Don't Forget Your Raincoat

Let me begin with an old enemy. AIDS. A decade ago it was on all our lips, all our minds. Now? We've forgotten. Gone complacent. Maybe it's the drug cocktails. If so, we're in trouble. Yeah, sure they've had an effect. But the current indications are that they don't cure the disease and that when you stop taking them it bounces back.

Let's leave aside the tedium of the cocktails themselves. Dozens of pills, in carefully regulated dosages and sequences. And the expense. Westerners with good medical insurance might be okay, but there's no way that the majority of Africans could afford the treatments. Let's look at the risks to our lives.

See, while the deaths have declined, the infection rates have continued to rise. For example, in the UK 2,825 new cases were reported last year. As one British expert pointed out, the UK is developing a large pool of HIV-infected individuals.

This is bad news for Ireland. This country may well be independent, part of the euro-zone and increasingly wealthy, but it's still very closely tied to the UK. This is a matter of many things. Like football. Irish fans are, if anything, more passionately supportive of British football teams than the natives. I won't speculate as to why that is, except to say that the same thing applies to soap operas, glossy magazines and sex.

A whole new generation — the Celtic tigers — has come to maturity since us old timers first came to terms with AIDS. They haven't seen their friends waste away. They haven't been in the hospices, cocooned with their lovers and partners and friends lest the plague escape.

So, they take the pill. It's true. The pill is back as the primary contraceptive of choice of huge numbers of young women. They've all forgotten that pregnancy was just one of the possible risks associated with unprotected sex. They take the pill, drink loads, smoke and smoke and shag and shag. Which is brilliant, except for the snake in the grass.

Here's the rule — take the pill by all means, to ward off pregnancy. But use a condom as well, to protect against sexually transmitted diseases in general and AIDS in particular. And never drink so much you forget these basic rules.

See, the wild party zone of the last five or seven years has maybe left us a legacy we didn't want. It takes years for the virus to manifest itself. Depending on your level of promiscuity, that could be a lot of risk opportunities. Moreover, since you also shag your lover's sexual history, it's also a lot of risk.

And the core problem is that the vast majority of those who are at risk don't think about it. It literally doesn't cross their minds.

Go on! Think! Summer holiday party romances . . . shagging on the beach with some German beauty . . . that mad caper in the States on the J1 summer .. a night of passion with a Czech visitor obsessed with U2 . . .

Whatever. There's a million possibilities. And lots of us let fly without a thought for the consequences, for ourselves or our loved ones or future partners.

Heap bad medicine.

Maybe it's time to dust down some of our old slogans and campaign tunes. Maybe it's time to wise up a new generation. And remind them — AIDS hasn't gone away you know.

Irish people who have fallen foul of the law in the UK will have noted the contents of the Macpherson report on the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

The bones of the story are simple. He was 18 years old, walking down Well Hall Road in Eltham in south east London in April 1993 with a mate, looking for a bus. Five white youths crossed the road shouting "what, what nigger". He was attacked — a vicious and unprovoked assault — and stabbed.

Witnesses gave the police names. The coppers decided they hadn't enough evidence to arrest. When, eventually, they were charged, the court case collapsed. At the inquest they treated the process with contempt. So much so that the Daily Mail, of all papers, branded them murderers and challenged them to sue the paper to prove their innocence.

According to the inquiry report, the investigation was "marred by a combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism and a failure of leadership by senior officers". The report went on to highlight a series of glaring flaws in the police procedures.

Now, we Irish can sit back and feel smug if we want to. We can refer to our "Paddy" experience in the UK and say yeah, that's the British police all right. We can empathise, can't we?

Sure we can. Except, we also ought to remember that many Irish in the UK are as racist, if not more, than any Anglo-Saxon. And that's before we get next or near the incipient and growing racism in Ireland. Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. And that's us.

We may be only ten years away from exactly the same thing here. There are many reasons. One of them is that the Irish state has corralled immigrants into exactly the same low-caste zones as immigrants to the UK, France and Germany — and I include Irish immigrants in that.

What will follow, unless there's a huge change of mind, is as inevitable as night following day. In years to come, we will have an immigrant poverty problem, and racism. Our police will pick on the Romanians and the blacks, youths will jeer and abuse them, and one day some disturbed shit will go several steps further.

What steps are our police taking to maintain their impartiality? At local level (the real arena in these matters) few, if any, I'd guess.

We could be lucky and brave. Right now, we could change the course of such a sad and unpalatable history. But we have to be ready to take decisions, to open up, to create a society in which immigrants are not seen to be 'other'. A society without prejudice, in other words.

Once we were taught that the Irish returned the light to Europe. Perhaps we might now think of doing it again. Starting with ourselves.

The Hog