DUMBARTON NOTEBOOK by BILL HEANEY
We know from their abysmal record in employee relations that West Dunbartonshire Council has a very poor record in the area of work.
All the time these days, their people are working under the cloud of the Brian Gourlay case, the health and safety officer who was bullied and victimised by them. The latest compensation figure I have heard was more than £600,000.
Some of their most senior officers from that time, when preparations were being made to knock down the council offices at Garshake, are still sitting there on fat salaries and big pensions.
They replaced Garshake with the astonishing £16 million that it cost to build their own version of Fawly Towers in Church Street.
Unfortunately they didn’t replace their rotten attitude.
You would think these pen pushers would get fed up with their posturing and bullying and telling half truths to the press and public who are not nearly as daft as we sometimes look.
But they continue to behave like they were part of the cast in a Norman Wisdom Carry On movie.
There’s an old saying along the lines of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
That’s very true at the moment in the case of the Council’s home carer service for the elderly and infirm.
It’s one of the few council service where we get really good value for our council tax money.
It’s mainly women of a certain age – and a few men – who are employed in this service, and they are universally loved by their clients.
As usual however with not enough work on their own plates – and without any tact or diplomacy – the hopeless Health and Social Care Committee want to change the terms and conditions of these dedicated employees.
They want to change their pay and conditions, particularly in relation to the hours they work.
These women have contracts for the hours they work. They have children and grandchildren at school and husbands who go out to work. They have family commitments to meet. They are doing us a real service.
But the gaulieters in Church Street want to change all that which means that instead of having a happy band of helpers in place, cheering up elderly folk, making sure they are well fed, showered and shaved in the morning and tucked in at night, the council want to alter their hours.
The trade unions for the carers have made it clear they do not want this to happen. That the recent consultation on this, delegated to an expensive consultant of course, would change the whole atmosphere and efficiency of the service.
But then we all know the council are notorious for not listening to either their employees or the electorate.
They are trying to get away at the moment, with the assistance of expensive spin doctors, with scrapping their rules on grass cutting, which they have grimly held on to for a long time, too long, now.
They are going to use the money from housing repairs to pay for that. That’s the housing with black damp on the walls, sewage seeping in through the ceilings and windows that rattle in the wind and fail to keep the rain out.
West Dunbartonshire Council should feel black burning shame for the services they fail to provide. Voters should get rid of them come the next local government election if not before. The electorate would be wise not to listen to them anymore.
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Working from a cottage in Connemara
I have to confess that I’m still in Ireland, working from a cottage in Connemara – the air and the wifi remarkably good – while my daughters and their mother are scrambling up the nearby Diamond Hill, a family-friendly mountain that rewards its conquerors with a panoramic view of the west: maroon- and ochre-specked mountains, lakes, beaches and bogs, the islands of Inishbofin and Inishark, the pale-grey speck of Kylemore Abbey, writes Brendan Walsh in this week’s Tablet.
We were all there yesterday, being shown around the sisters’ austerely beautiful new monastery – barely a year old. There’s a cruelty to the beauty of Connemara. In other parts of Ireland, the land yearns for human collaborators; here, nature seems to push back furiously against human pretensions at stewardship. Kylemore swallowed up the fortune of its Victorian builder; his successor, too, was rendered nearly bankrupt by the costs of maintaining a gothic castle and church in a remote and hostile environment. In 1920, a community of a couple of dozen Benedictine nuns bought the place from a speculator delighted to get it off his hands. There are fewer than half that number in the community now. Over a hundred years after moving in, they continue to work and say their prayers and wait to see what the Lord will bring. There are young women among the pilgrims and retreatants beginning to fill their guest rooms, curious about a way of life that has proved its audacity and resilience. Connemara’s hills loom over the cloister, and outside it, packed shuttle buses ferry growing numbers of gawping visitors around the vast estate.
From the vineyard
Kingsley Amis’ views on drink, aired wittily and sometimes tetchily in three small books, are entertaining to read but perilous to emulate. One view, however, with which most of us would concur without danger to health, is his insistence on the necessity of pre-prandials. He once opined that the most depressing question in the English language was, “Shall we go straight in?” The late Michael Dummett, quondam Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford and a Tablet contributor, would have agreed. He once remarked at the beginning of his major work on Frege that a book without a preface was like dinner without an aperitif. (By the by, Amis also thought that the most depressing three words in the English language were “red or white?”)