Workplace bullies destroy lives. Employers, in my experience, usually lack the courage or the will to do anything about it.
So I was really pleased to see that the Management-Issues website has put up a micro-site on this scourge.
If you're a target of workplace bullying, or if you' re a union officer or HR officer, check it out here.
If you're into radio, check out the marvellous Speechification blog with an eclectic selection of radio programmes, mainly from the BBC but also from English-speaking stations around the world. You can download the programmes as mp3 files. Some of my favourites include The Only Hooker in the Village, an ABC documentary about a primary schoolteacher turned sex-worker in small town in regional Australia; a BBC programme on Walter de la Mare's poem The Listeners - seems he wasn't too sure himself what it was all about; and I Was Douglas Adams' Flatmate on the early days of the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I really, really hope David McWilliams is wrong when he condemns the Government's bank rescue as a botched job which "will plunge Ireland into a much longer recession than is necessary" in this post on his blog.
"Make no mistake about it: our money will disappear in the next 12 months," he warns. "Irish bank shares will continue to fall steadily as the extent of the dire loan book is revealed and we, the taxpayers, will be asked to stump up again and again."
What scares me about this is that McWilliams was right, well before the event, about our current crash. And both the Government and the financial system are still being run by the people who steered us into this iceberg in the first place.
I discovered Ronelda Kamfer's work on the always excellent Poetry International Web. From the age of 10 she lived in Cape Flats, a place in which getting to school involved getting past three gangs. Cape Flats at one time had 150 gangs and perhaps still has. She saw a schoolmate shot dead in crossfire outside her school.
It's unusual to find a poetic voice coming from a background like this and I really like her poetry and recommend it to you. She writes in Afrikaans and there is just a handful of her poems available in English.
She developed her poetic style by compressing sentences into a few words to stop her little sister from reading her private stuff, according to this interview with Fred De Vries. I've never heard of that method before - but it worked.
A 8-year-old girl in Saudi Arabia has been married off to a 58-year-old man in Saudi Arabia, by her father, according to this report in The Guardian.
A judge has turned down her mother's plea to divorce the two. Instead the girl will have to enter a plea for divorce when she reaches puberty - but what's going to happen to her in the meantime?
The girl's parents are divorced and it seems that this sort of arrangement is sometimes made by men to get at their ex-wives.
What does this say about Islam? What does Islam say about this?
When I covered clerical sex abuse stories for The Irish Times in the 1990s it was clear that children who had been abused by clergy in the Archdiocese of Dublin and who later complained were seen as a nuisance and a threat to be sidelined for the greater good of the Catholic Church.
Judge Yvonne Murphy will shortly publish her report on abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese and I expect it will be devastating for the Church.
Meanwhile the latest report into clerical abuse in the Diocese of Cloyne shows that little has changed in that diocese. The response of Diocesan authorities makes the attitude clear: the Church matters more than the children.
It seems to be taken for granted by many commentators that an all-out attack on the public service is needed to help get us out of the economic hole we have got ourselves into - but I'm not so sure.
If it is true that we need people to spend money to get things moving again, then how does it make sense to throw public servants onto the dole queues who could otherwise be earning and spending money?
Of course we need public service reform and we need to work out just what we can afford in pensions and other benefits in the future - but let's do it in a measured way and not in a feeding frenzy.
(This is the text of my That's Men column published in The Irish Times on Tuesday 16th December 2008):
WELL, THE season of peace and goodwill is upon us so stand by for lots of tension and rows in many households.
That's why I was glad to come across "10 rules for friendly fighting for couples" on the excellent Psychcentral blog.
I don't agree with all of them but even a few of them could help you move from a freezing doghouse to a blazing log fire for Christmas. Here they are:
1 Embrace conflict. There is no need to go into a three-day sulk just because you and your partner have had a row. Quarrelling is normal among human beings. Accept it and get over it.
2 Talk softly. Now, this doesn't mean scary softly as in Hannibal Lecter. It means conducting the argument, especially the beginning of the argument, softly rather than harshly. You don't change people's minds by shouting at them.
3 Make peace sooner rather than later. Dragging the conflict out, punishing your partner for disagreeing and so on is unpleasant and exhausting. Since rows are inevitable, the sooner you can make the peace the better - otherwise you are going to be spending a lot of time at war. Making the peace can mean resolving the conflict, agreeing to differ or just letting the matter drop.
4 Attack the issue not the other person. "You're such a daddy's girl/mammy's boy. Why don't you just move back home and let daddy/mammy take care of you." That's attacking the other person.
"I'd like to have Christmas dinner here and visit your parents beforehand/ afterwards." That's attacking the issue.
Attacking the issue doesn't guarantee agreement, especially over the dreaded Christmas dinner with the in-laws. But it's still a superior approach to attacking the other person which only harms the relationship.
To me, the four rules above are the important ones. The other six are:
5 Listen respectfully. Good advice but if it's a proper row you're unlikely to be listening respectfully - otherwise it wouldn't be a fight.
6 Get curious, not defensive and
7 Ask for specifics. These two very similar rules I would regard as a counsel of perfection. To actually ask for details of your partner's complaints while you are being scolded would require the saintliness of Mother Teresa and Padre Pio rolled into one.
8 Find points of agreement. Yes, very good but hard to do in the middle of a fight.
9 Look for options - ask for suggestions. Again, we are in Mother Teresa territory here. Most of us are more likely to make (unhelpful) suggestions than to ask for them in a fight.
10 Make concessions. Marie Hartwell-Walker, who wrote the piece on the Psychcentral blog, points out that even a small concession can help defuse a conflict and I would agree with her. Probably you are more likely to make a concession after the row has died down but even so, it's worth doing.
As Hartwell-Walker points out in her article at www.psych central.com, couples in mature, healthy relationships seem to understand these principles. I suspect they learn them the hard way and that many relationships break up or are unhappy for want of following a few simple rules like these.
So take a look through the list and see if there's anything in it you can put to use. It might be the best Christmas present you'll get this year.
• Last week's piece on the often-hidden issue of eating disorders in men drew this response from Ruth Ní Eidhin of Bodywhys - The Eating Disorders Association of Ireland:
"At Bodywhys we are keenly aware of the issues that can arise around Christmas, and in fact we tend to see an increase in calls to our helpline immediately after the Christmas period from people who have had difficulty over the festive season . . . It is particularly encouraging to see the issue of men and eating disorders being addressed, as we are seeing more and more men coming forward seeking support. The more we can challenge the stereotype of eating disorders as a 'women's issue', the easier it is for other men to come forward without fear of any stigma."
The Bodywhys helpline is 1890 200 444 and www.bodywhys.ie is its web address.
• Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor. His book That's Men , the best of the That's Men column from The Irish Times is published by Veritas.
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(This is the text of my That's Men column published in The Irish Times on Tuesday 14th October 2008):
The term 'porn-zombie' was new to me until I came across it on addiction therapist Jason McClain's website.
McClain was referring to the way in which viewers of porn on the Internet - and I think it's fair to say the vast majority are men - lose track of time as they watch pornography for hours on end.
He takes the view that you have a pornography addiction if your consumption of porn interferes with your relationships or with key aspects of your life away from the screen.
He doesn't see it as an addiction, or necessarily as a problem, if you have a genuinely take it or leave it attitude to pornography. He is not, of course, referring here to child pornography and neither am I.
There are reasons, though, why the journey from 'take it or leave it' to 'porn-zombie' can be a quick one. Anything involving sexual stimulation has a powerful draw and when the stimulation is available free of charge, as it is on the internet, then the draw is all the more powerful.
And remember the collapse of the Internet bubble about eight or nine years ago? Very talented people in Silicon Valley found themselves out of work. Some gravitated towards that area of the web which continued to make money - pornography (the free pornography is, of course, meant to lure people into subscribing to pay sites). The result? Pornography websites became among the slickest and most sophisticated in the world. Link that sophistication with sexual stimulation and you begin to see how easy it is for internet porn, in particular, to draw people in and keep them there.
And the new browsers from Internet Explorer and Google come with what sceptics call a 'porn mode' option that allows people to surf without leaving a trace on their computers.
Add to all this the human tendency to escape into pleasure to avoid the stresses of life. By this I mean that we tend to drink too much, comfort eat, spend too much, do drugs, do pornography and so on and on as a response to emotional pain.
If you can do these things and then put them aside while you get on with sorting out your life, fine. But all too often, they become an end in themselves even after the pleasure has gone out of them.
In relation to pornography addiction, McClain identifies three stages.
The first is anticipation. Here the consumer of pornography is anxious to get people out of the way so he can get to the computer. Next is consumption where the user may well get into that 'porn-zombie' state. The third stage is self-hatred and a sense of time wasted. Then the cycle is repeated, sometimes as a way of escaping from that painful third stage - a bit like taking a drink at lunchtime to help with a hangover.
He suggests measures such as evaluating the effect of porn on your closest relationships, and maintaining an awareness of your behaviour while you are actually consuming porn instead of falling into the 'zombie' state.
He also advocates using software that doesn't allow you to go on to pornography websites. You can always disable the software temporarily but he argues the hassle involved in doing this may give you enough pause for thought to change your mind.
He recommends a free filtering system called OpenDNS, which you can find at www.opendns.com. The only problem is that it involves, according to its website, "taking a few minutes to unbundle your DNS service from your ISP's Internet connection" which would frighten the living daylights out of me.
But there are lots of filtering programs and if you can find porn you can find them too.
Final thought: people who have a dependence on pornography are not bad people. They are just people who are hooked on a very strong drug and who need to make new choices.
They could start off by looking at McClain's website at www.quitpornaddiction.com which promotes his ebook but also has a link to his blog with lots of good, free information. If you are married to somebody with a pornography addiction, you will find much here to interest you as well.
(This is the text of my That's Men column published in The Irish Times on Tuesday 7th October 2008):
The Malteser is, I think you will agree, a jewel of the confectioner's art.
But thanks to Pope John XXIII and a movie called Helga, I can't look at a Malteser.
My tale illustrates the dangers of liberal Catholicism and of sex education - for the latter is what Helga purveyed - particularly when both conjoin.
Let me explain. The other day, a friend confided that she cannot face a Fry's Chocolate Cream. This product is another confectioner's jewel, a shining light of sophistication in a coarse world. I know this because one of my grandmothers, a sophisticated lady if ever there was one, used to give Fry's Chocolate Cream bars to myself and my sister when we were children, after she had corrected our grammar.
Anyway my friend, at the age of five, was handed an entire box of Fry's Chocolate Cream. She did what any intelligent five year old might be expected to do - she faded into the background and scoffed the lot.
The results were as you might expect. That's why she can no longer experience the joy of eating Fry's Chocolate Cream.
In psychology this is called the Garcia Effect after an experiment in which...no, let's not go there.
Anyway, her sad tale reminded me of my Maltesers issue.
In the 1960s, a West German health minister called Käte Strobel decided to promote sex education. One of the fruits of her endeavours was a 1967 sex education movie called Helga.
Helga was special in its day because it was a mainstream sex education movie and because it featured a childbirth scene. It was also special because the film censor allowed it to be shown here.
And the Pope? Even before Ms Strobel got going, Pople John XXIII had convened the Second Vatican Council. This had the effect of liberalising the church and making us all think we lived in a new era.
A cohort of liberal priests emerged from Vatican Two and these priests were convinced that it would be a good thing for the young people of Ireland to be exposed to Helga.
Buses were organised to bring young people up to, I think, the Savoy in Dublin to see the film and be educated.
A have a dim memory of an earnest priest flitting about a bus in Naas that had been organised for the young people of the town and environs.
A major attraction of the Helga movie was that people were reputed to get sick during the childbirth scene. So we didn't go to it so much for the sex education - we knew bloody well there'd be no sex left in it by the time the censor was through - as to see if we could get through the childbirth scene without throwing up.
On the way into the movie, you will have guessed, I treated myself to an entire box of Maltesers. I'm talking about 1960s boxes here, big boxes - the sort of boxes you're meant to share.
I remember absolutely nothing about the movie. A Canadian contributer to the Internet Movie Database says that "I remember naked girls in a school shower," but it's a safe bet that the version we saw omitted this key scene.
What I remember is that I ate all the Maltesers myself while wondering if the childbirth scene was going to make me sick. It didn't but the experience created assocations in my mind with Maltesers which have prevented me from ever again eating one of those wonderful (as I recall) taste bombs.
So in the end, Helga was a let down. The church went on to implode and we all became heathens and went to hell in a handcart.
It wasn't worth it, not at the price of putting me off my favourite chocs.
The star of Helga, Ruth Gassmann, went on to make a number of movies including the 1972 Robinson und seine wilden Sklavinnen shown in the UK as Robinson and His Tempestuous Slaves and in France as Trois filles nues dans l'île de Robinson.
Now. why couldn't they have bussed us up to that one? I'd even have chanced another box of Maltesers.
I'm delighted that Poetry Daily, a website I've been reading with admiration for years, is featuring one of my poems today, Saturday 4th October. The poem, The red heifer, is from my collection You've been great. Click on over there and take a look.
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And here is the rest of it.
I just love the outrage over the attempt by the Irish Nationwide to get British investors to move money into its coffers in light of the Government's new guarantee scheme. "Wholly inappropriate" is the phrase being used by the great and the good about this attempt by a bank to capitalise on an opportunity. What did they expect? If you lock a drunkard in an off-licence overnight you are hardly in a position to bleat "wholly inappropriate" when you find him pissed the next morning. Not that I'm suggesting the folk in the Irish Nationwide take a drink. It's a metaphor.
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You've been great, my collection of 20 poems which was a winner of the Poetry Business Award 2007, is published by Smith/Doorstop. Smith/Doorstop, based in Sheffield, publishes the poetry magazine The North as well as books and pamphlets and was founded by poet Peter Sansom. The collection of 20 poems was one of four winners of the competition run by The Poetry Business which is associated with Smith/Doorstop. The competition was sponsored by the Arts Council of England and Kirklees Cultural Services. Also winning and having their collections published were Julia Deakin, Yvonne Green and Ann Pilling.
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Just Like A Man is hibernating and will be updated next in September. Meantime, there's plenty here to read. Have a good summer (or winter if you're down there).
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And here is the rest of it.
"He was prepared to accept the risk," she told The Irish Independent.
"He had to be in the thick of it himself. That was just his way."
"The lights have gone out for us," she added. "Nothing will ever be the same."
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I was sorry to read of the death of Nuala O'Faolain just before midnight, 9th May 2008, last night at Blackrock Hospice. Her interview with Marian Finucane a month ago startled and touched many people. It also tore away the veil of "don't talk about it" that surrounds terminal illness. It is some consolation that she died in a hospice where the experience would have been made as painless as possible. I hope she found some peace towards the end.
RTÉ's report of her death is here.
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And here is the rest of it.
Here's a link to the YouTube video that got eight guys in Bulmers fired. I would have thought a bollocking in the form of a month's suspension and some mandatory health and safety training would have been enough.....
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And here is the rest of it.
What a mess we've made of the issue of sex between adults and underage children. A 15-year-old boy is charged with statutory rape for having sex with a 14-year-old girl. A 27-year-old man who makes a 15-year-old babysitter pregnant gets away with two years in jail. We need to get this confused nonsense sorted out. At least the 15-year-old boy, now 17 years of age, is challenging the constitutionality of the law which allows him to be charged while giving immunity to the girl - all part of Michael McDowell's legacy to us as Minister for Justice in 2006.
And while we're getting that sorted out, let's remember we have been promised a constitutional referendum on the rights of children in general. It would suit politicians down to the ground to confine this to the issue of under-age sex and to ignore the myriad of other ways in which the system lets down kids. Campaigners on children's rights need to keep a close eye on that one.
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Weekly bric a brac from Padraig O'Morain
Mr Justice Hedigan said there was nothing in Irish law to suggest that a family of two women and a child "has any lesser right to be recognised as a de facto family than a family composed of a man and a woman unmarried to each other".
He said the rights of a man who acted as a sperm donor were at least no greater than those of an unmarried father. In considering his application for guardianship the child's welfare was the paramount consideration, the Irish Times report says.
He believed there existed such personal ties between the couple and the child as to give rise to family rights under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights which do not conflict with Irish law.
For more details, see this report in The Irish Independent.
This is the text of my article which appeared in The Evening Herald on Monday, 15th April 2008. Please note that many listeners found listening to the interview distressing. A transcript is here on the Irish Independent website. O'Faolain is author of Are you somebody, Almost there, My dream of you and The story of Chicago May.
[Note: Nuala O'Faolain died on 9th May 2008]Many people have wondered if Nuala O’Faolain’s interview with Marian Finucane on RTÉ Radio One on Saturday was distressing to persons with terminal illness. I would suggest that the interview was distressing to all of us but potentially comforting as well, two reasons.
The first is that we all have a terminal illness because, like her, we will all suffer death though not all of us will know about it at the time. The second is that people with terminal illnesses are expected by society to face the end in a particular way, namely with serenity, yet for many this is not the way they want to do it.
The bleakness and despair in her interview struck home particularly, I think, because it echoed that awful bleakness that a person can feel when they are awake alone in the middle of the night and the gloomiest of thoughts come to haunt them.
Nuala brought that bleakness into the light of a Saturday morning when most of us do not want to be reminded of it.
Psychologists say that one of the great crises we face in our lives is the realisation that we are going to die. We all know intellectually that one day we will die but it can take decades for us to feel the full force of that realisation. It can be triggered by the death of another person, even somebody we do not know very well.
When the realisation happens, we must come to terms with a reality that shakes us to foundations. Some people respond to the reality by denying it. They aim for eternal life on earth and take any treatment that promises to prevent the inevitable. Others become depressed or anxious or turn to drink or drugs. Most of us, I think, take the realisation of the inevitability of death as a wake-up call suggesting that we had better get on with doing the things we wanted to do in life.
In her interview, Nuala sound like somebody whom that realisation only hit six weeks ago when she got her diagnosis of terminal cancer. She is trying to cope with the realisation and the reality at the same time, an enormous demand on any human being. In saying that, I realise that I am presuming a great deal and that I may be entirely wrong.
One of the ways we deny the reality of death is to expect other people to die with a smile on their lips. Nearly twenty years ago, Therese Brady, who was then director of post-graduate training in clinical psychology at University College Dublin, complained about the expectation that people should face the death in ways that everybody else approved of. She developed the bereavement counselling service for the Irish Hospice Foundation. People who were dying were expected to do so in line with the expectations of a society which had, she said, “outlawed distress.”
It seems to me that by outlawing distress we have denied dying people the right to talk about this most significant of events. How often is the person who is dying told, when they want to express their feelings about it, “Don’t be talking like that, shure you’ll outlive us all”? What does it feel like, I wonder, to have to put up with that sort of nonsense when you are trying to make sense of your own death?
We will all face death in our own different ways. What Nuala’s interview has done, I hope, is to give permission to those who wish, in the words of Dylan Thomas, to “rage, rage against the dying of the light” to go right ahead and do so regardless of how the rest of us feel about it.
I wish Nuala some comfort in her journey.
Weekly bric a brac from Padraig O'Morain.
This is the text of my That's Men column in The Irish Times on Tuesday, 8th April, 2008. A collection of That's Men columns will be published by Veritas this summer.
Oh dear, can it really be true that those sexy images in the ads influence the behaviour of men?
I am afraid it is. But the women need not snigger. They too are prone to being influenced by attractive men in ways they might not expect.
Researchers at Stanford University showed men a series of erotic images and then invited them to gamble some money. The gambling exercise had no overt relationship to what went before. And yet the men who had viewed erotic images took greater risks in gambling than did men who had not seen these images.
But women interviewing men for jobs can find in their decisions influenced, unconsciously, by the attractiveness of the chap in the seat opposite.
Women in a mock job interview situation who were shown photographs of applicants tended to pick the more attractive looking men for the more high status jobs. They were also more generous to attractive men than to attractive women applicants.
Men in this experiment did not seem to discriminate between more and less attractive females. That surprises me given the number of guys in high status jobs who just happen to choose very pretty secretaries.
So I am not saying that these pieces of research are the last word on the influence of sex on men and women. And yet the influence of the unconscious on our everyday behaviour – sometimes in remarkable ways – is well established.
Consider this piece of research reported by Dr Christian Jarrett in the latest Psychologist (access restricted). A number of university students was asked questions, individually, by a researcher. While the questioning were going on, there were asked to hold the researcher’s drink. In some cases this was a hot coffee and in others it was an iced coffee. Later, another researcher came along and had a little chat with each of them.
The students were then asked whether they would recommend the second researcher for a job. The ones who had held the hot coffee cup said they would. The ones who held the cold cup said they wouldn’t.
So if you want someone to give you a job, buying them a hot coffee might work. This is especially so since people who drink coffee are more open to persuasion. For instance, in an Australian study, participants given a drink laced with caffeine were more likely to change their views on controversial topics such as euthanasia than those who were not.
Which goes to show that fellows who ask a girl in for a “coffee” at two o’clock in the morning are being a lot more clever than you might think.
Now, suppose you got a job from the manager who had a coffee in his hand at the time and suppose he sends you into a negotiation which you really need to win.
You take the bright new shiny briefcase your mother bought for you and you plonk it on the table, just to show you mean business, right? Wrong. If you ask two people to play cards and you place a briefcase in view, they will play more competitively than otherwise. So no briefcase, please.
Needless to say, you will offer your competitor a nice cup of coffee, though, won’t you? And if you want to be really sneaky, you yourself will just have a glass of cold water, thanks very much.
Here’s another one you can use. Getting people into a state of disgust or sadness will strongly influence their subsequent buying behaviour. In one experiment, students shown a film calculated to make them feel sad (The Champ) were later prepared to pay more for a bottle of water than people shown a film which made them feel disgusted (Trainspotting). So don’t make ’em laugh, make ’em cry and you’re on the road to riches.
And if you can’t make ’em cry, at least you can imitate them. Studies show that if you mimic the body language and mannerisms of a person with whom you are negotiating, you will end up with a better deal than if you do not. And, by the way, persons whose behaviour is mimicked are subsequently more benevolent towards others, a Dutch study shows.
The lesson? Don’t beat yourself up too much over your sillier decisions. It’s nothing to do with you, really.
Now, coffee anyone?
Got an opinion? Comment here.
Questia.com provides access to thousands of academic texts and newspaper and magazine articles - but you need to beware of its trigger-happy billing system which can mean that using Questia.com could very easily cost more than you think.
I'll come to my gripe (and explain the Ken Lay reference) in a minute, but first some other gripes from the Net:
Sara, on ripoffreport.com complained of difficulties in cancelling a three month subscription with Questia which renewed the subscription without reference to her. Kerim, on the anthropology blog, Savage Minds, complains also about the ease with which Questia.com turned a trial subscription into a recurring subscription. Here's one on complaints.com about Questia.com's habit of renewing people's subscriptions without telling them.
And I notice that Lansbridge University, which uses Questia.com, warns students of "Questia's policy on automatically renewing subscriptions. If you decide not to keep your Questia account before your trial period is up, be sure to contact Questia to have it deactivated. Otherwise, it will automatically be switched over to a monthly billing and you will be charged accordingly."
In my own experience, I signed up for a package which they renewed at a higher price than agreed. We sorted that out a year ago, or so I thought. This March they helped themselves to $8.62 from my credit card (which, incidentally, had expired six months earlier, thanks a lot, NIB Visa) with no explanation when my subscription, which I had no intention of renewing, still had a month to run. A small amount? Yes, but I don't exist for the purpose of giving Questa.com money for nothing. I could not get an explanation from them as to why they took my money - their emails when I complained largely side-stepped that issue - and, of course, I didn't get my money back.
I wouldn't deny for a minute that this company has thousands of satisfied customers but I wonder how much Questia.com's renewal policy makes for them every year? I don't know but if you don't want to be a contributor to their coffers, be very careful about doing business with these guys.
And Ken Lay?
This item from a report on Questia.com on Wired.com in 2002 said that "In three previous rounds of financing, over $165 million dollars had been raised, including an investment from former Enron CEO Ken Lay. Lay is also on the company's board of directors." Publisher's Lunch reports that Lay will stay on the board at least for the time being and quotes Questia's Helen Wilson as saying it would be 'premature' to speculate about his future."
Well, she was right about that alright.
Got an opinion? Comment here.
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