Terry Prone: Being an Age Friendly ambassador might just be useful — and fun
Paul Carroll, Director of Services for Housing and Community. Terry Prone, and Chief Executive of Fingal County Council, AnnMarie Farrelly.
Not many situations are worse than being stuck in a US airport at 9 o’clock at night. Any decent shops are closed, although the fast-food outlets still peddle their heart-clogging wares. Half-darkened corridors are mostly populated by cleaners and security folk. You wander those corridors because if you sit down, you might go to sleep and miss your flight.
So there was I, a few months back, wandering a Departure Gate corridor, when I came upon a group of late teens horsing around and laughing. As one of them stepped backward into my path, another of them issued a warning. “Careful of granny, behind you.” I swear to god, if my carry-on didn’t weigh two tonnes because of the books purchased in a previous airport, I’d have swung it in a powerful arc and felled him, so I would. And then gone on to swing it at the girl he was addressing, who registered me, smiled at me and nodded at him in one instinctive acknowledgement of my granniness. Didn’t matter how much plastic surgery I’d coughed up for, didn’t matter that I was mobile and on my own, waiting for an international flight, to them, I was still old and to be protected. A definite granny. I smiled at them through transplanted teeth and moved on.
Well, that’s one thing about aging. Another thing is that it doesn’t follow the decent pattern you kind of expect. It’s more like falling downstairs, the progression and introduction of limitations. They happen suddenly so you’re never ready for them. Nothing prepares anybody for unexpected granny stereotyping by total strangers. The first time the granny thing was laid on me was in a supermarket checkout line, where the woman in front of me openly surveyed the contents of my trolley, which contained clothing for toddlers (OK, it was Tesco, go shoot me) and smiled warmly at me while opining that the purchases were for grandchildren.
Now, think about that. If my trolley had been blurping with bottles of alcohol, this woman wouldn’t have smiled and suggested I was working up to alcoholism. Similarly, if it was crunching with Doritos side-by-side with softening ice-cream, she wouldn’t have felt entitled to warn me about my weight. Baby clothes are just about the only items in a supermarket trolley where it’s OK to a) note them and b) use them to make a comment on their purchaser. Because — make no mistake about it — that woman (whose own trolley, I observed in my waspish way, to be heavy on chocolate, even though it wasn’t near Easter) was commenting on my age. I did a mouth-tight half-smile and nodded her forward: Keep your eye on the task, Sunshine.
Which was more or less my initial reaction when Fingal County Council approached me to propose I serve as their age-friendly ambassador. Moi? Youthful Moi?
Once I looked at the list of people fulfilling the role for other counties, I had another reason for hesitation. You’re looking at people famous for world achievements, like Ronnie Delaney, for surviving and succeeding in a profession where both are difficult, like Geraldine Plunkett, for giving constant voice to the marginalised, like former Governor of Mountjoy John Lonergan. Not to mention a former colleague who is one of the funniest humans I’ve ever met: Gavin Duffy. Not dealing with muck here, like.
I agreed to meet the Fingal Co Co movers and shakers for lunch to discuss them making me an ambassador. I was truthful with them, pointing out my own unreliability when they indicated that this would not be onerous. It might not be, in terms of actual days required, I said, but that doesn’t guarantee that I’d stay on the sweetness-and-light side of ageing, which seemed to be a priority. I was not, their documentation instructed me, to refer to older people as “elderly” because research has established that older people hate the message of frailty and inability sent by that word. On that, I can be trusted. Words matter. As do pictures.
The demeaning photographs used to characterise older people during the pandemic drove me nuts. There’s more to being seventy than was conveyed by two shiny vein-swollen hands clasped over a walking stick, yet RTÉ news happily used and continues to use that shot as visually summing up older Ireland. Funny, when Florida is trying to sell assisted living access, they run posters of couples whose plentiful white hair is the only hint that they represent the target, ie, elderly, market.
As if the clasped hands on the walking stick weren’t bad enough, we also got over 65s almost exclusively portrayed as grateful dependents receiving cartons of food from local activists.
When I crossly indicated all that to the Chief Executive of Fingal County Council, AnnMarie Farrelly, she smiled the tranquil smile of someone who has built a career in local government by dealing with people even angrier about their particular vested interest than I am about photographed walking sticks and told me she looked forward to working with me “to ensure we are delivering positive outcomes in the community and that we’re doing as much as possible to change — and challenge — attitudes around ageing.”
Age Friendly Ireland is a shared service of local government which claims “not only to champion the needs of older people, but to educate and inform the wider population on the pressing need to adjust our environment and our attitudes to cater for a hugely growing demographic.”
Right now, roughly 800,000 people in Ireland are over 65 and that’s growing. “Older people are more active and engaged than previous generations,” Age Friendly Ireland maintains, “with significant shifts in societal attitudes towards health, exercise and socialization. They are redefining what it means to age and embracing positive ageing. Ireland shouldn’t just be a country to grow up in, but a great country to grow old in.”
So that’s what you’re pushing, if you’re an Age Friendly ambassador. You’re pushing it for free, the ambassadorship being honorary, although, in fairness, you get freebies. My bag of freebies comprised a logoed gilet, a water bottle and a cute travel coffee cup. Even better than this was getting inside Swords Castle during the photo op. It sits on the edge of what is to become the Swords Cultural Quarter with its own theatre, and anyone like me who goes frequently through the town knows the medieval outside of it. But I was bowled over to get inside the structure, entranced by the restored twelfth century church inside the walls where the photographs were taken, filled, as it was, with golden sunshine filtered through stained glass windows.
Being an Age Friendly ambassador might just be useful — and fun.
