The dead
Apologies for a Gladstone quote so early in the day.
“Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land, and their loyalty to high ideals.”
Apologies for the Gladstone quote so early in the day, but I can’t stop thinking about it. A news story this week brought it to the boil. Last year, Sylva Tukula died in a Direct Provision centre. Last month, she was buried without ceremony, without her friends around her. The Journal article I’ve linked to there is something you should read.
The quote above used to be on the top of the homepage of the Dublin Coroner’s Court website. Here it is in the aged digital flesh via the medium of the wayback machine. I had an idea a few years ago of sitting in the coroner’s court and eventually writing a long piece about all the cases. The idea was prompted by Nell McCafferty’s book In the Eyes of the Law. It was a collection of McCafferty’s court reports for the Irish Times and covered the life of a lower court. If you can find a copy, read it. I found it through Ivana Bacik’s reading list for Criminal Law. In the Eyes of the Law may have been the only full-length book I read during my undergraduate degree, maybe it is why I never pursued law as a career.
Like a lot of my ideas, the coroner’s court spycraft never really took its gulp of air. Time, money, strength - excuses or weapons depending on your reserve of all three. Also, there are the ethical implications of being a vulture and using other peoples’ tragedies to promote and grow the self.
The Dublin Coroner’s Court website has now had a mild overhaul. That sort of tidying-up is part of a plain English content design which you can see making its way across a lot of gov.ie offshoots. It’s all related to the gov.uk overhaul from a few years ago. It makes sense but means a lot of public websites are losing quirks. Apps like Hemingway rip away the unnecessary, according to the algorithm, words. Adverbs are culled. Difficult words highlighted in red and suggested for the guillotine. Sentences should clearly communicate.
When I visited the new-ish Coroner’s site this morning, I thought the quote had been deleted. But then a few minutes later I scrolled down to look for the web design footer, on the hunt for someone to blame, and I found it. The quote had survived. I exhaled. Yes, it’s no longer the pride of place but one piece of technically unnecessary content has survived. A small victory.
Inspirational quotes piss a lot of people off, but I like a family motto and when a novel opens with a few sentences from an older work. You’ve been gifted a frame, a mood, perhaps a rule. That Gladstone quote should be shown to anyone with a hand in Sylva Tukula’s burial. They should be made read it out loud in front of an audience. She deserved better, a small tender mercy.
There have been other mistreated departed souls this week. Noa Pothoven became the latest case study for fake news and misinformation. That’s another difficult read I would suggest. Our nation and the people online who dragged Noa’s death through the gutter should start to be ashamed of how we measure up. We already know our mathematical exactness.
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