life – The Curlew's Call

A Summer At Muckamore Abbey

Years ago, as a student, I worked as a care assistant at Muckamore Abbey. When I read of the recent report on the hospital detailing abuse and gross failures in management, I wondered what had changed since my short time working there; to the human forms that I had fed, dressed, became frustrated with – not that I expect any of them were living today – and to the nature of the place now so blackened by the catalogue of mistreatment of those under their care.

Today Muckamore Abbey Hospital is described as: providing treatment for adults with severe learning disabilities, mental health needs, forensic needs, or challenging behaviour. Back then, I was an engineering student in my early twenties, and I felt lucky to get a summer job there. The National Insurance I paid then contribute to my UK pension today. The London alternatives that year were on a building site or door-stepping suburbia for Encyclopedia Britannica. The induction for the latter was enough to send me home.

I don’t intend to compare those weeks to the shocking conditions outlined in the report, of which I’ve read only a brief summary, but to recount some of my experience then and how it still resonated with me when I read what happened. (See Note at the end for a very brief introduction to the Muckamore Report)

The temporary summer staff that year were a mix of male and female students. One benefit of the job was on-site accommodation. Outside working hours were, as you would expect, filled with music, stories, boy-girl games and nights out. Live rock bands played each week in the nearby Deerpark Hotel: The Move, the Small Faces, Skid Row. We walked everywhere, larked about on the roads, pushed each other into hedges, daring the brave to lie in a dark haunted graveyard on the Dublin Road. We drank and smoked a little, listened to Bob Dylan, though I recall Rory, an older Queen’s student, poo-pooing Dylan’s growing status, saying that Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction, which he kept playing and playing, was a much better protest song. I think he was also making a political point as he talked about civil rights.

How did I deal with those first few days in the Hospital Ward? I don’t know. Act normal, I suppose. Do what I’d seen those around me doing growing up, act normal, as the troubles got a capital T. And the worst years of the war approached. Try and figure it out later.

I was shocked by the scenes in the ward those first few days, images that are seared in my memory. Of humans the like of whom I’d never seen before. The worst cases, misshapen, motionless beyond belief, eyes and mouths twitching, made grunting sounds. Outside and beyond anything I had considered as human, left traumatised, without training or warning as to what to expect. Yet like the others, I complained mildly, went to bed, got up the next day, had breakfast, and walked the paths through cut grass lawns to the hospital ward.

What I remember about any induction was making beds, the detail of neat hospital corners drilled into me by a Belfast nurse. Her smoothed accent slipping into guttural curses to the amusement of anyone listening. My tasks were general cleaning up, changing beds, assisting in the dressing and washing of the patients, most of whom were incontinent and all were non-verbal. A few days into the job, I took on many of these tasks without supervision and was asked to attend patients for their ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy) sessions. For the most part, I suspect, given many tasks the full-time staff were happy to avoid.

With one patient, feeding of mealtime paste was always challenging with my spoon regularly swiped aside. His gloved hands prevented him from scratching his face raw. As I pulled up a chair beside him, he would swing his arms in random loops, I presume in expressions of excitement. Requesting him to stop had no effect. Much of the food ended up on the floor. This would go on forever, it seemed, until there was no more mash in the bowl and the cleaning would begin. One lunchtime, particularly frustrated, I used a towel to tie one of his arms to the chair’s armrest. This made feeding him much quicker, each mouthful taken with gusto.

A roar came from the day room door. A male staff nurse, one with a sharply cut head of ginger hair and matching personality, shouted, Stop that! You can’t restrain him! Take that off. Chastened and embarrassed, I untied his arm and resumed my slow task. What I’d done was forbidden. No one told me, or coached me in these duties, beyond the rudimentary.

One free afternoon, harbouring a career as a pilot, I booked a training flight with Woodgate Aviation at Aldergrove Airport. I walked the Oldstone Road three and a half miles on a hot afternoon. Soon I was banking a two-seat Cessna through a blue cloud-flecked sky. We flew over everything: over Muckamore, over the Antrim Hills, Lough Neagh, green fields with specks of cattle and sheep, over troubled towns with their plotting killers, banked over the Braid River that snaked through Ballymena and back onto the tarmac between airliners braking to a quiet rocking stop. Afterwards I walked the same sweaty roads back to the hospital accommodation and an evening’s craic.

So, what might have changed to cause this awful scenario to develop at the hospital in the 2000s? Here’s what I think. At least one major change has taken place in the management of UK government services since then: the introduction of a corporate metrics approach into the civil service by Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s and 90s. It was first used in government by Robert McNamara in the 1960s to help win the Vietnam War, using enemy fatalities as the measure of success. Despite its obvious failure – and it’s now referred to as McNamara’s Fallacy – it has been widely used as a government’s management tool. Often, these metrics are proxies for things that cannot be easily measured, like the quality of a service, for example. The rollout of this philosophy was complemented by a continuous drive for value for money.

In 1971, Charles Goodard coined the adage: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. That’s because we try to achieve the targeted measure by any means possible, by gaming it. The end goal of the management measure that might be aimed at improving value for money or the quality of care, becomes, in the sweat at the coal face, irrelevant. This measure-and-set-targets approach has impacted all our lives. And I suggest it is one of the major reasons for a drop in the quality of care in many of our institutions and in government services.

But back to the coal face, I can imagine carers on the hospital ward with a fixed time to feed patients under their charge, the lunchtime clock running, other duties calling, temporary restraint becomes necessary, then acceptable, and a blind eye is turned. And improved staff-to-patient targets are met. Frustrations vented become the everyday, and a culture evolves where the unacceptable becomes acceptable. That’s all very simplistic, yet most of us can understand it, or have some experience of how something similar might evolve in another environment.

What my time at Muckamore Abbey Hospital Ward has left me with is the shock of it: how out of my depth and untrained I was, attempting to care for people I never knew existed, who came from the homes of friends and neighbours, their lives hidden from us and left to the toil of state workers. Some things have changed for the better.

End

NOTE If you not familiar with the the 2026 health care report here’s a very brief background: Muckamore Abbey Hospital is a Northern Ireland state hospital near Antrim, described as providing treatment for adults with severe learning disabilities, mental health needs, forensic needs, or challenging behaviour. The June 2026 report highlighted a culture of regular abuse of vulnerable patients and a lack of appropriate oversight and management. Patients experienced physical injuries including black eyes, broken bones, bruising, and inappropriate or excessive restraint. Possible criminal cases are pending.

A link to the report at:

https://www.mahinquiry.org.uk/publications/muckamore-inquiry-report-june-2026-0

PDF version here

A Bed of Silage

In the photograph below, taken in summer 1957, my father stands on the bed of silage, legs akimbo, hands on his hips, looking knowledgeable, he hopes, while to the left, my grandfather in his show-day suit, shirt and tie, observes this farm innovation on hitherto unseen industrial-scale agriculture. Both men wear hats. The third man is Gerard McGuckian of AA McGuckian’s Ltd at their 700-acre farm near Antrim. Granda is making plans to take this new idea back to the Free State. In the lower picture, you would be forgiven today, thinking he could be checking his phone, but more likely he is making a note or filling his pipe with that crooked finger the child on his knee thought was permanently bent for the purpose.

My father, Tommy McWilliams, was a bread-man, and as far as I know, his farming experience was limited to his family’s Ballymena town allotment; and maybe to picking spuds in the surrounding farms. His father-in-law of six years, Richard Davis, had a collection of small hungry farms in North Leitrim, insignificant by comparison to the McGuckian’s spread on the fertile shores of Lough Neagh. However, in Leitrim, granda was a progressive farmer and built the first silage pit there.

Granda was impressed with the scope of his son-in-law’s contacts, and by a progressive Northern Ireland. Daddy was chuffed with the day’s work, though I’ve no idea how he made contact with the operators of such a large farm. It was most likely coincidence that the Special Reporter from the Farmer and Stockbreeder visited on the same day as they posed for the camera. It’s also my guess it was during the 12^th fortnight when Daddy got his annual holidays, and granda and granny were on their one and only visit to Ballymena after the recent birth of Nigel, then few months old.

Nigel asked me recently if I had a copy of a picture he recalled seeing among the various family records. If it was anywhere, I had it. He was right. The scanned 1957 newspaper article with these pictures was easily found and emailed to his small olive farm in Spain within an hour of asking. The Special Reporter – no name was used – was likely drawn to the novel self-feed silage system for wintered stock, and the fact that the cattle lay on A Bed of Silage.

About 1975, after finishing a course at Greenmount College, Nigel landed a job with agitech company, Masstock, which had been set up on this same Antrim farm by the next generation of McGuckians, Paddy and Alistair. They had a contract to develop dairy farming and milk and yoghurt sales in Saudi Arabia. These were large irrigation-based units, technology- and investment-heavy.

Nigel was one of the first two Irish workers joining the operations manager on their base in Durma, west of Riyadh. Two years later, the first milk flowed from the imported cows.

Presently, Nigel and Angelika work a small olive farm and their Airbnb southwest of Seville; Nigel has retained enough Arabic to get on well with many people of North African extraction who work in the olive and soft fruit industry there.

The connection between the farming article, with its pictures of my father and grandfather, and Nigel appears to be another coincidence.

The Masstock staff and workers who went out to those arid lands are planning a 50-year reunion, hence the interest in a copy of this rare reportage on an earlier McGuckian enterprise.

Back in 1957, my grandfather’s silage pit at Boggaun was the first in the area. After a couple of disastrous attempts at silage making, it lay unused for many years, built with a design flaw. Had he waited, it would have incorporated sloping sides that ensured the rush-covered grassy heap compacted and didn’t rot. As youngsters, we played in the empty concrete galley. Our Uncle Cecil later used it with a plastic cover, not available until the mid-1960s, to make middling silage from his fields with shallow, dauby soils.

My father remained a bread server and retired to live happily near my granda’s place, care-taking Nigel’s farm while he continued to work in Saudi Arabia.

Masstock Systems and McGuckian brothers expanded their agribusiness beyond Saudi Arabia and in 2008 Masstock was bought out by Irish agribusiness company Origin. The milk and dairy industry did little to liberalise Saudi Arabia.

Nigel and the young men and women who went to Saudi Arabia working in the scorching desert, turning some of it green, living with restricted movement and no – limited? – alcohol, made the best of it; as I hope they will at their reunion.

A full version of the Farmer and Stockbreeder article is available on request.

PDF version here.

A Slip Up

Running up past the fourteenth-century O’Doherty’s Keep in Buncrana, I turned right onto a grassy track that was once lined with houses of the medieval town, and slipped. My shoes had no purchase on a patch of mud. It was a minor skid that flashed me back to my first cross-country shoes, fresh out of their box. They had arrived that morning, mail order from a running magazine. I’d thrown a school bag from my shoulder to open this rare delivery.

O’Doherty’s Keep, Buncrana, Co Donegal.

At my first secondary school, I’d taken part in school games, though none particularly successfully. This four-year spell for those of us who failed the 11-plus exam, was to prepare us for the world of work at sixteen. P.E. class was another way to pass the time; few took it that seriously. The good footballers played their best games for the town’s teams.

Four years later, a self-propelled jump into a grammar school, where my brother had landed three years earlier, was a shock. Part of the cultural sea change was the importance of success at sports. Winning teams were famed and framed in the school’s heritage mounted in the foyer of what was a brand-new building. And there was a hierarchy with rugby – the First XV – at the pinnacle, cricket, tennis and towards the other end athletics and cross-country running. Though all winning teams, and their individual champions, were revered. Many of them went on to regional and international stardom, and were always ‘Academy past pupils’.

As far back as I can recall, I have had an instinctive fear of pain. It’s somewhere deep and hidden, and I’ve never fathomed it. To trust my physical self to the fortune of the moment, to a tackle, to a fight had never seemed right; it became second nature to shy away. The rugby motto of putting your body on the line was the antithesis of sense to me. Oddly now, the prospect of medical surgery, and I’ve had a few, doesn’t fill me with any dread.

Only once do I recall getting into a school fight. It was at primary school. Ringed by a cheering crowd, I threw a punch out of panic, drew blood and ended up in the principal’s office. I didn’t gain any kudos or reputation from it. There were others who fought regularly; they drew the abuse from teachers.

My first trial game for a minor team place ended my rugby career there and then. As a lanky runner, I was put on the wing. And I ran. In any direction to avoid being caught, the end line was irrelevant. To take a crushing tackle to advance the team a few yards down the field, again, was all wrong. Maybe, I hadn’t yet bonded with my teammates? But if they saw fear in my eyes and laughed, I didn’t see it, nor suffered any aftereffect. Aversion to such threatening circumstances had, by then, become second nature; my style was certainly not in the spirit of the game of rugby. And so, at the end of the game, the trainer kindly guided me back in the direction of the cross-country team.

Here I found many other like-minded individuals, including those who thought the whole sport thing ludicrous. We would suffer the same misfortunes of the weather as the rugby players, but we saw a lot more mud. I wasn’t a star runner but a good mid-team dependable. There was one training day when I ran effortlessly, passed everyone, and crossed the line well ahead; pity it hadn’t happened during a competition. I’ve recently heard such days called float days; I wish there had been more.

Those first running shoes had soles like tractor tyres, deep, angled rubber chevrons, no padding or support, leather uppers that were green suede. I thought them cool, and lent some seriousness to my running.

During early summer months, the focus turned to track and field athletics. One regional event I recall was held at the local St. Patrick’s Secondary School. I competed in the high jump where my goat-like legs could spring the rest of me upwards to a significant height. Among my competitors that afternoon was the longer-legged Liam Neeson. He cleared the bar higher than me, with an old-fashioned scissors jump, not the more adventurous belly-roll. These were the years when Fosbury was experimenting with his flop, and Liam was discovering play-acting. I assume he remembers beating me that day.

Years earlier, on my first running climb up Slemish Mountain, my uncle Tom christened me the mountain goat. At home, I would climb along the outside of the bannisters, run and leap halfway down the stairs, spring-jump up onto worktops and tables. This was natural to me, an extension of my leaning towards a restless motion. And I think running cleared my head, without being aware of it, dampening the tumbling anxiousness of teenage years. Then I got hooked on endorphins.

Since then I’ve run in London at college, in the Solomon Island’s Honiara Hash House Harriers – a hare-and-hounds running event evolved in the British colonies, setting up the weekend with exercise and cold beer – I’ve run in Derry, Donegal and Dublin, and other more exotic places, much of it by myself. And now on most Saturday mornings, at Park Runs among my friends in Sanctuary Runners. Mostly avoiding mud.

Yet, I like this grassy old track that runs up to join the Military Road, and its historic connection from the town to the Napoleonic fort at Ned’s Point. The earlier houses around O’Doherty’s Keep are long gone, any stone scavenged to build Vaughan’s Castle and the buildings of the relocated planters’ town. Lined with trees, there’s a sense of being in a woodland, and through mature beech there are elevated views of the Crana River and the beautifully renovated Swan’s Park, or Swan Park to be more colloquial and less proprietary. And then, there are those occasional patches of mud reminding me of running shoes with tractor tyre soles.

PDF version here.

Where memory takes you.

My first novel is finished. Well, for now, more editing is on the horizon. Some of the story takes place in the Solomon Islands, and on an overland journey from Afghanistan to London; roughly matching my two-year stint working in the Western Pacific archipelago and my subsequent travels home to Ballymena.

The route took me from the island nation, as it is now, on the western reaches of that vast ocean to my Irish home, a nine-month journey, most of it overland. Since then, I have managed to hold on to a few notebooks, two maps and a small guidebook from that time. They helped jog my memory of people and places. Whether these prompts have helped create a story of any merit is not for me to judge.

My Oct. 1975 edition of the Lonely Planet’s first publication.

Here I’m interested in memory, my memory. How come some places, incidents, and people are crystal clear, while others seem lost? And is it reliable? I had a beard then.

‘Memory is fiction. All memory is a way of reconstructing the past. The act of narrating a memory is the act of creating fiction,’ Damon Galgut says. This may sound a little too blunt, but there’s a ring of truth about it. Put another way, Professor David Eagleman says, ‘beneath the level of consciousness we are a riotous democracy of mini-selves locked in a battle for dominion.’ Fabrication of stories, he adds, ‘is one key business in which the brain engages. Brains do this with the single-minded goal of getting the multifaceted actions of this democracy to make sense.’ And that sense, is me, accepted without question. So, how I remember myself those years ago, may be a fiction?

Drafting a talk recently for an evening’s presentation to an environmental group about my love of trees and forests – years of growing saplings from seed, planting and tending woodland and forests – my memory proved unreliable. I’d included a rather poor-quality photograph among a selection to illustrate a thirty-mile walk I once took across the tropical forested island of Santa Isabel. The visit was primarily to assess a fresh water supply for a hilltop village, though I remember being drawn to the day’s walk through the bush to reach this small, isolated community. Almost all of my travel in the islands was by sea, to the more common coastal villages.

The photograph of my guide, whose name I couldn’t remember and never expected to, was taken against lush bush that dropped off sharply to the bay and the dense mangrove inlet, from where we’d started out. The photograph helped me remember him and parts of the two-day trip, but not his name. It was lost in time, it seemed.

There he stands, strong upper chocolate-coloured body typical of a coastal dweller, a small bag clasped in one hand, the other by his side holding a bush knife. He was a council tax collector. I recall that we missed the path that turned off a stream up to the village; that we spent some anxious hours – anxious to me anyway – in a rough shelter we’d come across, finally reaching the hilltop with its red earth clearing and six or seven houses, later awakening during the night in the large communal sleeping house to see an old man moving around to tend a smouldering fire, and hearing a baby’s soft cry. I’m pretty sure this happened, though I haven’t any notes of that time to confirm it. But the rest of that trip is hazy.

Some weeks after I’d first drafted the piece, his name, or the name I knew him by, suddenly occurred to me. Nelson.

Nelson walked comfortably on his broad feet over rough bush paths, slashing at hanging vines and branches as he went. I followed, carrying my small rucksack, going barefoot too, as my best option: laced boots had proved too sweaty, and flip-flops and sandals became slippery skaters in mud. We shared a little pijin conversation, mostly I asked questions. He was at home on these shaded tracks that snaked around trees and climbed over rocky outcrops. Did I mention that we got lost? Or that I had a beard then. That’s without doubt.

How could his name still remain in my memory after fifty years? And writing the novel turned up many such examples, recalling later what had first appeared completely lost. In the meantime, every cell in my body has changed many times over. In terms of atoms and molecules, I’m certainly not the person I was.

At my children’s bedtime, I retold many of these stories, and I’m sure that has helped secure their hold in my brain’s chemistry.

So, what to do now with this small pile of redundant, worn-looking notebooks that sit on my desk, artefacts of a life lived many years ago? I’ll not throw them out. I’ve learned that, for the writer, they are a valuable resource: for a character, a story, or to help a narrative along. So, I’ll read the ones I haven’t, and see what emerges. Test my memory, try to tease out the fiction. And I’m interested in making contact with the young bearded man who penned those notes all those years ago, and ask him to join me on the slippery paths into the future.

END