What Did James Connolly Die For?

national | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Saturday June 18, 2005 17:28 by Sean Crudden - impero sean at impero dot iol dot ie Jenkinstown, Dundalk, Co Louth. 042 93 71310

Give The Worker Individual Responsibility

Who has the best chance of forming the correct opinions about management in the police or in the health "service"? Is it the tub-thumping, opinionated politician with a big mouth and deaf ears? Has the individual worker a smaller brain or a less important personal life than "Mr Big" in the Health Service Executive (HSE)?

"A HSE spokesman told The Irish Times last night that the review would examine whether nursing-home inspections were ‘sufficiently robust’ and whether health authorities were consistent in their assessments of the homes."

Quotations like the above from the Health Service Executive are designed to cause a little flutter in the breast of people involved in nursing home care. Individual words like "Executive" "robust" "authorities" "assessment" carry, for me, a flavour of the Dickensian. It looks like as if the HSE considers it can guarantee standards only by some kind of aggressive imposition "from the top." My own personal experience is that it is not only in golf that hitting "from the top" is a bad idea.

We all know that James Connolly was executed by gunfire sitting in a chair after he had fought bravely a hopeless battle intended to secure the liberty of the Irish working class. I am sure that if he were alive today he would interpret the HSE as a bureaucratic oppressor seeking to make slaves of workers at the lower levels in the health "service."

The legacy of the 20th century is one of personal freedom and responsibility - next Tuesday is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Sartre who with Albert Camus was one of the fathers of existentialism. People in general today have a high standard of general education. People in their personal lives are well fitted to use their own judgement and there should always be room for personal discretion at work too. The experience which people have of working in a job often has a lot to do with their personal development and the way they are treated at work will often have a very profound spillover effect in their personal and family lives. If workers in the health service (or in the police) are treated like eejits and morons and worse who have no intelligence and who do not know how to do their job then the long term results for society (in terms of family culture) will be regrettable.

Apart from that the work of the health "service" and the police will be of the lowest bestial quality.

No. We will have to get back to basic ideas of respect for the individual worker, training and team-building - and none of this will flow easily from a top-down, authoritarian approach. Paradoxically aggressive management seems to be common currency with the main political ideologues of today (Fine Gael and The Progressive Democrats). Aggression and bullying are the trade marks of Blair in Britain and Bush in The United States - and maybe, also, Putin in Russia.

There are people in Ireland who know a better way and, I think, Bertie Ahern is not least among them. However they have their work cut out for them to roll back a stinking tide of popular, fascistic, unthinking and merciless right-wing politics.