

Entwined within the complex negotiation process on working hours is a consultants’ dispute involving the renegotiation of their common contract and medical indemnity insurance. The consultants’ union, the IHCA, has refused to enter negotiations on a new contract for the past two years. No new contract means no new consultants. And no new consultants means longer working hours for junior doctors. “It certainly is a mess at the moment, and it’s costing an enormous amount in overtime,” says Liz McManus, health spokesperson and deputy leader of the Labour Party. McManus’s husband is a doctor and two of her children work as junior doctors. “Hanly is very long term in perspective.The government certainly hasn’t pursued it in any way that is perceptible,there’s a lethargy at departmental level. “And even if they do say they are moving towards compliance, they are not addressing the concentration of [working] time.” McManus points out that “there are countries in Europe that have been in compliance since before it [the act] even came into being. Here,we don’t have enough consultants; we’re far too reliant on junior hospital doctors.They’re doing a lot more work than in other countries and it’s not good for training.”

Her comments are borne out by a comparative study with Finland which found that,with a lower annual healthcare spend than Ireland in relative terms,doctors in the Finnish system work an enviable 43 hours per week. Finland’s specialist-to-trainee ratio is five times that of Ireland. In order to phase in the requirements of the working time directive, the IMO has begun pilot studies of alternative work practices. “Meanwhile, the patient and the junior doctors are in a bind,” says McManus.

For the present, the unwritten rule, it seems, is that doctors must continue to work quietly under these conditions until a deal is sorted out that is beneficial to understaffed hospitals and doctors alike.

“There is sort of a ‘peace clause’,” says Ishtiaq. “It’s an agreement that all our members are aware that active representations are being made at the Labour Relations Commission to find a solution [to long working hours].” With low basic wage levels, many doctors accept the overtime hours because a working weekend effectively adds a week’s pay to a wage packet.

“My hourly base pay is the same as a McDonald’s manager,” says one junior doctor. “So if we do a 58-hour week we lose all our oncall hours, and don’t make as much money. But what about patient care?”

The IMO is pushing for a basic rate of pay that allows doctors to earn a “living commensurate to their qualifications and the type of work they do’‘. Until that is provided, it says it is unreasonable to demand that they give up their overtime hours. “The argument always given to us was that, since the opportunity to earn overtime is so high, the basic rates of pay always remained comparatively low. “When the NCHDs no longer have the opportunity to earn enormous overtime hours – which are not of our choosing – there has to be a reciprocal increase in the basic pay,” says Ishtiaq.

Shift work is one way to go, he says.However, according to aRoyal College of Physicians survey published this year, 84 per cent of registrars felt that shift work reduced the continuity of patient care, 81 per cent reported excessive fatigue at work and 74 per cent admitted to having fallen asleep at work.

With a continuing stalemate between the medical unions and the government, junior doctors will continue to catnap their way through arduous shifts and rely on the buzz of the job to get them through.

“The thing is,when you get a call from casualty, there’s this massive adrenaline rush, it’s not like waking up with your alarm clock,” says one hospital doctor. “You wake up and if it’s something serious then your mind just suddenly switches on.” Howard says that, while the likelihood of a major mistake occurr ing dur ing such long shifts remains small, such suboptimal situations will continue to occur. “But has safety been impacted? Yes. Do you want this person performing your operation? No.” He compares practising medicine while sleepy to driving a car. “Driving while sleepy – close your eyes for five seconds going at 50mph and the possibility of a crash is very high. Practising medicine while sleepy, if you close your eyes for five seconds, nobody will notice.

“But safety has been impacted, it’s just that we don’t travel 50miles per hour in healthcare.”

Every now and then you do a piece that catches you in the throat. This piece stemmed from an interview with a blogger who was tackling some intensely personal stuff on his blog about his own self-harm, which he has now ditched as he has stopped harming. Result.

Sunday Business Post – Jan 26, 2006

John cuts himself. He takes a razor blade, draws its edge slowly across his upper arm until it parts the skin and glides smoothly, steely into the soft flesh beneath. He says that when he sees the blood, it feels good; it feels like the sting of sunburn and a release of pressure. When his feelings get confused and his thoughts are clouded, he seeks solace in pain.  The pain focuses him, it’s a pure sensation, a reminder that he can feel; that he does have emotions and everything is alright again. It’s like hitting the ‘reset’ button.  Refreshed, John patches the cut with a plaster, rolls down his sleeve and goes to sleep.

This is deliberate self-harm, and John is no fictitious character.  He’s one of thousands of self-harmers in Ireland, who cut, burn or otherwise harm themselves to find relief from the paradoxical pain of emotional numbness.  It’s neither a suicide attempt nor a cry for help, it’s a way of managing overwhelming emotions, and it’s the only way self-harmers see fit to do so.

By cutting himself and letting blood flow, John opens an emotional pressure valve. “The cutting makes you feel, you feel the pain, you see the blood and it’s like everything goes back to normal then because you’ve just released what was there, what was building up inside you through pain, through bleeding, through cutting.”

In 2003, nearly 10,000 people in Ireland presented to hospital with injuries caused by deliberate self-harm.  It is thought that half that number again may be harming but not seeking medical attention.  John’s story adds credence to that.  He has been cutting himself since the age of seven, but has only gone to hospital on a handful of occasions, when the cutting drew an unusual amount of blood and he got scared that he had caused himself severe damage.

“I can remember the first day I did it,” John says. “I can’t remember what was going through my head, I just remember going up the stairs to the bathroom and locking the door. I remember opening up the cabinet and seeing the razor blades there and taking them out. And I started just to make one cut, then made a series of cuts.”

Soon, John found the cutting was becoming a familiar way of finding release. “I just found it did me good back then, it was helping me, helping me get through things I didn’t understand at the time, and then it became something I did on a regular basis.”

The emotional ‘numbness’ is hard for him to explain. “Your emotions get very confused, you become devoid of emotion and it just causes numbness. The only way I can describe it is as a lack of emotions, you can’t feel anything. Your head goes like cotton wool and you get very frustrated and confused.  The only way you can get through these emotions is by cutting yourself.”

The calm that the cutting brings is a purely psychological reaction for some. Professor Kevin Malone of St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin explains that self harmers tend to experience ‘intolerable levels of anxiety’ and that the harming provides a ‘transient release of tension.’ It also represents a desire to take control over their own body, often as a reaction to trauma during childhood. Another theory regarding repetitive harming is that it is a form of natural addiction. The pain from cutting triggers a release of endorphins which unblocks a wave of the body’s natural pleasure chemical, dopamine.  This gives the same ‘high’ people experience when running long-distance or getting tattoos.  Like any high, it can become addictive.

Self-harm’s habitual nature is what distinguishes it from another common term, parasuicide.  Parasuicide is a once-off, uncharacteristic act, often a cry for help. Acts of parasuicide are more typically chemical overdoses, often using large amounts of mild tranquilisers or paracetamol, and these acts represent a large chunk of current self-harm figures.  Cutting ranks as the second most frequent method of self-harm, accounting for 20 per cent of hospital admissions.

Regular self-harmers, on the other hand, treasure the privacy of their actions and will go to great lengths to hide it from others.  Those who do confide in someone about their problem will often defend themselves by saying they have no intention of committing suicide, and want no-one to know about what they do, a fact Professor Malone disputes.  Prof. Malone is an expert in suicidal behaviour, and is anxious to point out that there remains a link between deliberate self-harm and suicide.  “There’s a notion that they’re ‘just’ self-harmers.  Most self-harmers don’t end up dying from suicide but there are a small number who will.”  He explains further, saying that people who self-harm are in a very conflicted position.  “At one level there’s a huge amount of pain and they do want to keep it hidden.  at another level, they’re frantic for help. Hiding it can only last so long.”

Paul O’Hare from Samaritans says that people who harm themselves are “horrified that they do it, they’re disgusted with themselves.  They’re mortally embarrassed that anyone would find out.  Because of the stigma attached, guys are better at hiding it, as they are with their emotions.”   John, for example, has been harming since the age of 7, but has yet to broach the subject from his mother, from whom he has hidden his cutting.  “Family-wise, I kept it hidden from them for quite a long time,” he says. “It’s only in later life that it’s become more of an issue that they’ve come to know more about it.  My sister would know and I’d talk to her quite a lot about it.”

Outside of a circle of close friends or family, the fear of being stigmatized or tagged as an attention-seeker prevents self-harmers talking openly about their behaviour.  Instead, many look for advice from anonymous online support groups. Survivors of self-harm and specialists in the field share advice through web for and bulletin boards. Concerned relatives and current harmers form virtual communities to discuss how best to cope with family members who harm, their own harming and all peripheral issues.

When John began cutting himself, he felt totally alone.  Ireland in the 1980s wasn’t a place to be admitting to such behaviour, and he believed his form of self-abuse to be peculiar to him. Then, on a trip to New York, he saw a young girl with unmistakable scars on her arms. “With harming there’s a pattern, it’s a pattern of cuts, its ten or twenty straight cuts, all the same length, all the same width.”  Seeing the cuts on her arm made him realize he wasn’t the only person putting a knife to their own skin.

He also looked to internet communities for support and in the last year has started his own weblog site at http://iselfharm.blogspot.com.  On it, he documents his struggle with self-harm in depth, shares experiences and tries to direct other harmers to places they might find help. It’s also a source of comfort for him at times. “It has been therapy for me, being able to put everything down on paper.”   Regular readers also chip in with messages of support and encouragement.  The site has attracted several thousand hits and is the first of its kind in this country.

Several UK sites deal specifically with self-harm, and provide detailed information for family and friends of suspected harmers. The UK has the highest rate of self-harm in Europe.  Four people in every 1,000 self-harm in the UK, double the estimates for Ireland.  Here, just under two per 1,000 people cause themselves deliberate harm, but numbers are on the increase. Half of all recorded episodes are by those aged under 30, and the peak rates in Ireland are found in girls aged 15-19.

The National Suicide Research Foundation estimates that one in every 150 girls in this age group presents to hospital as a result of self-harm at some stage. Although women are traditionally more likely to harm themselves, the gender gap is narrowing, and particularly in the midland and eastern areas, young males are catching up fast. Close to one in 250 males aged 18-34 harmed themselves in 2003, a rather alarming number.

Men are more likely to cut themselves than women, and are also more likely to involve alcohol in an episode of self-harm.  John agrees. “If I go out and drink I would self-harm more aggressively than if I wasn’t to drink,” he says. “I was having just two or three pints of beer and I’d have total blackouts, I’d wake up in the morning and I wouldn’t remember getting home. I would have harmed and I wouldn’t remember any of it.”  It can be even more destructive harming, too.  “I find that sometimes when I get out of control, I don’t care, I’ll cut anywhere on my body,” he says.  “I’ll never cut my face but I’ll cut my legs, arms, stomach or chest.”  His last episode was particularly traumatic, and came at the end of a night out drinking.

Ireland is very poorly served when it comes to this growing problem. There are a few scattered research groups in Ireland, but they exist without much co-ordination, and there is, as yet, no dedicated group dealing with the problem. There are options, however, for Irish self-harmers who wish to talk to someone anonymously.  Most experts recommend going to see a local GP, but as self-harm tends to be a very secretive habit, people prefer the anonymity of helplines or online groups.

Childline and the Samaritans both run helplines for people looking for someone to talk to. Samaritans are taking an increasingly pro-active role in dealing with the problem, and have been educating their staff on how to respond to people struggling with a self-harm problem.  John has been helping them with this, recording a two-part video detailing his struggle and the reasons behind it.  As a self-harmer, he felt isolated by the lack of resources in Ireland for people going through the same turmoil, and felt compelled to do something about it.  Through his input online and in the video, he hopes that others will find support and have an easier time than he did. “I’d like to think that’s the sort of direction that things are going for me, that I could get involved and help other people. Obviously I’ve got a long way to go myself, but I feel some good has to come out of this.”

The video was an instant success, and after its first showing, staff responded immediately, thanking John for brave contributions and wishing him well.  “When someone has the confidence to confide in someone about it,”  says Samaritans spokesperson, Paul O’Hare, “the response given to that is crucial to their recovery.  If they’re labeled as bad, mad or stupid, they’re less likely to open up.” O’Hare feels this is a product of our societal aversion to open discussion of emotions. “In Ireland we’re very good at having conversations but bad at talking about how we feel.”  Samaritans are also aware of how important anonymity is, and to that end have gone further than providing a helpline. “Younger people tend to feel happier putting their feelings down in words rather than talking on the phone,” he says, and now Samaritans can be reached by email, allowing even greater anonymity.

“We’re really only beginning to deal with what society thinks of this,” says O’Hare, adding that we’re now much better at talking about suicide than we were ten years ago.  As with suicide, the number of young males harming themselves is on the increase, and O’Hare insists that behaviours like these must be viewed as part of one continuum rather than in isolation.

Through lengthy and ongoing therapy, John believes he has gained more control over his self-harm habit in the last few months, but lost control in others.  “I think I’ve a better handle on the harming than I have had in a long time, but there’s still a lot going on in my head.  I do get tempted some times, I do have bad days.”  On his blog, he says: “I have given up a lot of control in the last while, around when I started to get help, writing the blog and being very open about harming. Sometimes I think I did too much too quick, I was on such a quest to ‘get better’ that I started to convince myself that I was better and the lines got blurred. At the end of the day, I am the only one who can control my destiny. I am going to get myself together and become who I want to be in my own time and my own way.”

ends

Panel 1

An anonymous comment on John’s blog shows how self-harmers often feel a sense of isolation as a result of what they do:

“John, I am currently battling a war with self-harm. It all began about a year and a half ago. I had heard about people who cut themselves as a form of release, and one day I tried it for myself. I had never felt anything like it. It was exhilarating and magical. It turned my life around, and I felt completely different. Everything I hated was suddenly insignificant because I had a way to deal with it all. Before long I became a slave to self-harm. All day I fantasized about it, and it continuously weighed in my mind. When I wasn’t doing it, I was thinking about it. I was self-indulgent and completely mortified. I am currently still dealing with all of it, and cannot stop on my own. I don’t think I can ever stop. But there is always hope. For the record, the amount that I love self injury, is equal to the amount I hate it. We’re friends, but we are worst enemies. It is a complete paradox. I hope that someday I will be able to overcome all this and help others who are in the same position I was once in. Anyway, I simply decided to post this so that you know I can relate to you and many others out there. Take care.”

ends

Panel 2

Where to go for help

Samaritans run a 24/7 helpline for anyone who wants to talk anonymously about their problems or those of a loved one.  Call them in confidence on 1850 60 90 90, or email them atjo@samaritans.org. Their website (www.samaritans.org) has some useful information on self-harm

Childline answered nearly 180,000 anonymous calls from children and parents in 2004, and introduced a new texting service in April of this year. Call them on 1800 666 666 or text on 50101

Other websites:

www.selfharm.org.uk

www.nshn.co.uk – National Self Harm Network (UK)

http://iselfharm.blogspot.com – John’s self-harm journal

www.theblackdog.net – Site for men suffering from depression

Beginning of day one of horse trek: Happy face. End of day two of horse trek: Sorry arse. This is the story of a silken-assed young city boy, the ghosts of some famous cowboys, and a feisty ride called Cynthia. (Sounds like a night in Coppers).

Sunday Business Post, September 23, 2007

There’s a certain comfort in some of life’s old reliables, the things you can count on staying the same when all else goes haywire. Yesterday will always be better value than today, and night will always follow day. In the travel world, backpackers will always blindly follow the highlights list in the front of guidebooks but claim they’re trailblazing pioneers.

Most of the trails in the world were well blazed long ago, of course, but a few still lie relatively unbeaten and not far from the main bottlenecks in South America’s backpacking logjam. Notorious highwaymen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hit them in the early 1900s when they hung up their outlaw spurs in search of an honest life. They didn’t want to settle somewhere well signposted, so they headed for the isolated plains of Bolivia.

Even today, you can still sneak away from the madding crowds and follow in Butch and Sundance’s hoofprints.

A jolting six hours beyond the last of Bolivia’s tarmac roads lies Tupiza, a dusty little outpost not far from the Argentina border. Butch and Sundance staked out the town’s bank for days back in 1908.The Kid had forced them to quit their new rural life of idyll, blowing their cover by drunkenly bragging of their felonious exploits in the US, and they were on the run again.

Southern Bolivia was once rich with gold and silver, and by holding up the right wagon, the pair could expect a haul that would tide them over for years.

Nowadays, the town lies just outside the range of most backpackers’ radar, east of a popular route for tours of the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat, south of Potosi, the world’s highest city, and just a day and a half ’s hard hoofing from San Vicente, where the sheriff’s posse finally caught up with Butch and Sundance after they held up the wrong wagon.

Just as Sundance cased the bank, we swaggered into questions asked. Martyred revolutionary Che Guevara also met his grisly end here, so the land is stained with the blood of legends.

If I failed to absorb at least a hint of this country’s Latin machismo, I’d be an embarrassment to my gender. I had suffered enough emotional persecution at home for my inability to control horses, so this was a shot at some form of masculine redemption. Tomorrow, I would gallop.

We looked up the family run Hotel Mitru, among the best in town, which isn’t saying much. Double rooms near the pool start at around $12 a night, rising to a bank-breaking $30 if you want air conditioning and cable TV. Having stabled our rucksacks for the night, we struck a deal for two days on horseback, handing over US$20 each and receiving saddlebags into which we could cram a few necessities.

In true South American style, there was scant regard for safety when we mounted our noble steeds the next day. The stirrups could have been hacked from old pipes, rough steel hoops bound with rope. No helmets, no instructions, just a smile from our guide, and we were off down the train tracks and out of town. The red sandstone canyons around Tupiza are reminiscent of a mini Grand Canyon, guarded by cactuses and replete with wheeling hawks overhead, hummingbirds, lizards and even the odd ghost town to ride through.

The landmarks bear stout cowboy names such as Puerta del Diablo (Devil’s Door) and Canyon de los Machos (Canyon of the manly types, one assumes).

We started slowly, following the banks of the Rio San Juan de Oro, the escape route Butch and Sundance used after their botched heist. They were nabbed and died in a bloody shootout not far from where we set out.

Likewise, it wasn’t long before my quest for machismo took a mortal blow. My horse, my noble steed for the two days, was called Cynthia. The Lone Ranger had Silver, Gandalf had Shadowfax, I was lumbered with simpering Cynthia.

Cynthia, however, was a headstrong and frisky lass and, as we hit the gravel riverbeds of the river of gold, the horses belonging to my guide and girlfriend took off, and Cynthia was keen to give chase. With my heels down, arse up and hat flailing on the end of its neck-string, we hurtled up the gully, Cynthia thankfully in full control of the situation, and me as the passenger, clinging on with a wide grin.

The grin was partly out of enjoyment (about 30 per cent), but mostly because I could now tell the doubters I had galloped with the ghosts of real cowboys and lived. No posh saddles, just a few layers of blankets and leather strapped on a horse’s back, my drainpipe stirrups cutting into my feet and, before long, my jeans cutting into my backside.

That was fine, though, because this cosseted city boy could tick one more thing off the list of bloke-ish must-dos. Learn to ride a motorbike. Check. Get a tattoo. Check. Gallop a horse through a river. Ahhh. Check.

We stopped for lunch at a picnic spot, sitting in the shade of a tree on the river bank, with some cliched cowboy guitar music wafting out of a transistor radio. The afternoon brought more river crossings, more flat-out gallops and more blue skies. The $10 price tag didn’t buy much in the way of accommodation that night, and four of us shared a room in a local house with a cloud of ravenous flies.

It was a small price to pay – day two’s scenery excelled that of day one, and the gallops became easier and more enjoyable. Cynthia did all the legwork and, when we eventually sauntered along the train tracks into town, sunburnt, sweaty and saddlesore, we were ready for a shootout with the sheriff.

Or a dip in the Hotel Mitru pool.

Whichever was on offer.

Getting there

How to get there: Tupiza will not be your first stop in South America, and no travel agent will want to book you a direct flight to La Paz either, because Bolivia’s airlines are less than reliable. Plan a few days in Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires (Usit offers flights from €663 and €604 respectively) and book onward flights from there via Aerosur or TAM airlines.

Where to stay: We stayed in the twee Hotel Mitru, which also runs horseback tours and other excursions. www.tupizatours.com.

The currency: €1 = 11 bolivianos

What to bring: cream for the saddle sores. At least three litres of water per person per day on the trail. Some robust sunscreen and your own toilet paper. A guide book with a language section – English is some people’s third or fourth language in Bolivia.

Beware of: trail food. There are no Michelin stars on the cowboy trail, so it’s best to bring your own grub, and some for your guide. Try the saltenas when you get back to town – delicious local meat pasties.

Anything else in the area?

A salt-flat tour is on the must-do list for a reason. Four days of spectacular scenery, from blood-red lakes to white open flats. Tupiza Tours will also sort this out for you. b

Having taken a step back from blogging and all that ‘meta jazz’ for a while, I’ve had a good long think about the Social Media Guru (SMG) vid I put together in September, and what motivated me to be so cynical. The video is the only web ‘thing’ I’ve ever really created, it has generated 143,000 hits and counting. That’s unexpectedly large given what it was (ten times the hits of the much-vaunted DJ Hip Op vid), yet infinitely small in Youtube terms (20 million people have watched this surprised kitten video).

It sparked some pointed animosity from American SMGs, already sick of being mocked, despite the video being aimed squarely at their clients, whose gullibility and laziness of mind is the root of the real issue. One full-on viral case study was done on its global spread, which was very interesting indeed.  The video was met largely with a wall of silence by those in the sector in Ireland, in comparison which is unsurprising due to the small marketplace here.

I’m not a guru or a techie, I’m not selling any guru-like services (at present), but I have helped friends get started in the sphere and written copy for plenty of websites. I’m also a chronic lurker. I sit, watch, read and listen. I don’t generally join in the Irish web backslappery that has been lamented of late (except where justified), and wouldn’t class myself as part of the inner clique of Ireland’s bloggertwitterati, despite having met some great people within that group through online interactions, and having won a Blog Award, which I was very grateful to receive.

What grasps me about the whole social media phenomenon is its simplicity and accessibility. The majority of people out there who ‘get it’ never took a course. They opened their ears and figured out how to apply it to what they already did. Ditto a lot of the people who are now profiteering on the back of it. And what they’re preying on is the Irish penchant for mee-tooism, the total and utter failure of independent thought that is, if I were to link into something more big picture, at the root of Ireland’s economic collapse. And well they might – anything to keep the wolf from the door, I suppose. If there’s money to be made, go for it.

With social media, there are a few golden unwritten rules to follow, but beyond that things largely parallel established business wisdom, if you’re using it for business. No matter if you’re selling kid’s raingear or attempting to redefine journalism, versions of the same rule apply.  Know what your brand stands for. Make sure everyone else in your company knows, too. Identify your goals, your ideas and whatever innovations you want to introduce and then, if it fits, use social media to further those goals, realise the ideas and facilitate the innovations, while always making sure everything is in line with what you want your identity to be. Foundations first.

Beyond that, it’s a matter of staying current. Keep up to date with emerging trends, but don’t necessarily jump on every bandwagon that pulls into the station. Be selective in what you use. Read widely, think analytically and act independently. Resist groupthink. Don’t react until you’ve thought things through. Avoid the myriad opportunities for being a total fuckwit. Slow down, think a bit. (Everyone breaks these rules at least once)

Knowing what you want to be, and what your goals are, would seem to be obvious first steps, ones that should carry through into everything you do, but it baffles me how even large multinationals will often chuck all sensibility aside when it comes to adopting social media, even if they’ve apparently sought the best advice out there. Out goes consistency of message. Out go brand guidelines. Tone of voice isn’t even an issue, apparently, neither is strategy – social media is presented as a shotgun with which to shoot whatever clay pigeons get spat out of the machine. Why is this? Why chuck out all accumulated wisdom for the sake of the next new thing? Innovation does not erase all that has gone before, it adds to it, enhances it, and, yes, makes some things obsolete. Much old wisdom stands strong today, though. Gravity still pulls downwards.

This is all common sense, of course.

We don’t have a great track record when it comes to common sense here, though, which is why so many people look to anyone with a shiny blog and a knack for passable guff for a socmed lifeline. Even the big guns. A friend recently attended an in-house talk at a major global plc with an established Irish presence, who had hired in a reputed SMG for the day (not one of the well-known ‘influencers’ incidentally). In a shabby, ill-fitting suit, the guy pretty much told this massive global tech giant to ‘hook their Myspace to their Twitter’, before handing out cards with ‘The Social Media Guy’ under his name. My friend nearly snorted directly in his facebook.  (They had seen the video).

The ones who will win out in all this are the SMGs and the clients who understand where social media fits in the full context of established wisdom in whatever sector they inhabit, from SMEs right up to multinationals. They will be people who know where to put the equity of corporate identity on a balance sheet so that they can relate its bottom-line worth to a CEO and the tombstone-faced CFO sitting to his right. At the same time they’ll be able to relate how best to use things like Twitter to the blonde 20-something, €23K-a-year PR bunny who’s in charge of implementing the practice via Tweetdeck. And they’ll equip the middle management layer with the understanding of how important it is to ensure, through the filter of best practice, that what’s being implemented by the bunny has to make the boardroom happy. They’ll know that it should complement and act as an extension of existing marketing strategy rather than rail against it or be shoehorned uncomfortably into it. And if they know they don’t know all that stuff, they’re the ones who are smart enough to admit it, acknowledge its relevance, and find and bring someone along with them who can provide said context, rather than continuing with a bluff of buzzwords and a blizzard of statistics.

There’s no room for jesters in today’s court.

(Note: I wrote this post back in early January, so a lot of the guff that sparked my animosity has blown over since then, or else I’m just not paying attention to it any more – blogging being dead again, and all that. A very illuminating chat with two online writers yesterday prompted me to post it. You know who you are.)

Ah, the wireless. Sure where would you be of an aul winter evening without the magic box in the corner?

I’d spent a long time looking for this old radio documentary I cobbled together for a college project when, finally, it appeared in an old clippings folder.

It’s an interview with my dad’s aunt Peggy, a Loreto sister who spent 43 years in Kenya with the order as a teacher. She crossed paths with Mother Teresa and taught a child who ended up winning a Nobel peace prize. Not a bad lifetime’s work.

I’ve started doing some podcasts for another website, and thought I’d throw this one up here for the record. Enjoy.

Peggy

Last week I took a bunch of college students back to school. After three hours of poker, I stood up and walked away with 70 of their softly-bludged euros. It was a rare, rare win.

While I was busy fleecing them, we got talking about work, and the fact that I’m back freelancing again. The lads started asking me about what articles I most enjoyed researching. I’m not a big poker player, but when I mentioned a long feature on student poker, and promptly scooped another hefty pot of chips, there was a collective groan. He’s a fucking shark.

The article appeared on the front of the Agenda magazine while I was still a student myself.

Sunday Business Post, Feb 27, 2005

Poker School

It’s 7.30pm and the last of 270 students are trickling through the doors of the Gresham Hotel. Ten to a table, they sit and make guarded small talk, eyeing each other nervously.

With a top prize of €1,500 on the line, there’s little time for making friends, and everyone is anxious to get down to business. Niall Hughes of Trinity College’s Card Society announces to much applause, that the prize fund has reached €6,500.

Hughes gives a short rules briefing, explains the format for the night, and the largest student poker tournament in Britain and Ireland gets under way.

As the first hands are dealt around the room, the chatter dies to nothing, replaced by the clink of poker chips and deep, contemplative sighs as players study their cards before placing a bet.

A poker night used to represent a quiet night in, but its resurgence among college students has seen it rebranded as a lads’ night out.

The tournament is not an isolated anomaly, but indicative of a changing social landscape in Ireland. Gambling – specifically poker-play for cash – is fast becoming the new binge drinking for many of the college-going population.

That the game has found a new foothold in Irish campuses is no secret, but the momentum for a revolution such as this hasn’t appeared out of the ether.

Poker is enjoying an enormous resurgence in popularity worldwide. It’s a phenomenon that is being led, unsurprisingly, by the United States. Televised poker and the internet are largely responsible for the surge in popularity, but people are playing poker in any form they can get it.

The live game is as omnipresent as ever, but internet poker rooms now bring quick-fire poker and real-time cash tournaments directly into the home, using a decent dial-up connection.

The internet is awash with foolhardy beginners and undisciplined players, meaning skilled poker players can easily make $40 per hour preying on novices.

Breon Corcoran, commercial director of Paddy Power’s internet operations, estimates 100,000 people per day play online poker in the US, with up to 50,000 people playing at any one time.

The attraction for those who are looking to turn a profit out of the game is that you can play multiple games at one time, at a much faster pace than is possible at a real, or ‘live’ game.

Most sites necessitate that you download their gaming software and then make a deposit into an account via credit card, with which you buy your online chips. However, you can hone your skills on ‘play-money’ tables, for which there is no charge.

Players can bet as little or as much as they feel comfortable with, and there are hundreds of tables from which to choose in any given site.

Regardless of whether the game is real or virtual, it’s no less addictive. Its accessibility is luring an increasing number of people into frittering away cash without ever having to enter a casino.

Within the college tournament structure, addictive gambling might not be a problem just yet, but the potential for people to get hooked is still present.

The early dropouts in tournaments often go in search of a cash game to occupy the rest of the evening, or head home to play on internet poker sites, where there are fewer limits on what they can spend.

Commercial casino gambling per se is still illegal in Ireland, although card clubs and societies operate within the law by demanding that their patrons become members.

Online services operate in a grey area, offering gambling across borders with little or no regulation.

Some companies, such as paradisepoker.com, are fleeing recent restrictive legislation that prohibits this in the US.

But rather than having Irish and foreign bookmakers locate elsewhere, the government is actively trying to lure more gambling companies to locate in the Republic.

To this end, betting tax has plummeted from 20 per cent in 1985 to just 2 per cent now, as a result of amendments made by the then finance minister, Charlie McCreevy, in 2002.

Stephen Rowen, director of the Rutland Centre for Addiction, calls gambling the most expensive addiction in Ireland, yet one the government seems intent on fuelling.

Rowen classes Ireland as a “high-risk population’‘ in terms of gambling addiction, with growing levels of disposable income and more people living in the relative anonymity of cities.

He has seen an increase in the number of gamblers coming through the doors of the Rutland Centre.

Rowen attributes this to the ease of gambling afforded by the internet.

The typical Rutland Centre client is one who is a year’s salary or more in debt, and who seeks help only at that stage of the problem. Rowen says the rise in student gambling and the targeting of students as a market is a real cause for concern.

“The traditional age to start gambling is in the teens. It’s always worrisome when a population that is more vulnerable is targeted. It’s not unusual for under-agers to follow those who are a little older; big brothers and people they see as being ‘cool’.”

John (not his real name) from Gamblers Anonymous’ Dublin branch backs this up.

“I got hooked from the age of eight,” he says, “and any education I had went out the window after that. I didn’t stop until I was 43.”

Rowen warns that even those who see themselves as above addiction can fall prey to it. “These are not bad people. Everyone we work with is bright, intelligent, and able to orchestrate loans and finances to pay for their gambling.”

With that in mind, it’s not too long a path from the Rutland Centre back to the college campuses, where the bright young minds of tomorrow are gathering around card tables with startling frequency.

In Ireland, just as in the US, young, college-going males are leading the poker charge. Many of the players at the Gresham tournament developed their love for the game during summers spent in the US, and now play regularly back home. Poker societies in Irish universities have seen their membership balloon in the last year.

Subscriptions to UCD’s Pokersoc doubled this year to 480 players. Trinity College’s Card Society boasts the biggest number in Ireland, with 645 members – a number it expects to grow as the year progresses.

UCC is a newcomer, having founded its poker society only three weeks ago. On the first night,16 people showed up. A week later the capacity of the cards was reached, with 42 players, and the society had to turn away seven hopefuls. It now has 75 members on its books.

The college focus is on the live game, with face-to-face action in organised tournaments and weekly games. Most of these involve an entry fee, which is pooled to make the prize fund split eight or ten ways.

Players in the Gresham hotel tournament paid a €20 entry fee to have a shot at the €6,500 on offer.

A similar event in UCD in mid-February came close to topping that number, with the turnout taking the organisers completely by surprise. The top prize of €1,500 in cash at the Gresham event went to William Whelan, a 20-year-old commerce student.

Whelan plays regularly in the Fitzwilliam card club, but since Christmas, has “been playing more and more online.

“There’s nothing to beat a live win though, like last night. Biggest adrenaline rush I’ve ever had.”

Whelan isn’t alone in seeing the internet as a potential goldmine. Aged just 22, student Cian O’Sheehan is a professional online poker player and co-owner of www.Poker.ie.

“I don’t consider myself a gambler,” Cian says. “I never play the Lotto or buy scratch cards, or bet on horses.”

What Cian does do, since putting his NCAD course on hold and quitting his part-time job in a video shop, is play internet poker for money full-time.

“My parents weren’t pleased. When I told them I wanted to leave my part-time job to play poker instead, they were concerned that it would develop into a problem. But to be a winning poker player, you have to eliminate as much of the gambling side of the game as possible.”

It is tempting to dismiss a professional, yet somehow ‘non-gambling’ card player as being knee-deep in his own denial, but the statistics indicate that he may be on to a bona fide winner.

Part of the attraction of poker is that, for a small buy-in, you can win your way into bigger and bigger online tables. Cash prizes apart, the goal is then to get a free ticket to one of the top tournaments.

According to Whelan, “$20 can win you a trip to Vegas worth something like $15,000′‘.

It is becoming more common for poker players to bridge the real/cyber world divide. Those who pick up skills and tickets online have a realistic hope of making the final tables in the big cash prize tournaments, where play moves at a more considered pace.

In 2003, the top $2.5 million prize at the prestigious World Series of Poker in Las Vegas was won by a 27-year-old accountant from Tennessee, Chris Moneymaker. It was his first live tournament.

Like local Bray pro, Cian O’Sheehan, he learned his trade, made his money and won his ticket to Vegas by playing tournaments online.

Moneymaker started playing on Pokerstars.com after watching Rounders, a film that stars Matt Damon as a reformed college poker addict who gets dragged back into the game to pay off a friend’s gambling debts.

Damon’s character in the film alludes to the skill involved in tournament poker, saying: “Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final table of the World Series of Poker every year? What, are they the luckiest guys in Las Vegas?”

With a mixture of luck and skill, Moneymaker found himself propelled from the anonymity of internet poker rooms into that exclusive circle. He played alongside poker legend Johnny Chan and foot-high stacks of dollar bills that he would later walk away with.

Moneymaker’s success has accelerated the take-off of online gaming in the US.

From an industry point of view, poker is definitely an increasingly lucrative market.

Sportingbet, the world’s largest online betting provider, added paradisepoker.com, the third-largest poker site in the world, to its portfolio last year. The move signalled the growing commercial importance of the online game.

The rise in Irish poker play coincides with improving internet access and bandwidth, putting internet poker in a good position to change the way the game is played here.

The Gresham Hotel tournament was co-sponsored by VC Student Poker, a branch of the successful Victor Chandler gaming franchise. VC Student Poker brand manager, Rakesh Chablani (aged 25 and a former professional poker player) claims to have 4,500 registered student users, with 2,500 of these playing regularly.

Unlike other poker sites, VC has a site dedicated to students, and Chablani says that 90 per cent of the students that play through VC sites are “winning players’‘.

Irish bookmaker Paddy Power also wants a piece of the gaming action, and has launched Paddypowerpoker.com to that end.

Students, however, are not its target market, says commercial director Breon Corcoran. “We’re focused on providing a service for our existing customers. Our site means you need to have a credit card, and that’s not as prevalent among students.”

The Paddy Power site does, however, provide the low-stake betting that students tend to favour. UCD Pokersoc deputy auditor Bernard McGrath credits some of the growth in the society’s numbers to a recent change in the betting structure, designed to cater for this demand.

“Cash games are not popular with our members. Last year, they only played cash games, not giving too much diversity. We decided to incorporate tournaments into our weekly games, and they have proved to be much more popular,” he says.

Betting is done with chips supplied by the organisers rather than constant cash from the punter’s pocket, so you can enjoy the thrill of the game without having to pay out ever-increasing amounts of money.

“People pay an entry stake at the beginning of the night and there is limited opportunity to rebuy when that stake is gone.

“It is almost impossible for anyone to lose more than €20 a night,” says McGrath.

O’Sheehan of Poker.ie echoes this sentiment: “At the end of the day, it really isn’t about the money. If you happen to lose €20 in a night, that’s the equivalent of four pints. And no one would berate you for drinking four pints.”

Alcohol is something that is conspicuously absent from the university tournaments. The Gresham event had a bar extension until the wee hours, but the barman remained distressingly idle.

Beer glasses were a rare sight on any of the gaming tables, with players preferring water, minerals or Red Bull.

McGrath says UCD’s poker events no longer provide a bar.

“Sales were extremely low, probably because poker players want to keep a clear head. From the point of view of the organisers, it turned out to be more hassle than it was worth.”

In fact, anyone looking to dish the dirt on these young poker fiends will come up empty-handed. The visible part of the college scene is nauseatingly wholesome.

For the time being, it’s a lads-only phenomenon, and smashes the stereotype by being drink-free by choice and smoke-free by legislation.

More characteristically, students are generally not burdened with large wads of cash and are therefore reluctant to bet more than they can afford to lose.

The society organisers boast of job offers they have received as a result of their tenure, extolling the social virtues of the game.

“It teaches you absolute self-assertion,” O’Sheehan says. “You can’t play winning poker without being aware of what you are doing and why you are doing it.

“Because of the chance elements of the game, you need to develop great patience and discipline, and at the same time you are learning how to handle your money.”

Despite this, the stigma of poker as a furtive, backroom pastime remains, and many students won’t talk about their pastime because their parents wouldn’t approve. One student had study notes in front of him at the table, studying for an exam the next morning.

One college event organiser wished to remain anonymous, saying that despite being proud of his society’s growth, he wouldn’t feel comfortable mentioning his poker involvement on a CV, and would certainly never mention it at home. He had fabricated an alibi for being at the tournament.

But he might not have to keep quiet about his talents for long. In booming Ireland, gambling is a growth industry. The punters want it, the students want it and the government wants it. Further expansion in our colleges and online is certainly on the cards.

Poker face: Kevin O’Donovan

Age: 23

Occupation: MEng student in Engineering

Years playing poker: 1.

Favourite online poker site: pokerroom.com

When most people were heading to bed on Christmas night, Kevin sat down at his computer. Admittedly a little merry from the festivities, Kevin entered a $30 buy-in tournament on pokerroom.com.

“I play online a bit, but prefer to play for smaller stakes, usually, entrance fees of around $5 or $6,” he says. “This one was a bit more expensive, but there was a guaranteed pot of $50,000.”

Playing against 800 other online users, Kevin was still at his keyboard when people began waking at 8.30 the next morning. He had made it to the final table, coming second, and taking away a prize of $6,000.

“No one believed I’d won, and no one believed I’d get the money. They said, ‘I’ll believe it when I see the cheque’.”

When a player ‘cashes out’ for more than $100 on this particular site, the cheque is sent by courier.

“People just don’t trust the internet, but the cheque arrived in a FedEx envelope,” says Kevin.

However, he doesn’t trust the internet totally. “I only play poker. I would only play games against other people. There’s always the chance the computer can screw you if you play games like Blackjack.”

Kevin has been to card clubs in Dublin a few times, but plays most of his poker with friends or online, and has never played a live game for big cash.

“I don’t have the money. I spend about $50 a month online, and I use whatever I win to play more poker. The $6,000 has made the time spent looking for the right job a bit easier.”

This was one of the hardest articles I ever chose to write. My mum (pictured) had a short but intense battle with MS in her mid-forties, which she ultimately lost. I paired up with Damien Mulley, who had been diagnosed recently, to write about our experiences of the condition. It’s heavy.

I wrote this six months after my father died, and some people remarked that it was an article I could never have written while he was alive, given the situation it describes. It doesn’t attach any blame to him for his response, but it would have been….awkward. And as for the motives behind it – I don’t know. Therapy, I guess. It’s still hard to re-read, and seeing it in print was much harder than the process of writing it, which I undertook pretty much on autopilot. I picked up a copy of the paper and went into a coffee shop to read it that day, and nearly collapsed when I saw the pictures of my mother in the paper. Anyway, here it is:

Sunday Business Post, September 07, 2008

MS, which attacks a person’s nervous system, directly affects more than 6,000 people in Ireland. Diagnosis often prompts a frenzy of research, as the new patient scrambles to arm themselves with as much information as they can. Often, the first stop is someone whose life has already been affected by MS.

For Cork-based journalist Damien Mulley, diagnosed this January, his first port of call was a fellow journalist, Markham Nolan, whose mother died in 2004 after an unusually brief time with the illness. Here, they share their very different perspectives on a condition that is a familiar presence in thousands of Irish homes.
Damien’s story
People thank their idols and their family when they win awards that recognise their achievements. I’d like to thank my MS for my future achievements. My world hasn’t drastically changed since the diagnosis, but it has given me some new perspectives.

Last November, my left hand and left foot had a numbness/pins and needles sensation which we put down to the amount of travelling I was doing. Mostly, these symptoms subsided.

On December 3 last year, I woke up in my hotel room in Palo Alto, California, with a buzzing in my ears and my left side, from my ear all the way to my toes, was numb. I sat up, panicking. Should I call for a doctor and end up in a Stanford medical centre with my family on the other side of the world worrying about me, probably trying to fly out, and having to pay a hefty medical bill? Plus, I was on a work trip organised around a tour of tech companies. This could wait until I was back in Cork. That Damien’s priorities were different then.

As I hobbled through events over the week in California, the buzzing in my ears subsided, and the pins and needles and numbness lessened but never went away. I kept checking the mirror, wondering was my face sagging.

I was 27 years old. I thought the pressure in the cabin over the 11-hour flight had damaged something in my head, and I was petrified getting the flight back home.

Even though I have an aunt with MS, it never crossed my mind that I was experiencing some of the symptoms of this illness. I saw my GP the day after I returned, and he said I needed to see a neurologist immediately. However, an appointment, even with a private consultant, would be months away.

He fast-tracked my appointment by sending me through A&E in the Mercy Hospital in Cork. I spent the night on a trolley, answering questions, getting physical tests, cat scans and blood tests. The doctors were not happy with what they were seeing.

Diagnosing MS isn’t done by a simple blood test. So, over the next few days, I had an MRI scan, more blood tests and a spinal tap. Not pleasant.

It was only when they told me the spinal tap would be looking for myelin, among other things, that I suspected MS. Myelin is the human equivalent of the insulation around cables, except it’s around our nerves.

People with MS have their myelin attacked by their own bodies and it gets damaged or stripped away. It can show up in spinal fluid. My spinal fluid did contain myelin, but many other tests were done on the fluid. Only when everything else was ruled out would the doctors settle on MS.

I would have to wait for three months, until my test results came back from Britain to get final confirmation. I didn’t tell my family that MS was suspected. I wanted them to enjoy Christmas. If it was MS, telling them once would be enough.

Getting confirmation that I had MS was in some way a relief. While I didn’t want that diagnosis, knowing what I had meant I could box around it.

Now, my left side is no longer numb and the pins and needles have receded, leaving a tightness in my left palm. I feel a throbbing pain in my left side when I become tired, which I do easily, even after the most mundane tasks. I need to sleep more than I did.

When I get tired the tightness in my hand can increase and travel up my arm, while pins and needles in my left foot can travel up my leg. It’s an early warning system to take it easy.

Although many people experience MS in this way, I previously thought only of the illness in terms of wheelchairs and crutches. I might never get another attack – if all I’m left with is a moany left side, I can deal with that.

Markham’s story
One of the first things they tell the family of an MS patient is that stress exacerbates it. Here’s the diagnosis, now stay calm, everybody, and it’ll be all right. Breathe easy; don’t worry; it’s not the end of the world, they say.

That’s what I tried to pass on to Damien when he said he was diagnosed. I was checking e-mail when he popped up on instant messenger, asking if we could talk about my Mum.

Damien had never known my Mum, other than through what I had written about her MS when trying to raise donations for MS charities. The penny dropped instantly. He had recently complained of mysterious numbness and pins and needles, and I knew immediately he had been diagnosed.

Then I panicked, because he wanted to ask about Mum’s story, which isn’t one you’d want to relate to a newly-diagnosed patient. Hers had no happy ending, it was the MS doomsday scenario.

From normality to Richard Pryor in four short years. Inmost cases MS is, in the grand spectrum of degenerative diseases, eminently bearable and actually pretty manageable.

A diagnosis usually means making some environmental and behavioural changes, and dealing with the odd bout of illness, but, largely, life remains the same. A cousin of Mum’s has it and lives a happy and busy life.

Mum’s case of MS, however, was far from typical. It was hugely and unusually aggressive and we weren’t told about the impact of stress on MS until her condition had moved beyond a simple case of stress management.

The period between the emergence of her symptoms and the official diagnosis saw her endure one of the ‘Big Three’ when it comes to stress: her separation from my father. After a family trip to Barbados, Mum started complaining of strange symptoms. Her balance was off, her hearing was supersensitive, and she had headaches and nausea.

The doctors, at this stage, were bobbing for answers in a confused sea of symptoms but coming up with nothing. After a course of steroids, she was sent home feeling slightly better, but changes were already under way. Her mood swung like a pendulum, which we put down to hormones, but the changes deepened. Mum became wildly emotional, uncontrollably so.

I later learned, from another MS sufferer and campaigner, that the MS patient will often undergo alterations in their personality. The severity of it varies with the person, but before we knew it was the MS we were in the dark as to why mum had changed so much. She couldn’t explain it either.

As she worsened, her friends couldn’t handle her. Neither could my father, and they split after 20 years of marriage. Having been a sociable, sporty person, involved at the hub of everything from tennis club committees to charity work, and our lives as her children, Mum became a physical and emotional stranger to us all, far from the person who married Dad and raised us.

Gone was the artistic, productive and positive backbone of what was a very happy family. Instead, we got to know a hyper-sensitive, paranoid and deeply sad woman, who we loved none the less, but whose emergence we just couldn’t understand.

The separation only served to make matters worse and, as the MS, still undiagnosed, took hold of Mum’s nervous system her memory and motor control began to slip. Small dings started to appear mysteriously on Mum’s car, blamed unfairly on the two L-plate drivers in the house (myself and my sister), to the point that we started to question our own memories, and each other’s driving.

Tennis, golf, everything was suddenly beyond mum’s physical capabilities and her social life, which revolved around her sport, fell apart.

Fully aware of her own dilapidation, Mum’s frustration and depression snowballed, with tears an almost daily occurrence. Our house, formerly famous for its open door to all comers, Mum’s smile and home cooking, became somewhere we only brought friends when it was unavoidable. I was 19 years old, starting in college. My sister was 16, becoming a woman with her female role model torn asunder. Our mother was just 43.

Her eyesight worsened, with her eyeballs oscillating uncontrollably, and we realised that this had to be more than hormones. Some thorough investigation by Prof Michael Hutchinson in St Vincent’s Private Hospital turned up the reason. She had MS.

It had been lurking in her system, perhaps forever, and was probably spurred into action by an earlier bout of encephalitis, helped along by the various stressful episodes since then. MRI scans showed up lesions in her nervous system, and the damage was irreversible.

Professor Hutchinson, to his credit, threw the book at Mum’s MS and showed superhuman compassion and patience in trying to slow it down. We visited ‘Hutch’ in St Vincent’s so often that he became like an uncle, and he seemed to take every loss in our shared battle personally.

Betaferon drugs were diagnosed, and I learnt how to inject Mum’s back three times a week. Their impact is unpredictable, and they didn’t work. Neither did steroids, and nor did the joints my friends supplied, to Mum’s horror, for ‘‘medicinal purposes’’. We would try anything, and reckoned that the uplifting feeling of sticking it to the man by making a minty with Mum’s menthol cigarettes had to be worth something.

Mum and I moved house, leaving the family home and having to discard much of the detritus of 14 years of living. This was stress number two of the big three, and Mum’s mobility worsened considerably as a result. She couldn’t feel her feet through the pins and needles she was experiencing, and the new house had to have handles fitted in the bathroom and an extra banister on the stairs.

I coached Mum to come down the steep steps backwards, so that if she slipped, she had less chance of doing herself damage. Stress number three would come 18 months later, when Rose, my maternal grandmother, died after a short illness.

The funeral was Mum’s first public outing in a wheelchair, and came as a shock for many of her friends, who hadn’t seen her since she disappeared from whatever ‘scene’ they knew her from.

Nana’s death pulled the rug out from under her feet completely. Within a month, she became unmanageable, unable to wash herself, feed herself, clothe herself. She nearly set the house aflame lighting a cigarette. I couldn’t do it alone any more.

We had no choice, and looked for suitable care, and then spent a year and a half visiting Mum in a nursing home, where she sat, her speech, physical control and awareness sliding until the end. She was the youngest in the facility by some 25 years.

Multiple sclerosis: the facts

What is MS?
MS is a condition that causes the links in a patient’s nervous system to degrade. The connections between nerve cells, white matter cells, are the wiring of your nervous system, carrying messages around your body from your brain to your limbs and organs.

Just like electrical wiring, the wiring in your nervous system has a protective coating around it, made of a substance called myelin. In MS, the cells responsible for maintaining this protective myelin lining come under attack, meaning the lining can degrade. This exposes the connecting nerve fibres to damage and, eventually, breakdown.

Who gets it?
MS is most prevalent in latitudes between 40 and 60 degrees north or south of the equator, and among people in their 20s and 30s. Among affected populations, approximately one person in 1,000 will get MS, with the prevalence for children of MS sufferers rising to one in 40. Women are 50 per cent more likely to develop it than men. It is not contagious, it is not fatal, and there are 2.5 million MS sufferers worldwide.

How fast does it act?
That depends on the person. In its ‘relapsing-remitting’ phase, the symptoms of MS come and go, with extended periods of wellness between attacks where the symptoms can disappear completely. Progressive MS, often diagnosed in later stages, has a more sustained effect on the patient. If diagnosed early, MS is often prevented from reaching the progressive stage for a long time.

Is there a cure?
Not yet. There are plenty of tried and tested remedies to help slow the progress of MS. One of the more recent discoveries, Tysabri, has been removed from the shelves again after patients developed side-effects.

Who can help me if I have MS?
MS Ireland is Ireland’s support agency for MS sufferers and their families. In 2007, it spent €9 million helping people deal with MS, providing more than 5,600 members with support, welfare counselling and through its MS helpline.

It is the first port of call for many MS patients, funding MS research and lobbying hard for improvements in MS care in Ireland. Half its income is derived from donations and fundraising. If you think you might have MS, wish to know more about the disease or want to help raise funds, contact MS Ireland on 1850-233233 or visit www.ms-society.ie. See Damien Mulley’s blog at www.mulley.net

Markham’s advice
When Damien Mulley was diagnosed with MS, he contacted fellow journalist Markham Nolan, whose mother died after a battle with the disease. The first advice he received: smoke a joint, don’t stress, and run that marathon. This is the instant messenger conversation they had on January 16:

Damien: Can I ask you a question about your mum?

Markham: Sure.

D: How long did she have MS?

M: Have you been diagnosed?

D: Last week.

M: Sorry man. But don’t get too worried. Mum’s was a test case. She had an unusually aggressive form of MS. Most people get relapsing/ remitting MS which comes in waves but you’re grand in between. Mum was diagnosed five years before she died. Her case is not one you should use as a benchmark

D: Just wanted to know how long she had it – they want to put me on Interferon next month when the final test result is back. I will tell my folks then what it is. I’m breaking them in but once they hear those two letters they’ll think the worst.

M: I dealt with two neuro guys in Vincent’s during her illness. Dr Hutchinson, who was v good, and also Dr Tubridy – Ryan’s bro – who had the nicest bedside manner of any doctor I’ve met.

D: I have a guy in Cork called Harrington.

M: When you started talking about the numbness, etc, it came to mind immediately, I have to say. Best advice I can give you: DON’T STRESS. Smoke a spliff. Stress and MS go together like petrol and matches. So with Mum, the old divorce/ moving house/mother dying combo wasn’t all that helpful.

D: Yeah they told me not to get stressed.

M: E-mail if you’ve got any questions. My cousin has it too, he still works his ass off and is just fine 90 per cent of the time.

D: I should be okay running a marathon you think? Feel like I need to prove myself.

M: Of course. Exercise is stress relief. Ten months till the next Dublin mara.

How Obama’s father-in-law lived with MS
Michelle Obama, wife of US presidential hopeful Barack Obama, recently cited the example of her father’s attitude to his MS was an inspiration to her in times of adversity.

At the Democratic National Convention, she told crowds: ‘‘My dad was our rock. Although he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in his early 30s, he was our provider, our champion, our hero. As he got sicker, it got harder for him to walk, it took him longer to get dressed in the morning. But if he was in pain, he never let on.

‘‘He never stopped smiling and laughing – even while struggling to button his shirt, even while using two canes to get himself across the room to give my Mom a kiss. He just woke up a little earlier, and worked a little harder.”