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THIS DOCUMENTARY ABOUT the Mayo town of Ballyhaunis was published on the Guardian website last week.
It tells the story of Ireland’s “most diverse” town, and focuses on how the local GAA club has been successful in bringing people together against a backdrop of the crisis in Direct Provision, the system where asylum seekers live while they await a decision.
The video went viral and was one of the most popular articles on the site for days afterwards.
Earlier this week, TheJournal.ie caught up with documentary filmmaker Maurice O’Brien to talk about the film, how it came about, and the overwhelmingly positive reaction to it.
Pitching up
“It’s already one of the most viewed videos ever on the Guardian,” he said. “They look at stats for people who watch it right through to the end, and it’s right up there.”
O’Brien said that he moved back to Ireland recently from abroad, and had wanted to make a film about the GAA in some way.
“I heard about the fact that Ballyhaunis was the most multicultural town in Ireland, and a journalist called Eoin Butler wrote about the GAA club doing an integration day, so I just went along and spent some time there,” he said.
For me it was a positive story. The GAA is the social fabric in a lot of these towns. You can really see how it takes on an even more important role in this film.
The documentary presents a compelling account of the local GAA volunteers who put in the long hard hours for the teams of all age levels, the children of over a dozen nationalities who play on the teams, and some of the parents of the children who have lived in Direct Provision.
O’Brien said that it was a good way to highlight how far Ireland has come.
“Immigration still feels like a new thing in Ireland,” he said. “I’m sure there are schools in Dublin where a large proportion of children speak another language at home, but it’s not as common in towns in the west of Ireland.
I think, overall, Ireland has done pretty well. Ballaghaderreen is just down the road in Roscommon has many Syrian families there. To see the welcome that the local community has afforded these people is heartwarming.
O’Brien said his experience filming in Ballyhaunis was a welcome change from the traditional narratives around immigration, particularly “across the water”.
“I think we should highlight the positive elements of people from different cultures coming together in the same community,” he said. “Look at the Brexit debate over in the UK.”
He said that away from the “endless negativity” about immigrants, a counter-narrative needed to be portrayed.
The nationalities of children playing GAA in the documentary range from Polish and Lithuanian, to Nigerian and Syrian.
“There are always challenges with everything, but there are some inspiring stories, too,” he said.
O’Brien said that this documentary struck a chord with many people, which was reflected in the comments under the original Guardian piece, and the emails he’s received since.
One story that features in the documentary is that of Desmond, a boy who has spent most of his life in Ballyhaunis. A keen GAA player, the small Mayo town feels like home.
His mother, Francisca, came to Ireland from the Ivory Coast and spent over eight years in Direct Provision.
In the documentary, she expresses frustration that she wasn’t able to work during this time, and O’Brien said that is a massive problem for the people he’s come into contact with.
“She was appreciative of the fact that she got a roof over her head, and got food, but it was a big problem that she wasn’t allowed to get a job,” he said.
It’s one thing living in that accommodation, but not allowed to be useful either? People are not allowed to feel like they’re being of some use.
Francisca thought that she would leave Ballyhaunis when her time in Direct Provision came to an end but, with she and her son sowing roots there in the community, that is no longer likely.
“Desmond has been there all his life. All his friends are there. He’s a Ballyhaunis boy,” O’Brien said.
The filmmaker said it was never the intention to “overly sugarcoat” the issues with the documentary, but simply to highlight how hard it is for some people and the way a positive community atmosphere can pull everyone together.
With over half a million views already and counting, O’Brien has certainly helped to get the message about Ballyhaunis out there.
“On this side we have qualified physicians and researchers, who have investigated the efficacy and safety of the vaccine through phase III clinical trials and over 10 years of use, and on the other side we have parents with internet access.”
@Jimbo Jones: I guess you are right Jumbo, pharmaceutical companies are very good at putting the lives of patients before money.
But it’s not just pharma companies saying it’s safe. There have been studies done by medical professionals and investigative journalist and they are saying it’s safe.
Investigative journalists that carry out scientific medical research? Hmmm.. The issues that these girls and more are suffering from aren’t imaginary, and these people are being lambasted as being anti-vaccine, they’re questioning ONE vaccine that their daughters have ALREADY received! Nothing wrong with that as far as I’m concerned. My niece had a prolonged adverse reaction during her teenage years, thankfully she’s better now. Her and my family aren’t even part of REGRET so I believe there are quite a few more than the 400 cases they refer to in Ireland.
@Aaron Ramsey: OK, I’m a physician and considered the data extremely carefully before allowing my daughters to receive HPV vaccine. You feel in some way clearly that I have been duped. We give HPV vaccine to girls in their early teens. Unfortunately, this is the group of people who are also most likely to get anxiety and psychological stress related disorders. All the studies that checked whether the symptoms attributed to the vaccines were commoner in those who got the vaccines than those who didn’t were negative. No relation was found. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/pdf/data-summary-hpv-gardasil-vaccine-is-safe.pdf
I think the problem is that the media is full of stories of people blaming the vaccine for a wide range of very non-specific symptoms. I wish that someone could properly show the consequences of aggressive cervical cancer in the media. The experience of watching and talking to a young woman in severe pain despite being on a morphine drip where the cancer has more or less invaded everything in her pelvis; bowel, bladder, bone, and sent mets the size of golf balls into her lungs and liver is something that you and Senator Craughwell need to experience before I’ll pay any heed to your one sided, half informed opinions about HPV vaccine. If you did you would hopefully learn more sense than repeating BS ‘oh they’re only interested in profit’ jibes than the one you’ve just submitted.
Did anyone ever claim this or any other medication is 100% safe. No. also nobody says there are kids that are ill. What they and I am saying is that there is no evidence linking the hpv vaccine to these kids. Kids present with exactly the same symptoms having never had the vaccine.
And Joe you don’t even have to go to that awful extreme you’ve just described. I’ve had abnormal cells and have had to have countless colposcopys to check them every 6 months or so. It’s a horrible invasive thing to have done, legs up in stirrups and a doctor sitting between your legs poking around inside you, literally. All caused by the hpv virus.
Obviously there is no comparison to what you have described but if I can stop my daughters from having to have colposcopys and lettz procedures then I’d be negligent as a mother not to.
Great comment Joe. There are people out there who cannot wrap their heads around the fact that correlation does not equal causation. No matter what facts are presented their minds will always be stuck on; this, therefore that. The problem is when these people start trying to influence policy and claim professional conspiracy amongst the global medical community.
MMR vaccine, qualified Physicians were proven by an Italian court to have altered results to in fact disprove the connection between the vaccine and autism in african American children, Anything for $€£ The Internet maybe the peoples saviour
@ Joe Harbison the pharmaceutical companies you speak of will put profit before our children, unfortunately the world needs to question most things again because of the same point, money means more to them than life
@Paulo mclawlor: I call bu!!s41t. http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/italian-mmr-autism-decision-overturned/. It was a local court and its findings were overturned rapidly by an appeal court. It’s a typical anti-vaccer stunt and 2 seconds of checking your facts on the ‘peoples saviour’ would have shown that. You should be ashamed of yourself trying to mislead people.
@Paulo mclawlor: SJW type BS being used to justify tin-foil hat level beliefs. Anti-vaxxer trolling, pure and simple.
Well said Joe Harrison. Vaccination conspiracists are causing needless terrible deaths. We have this miracle of science and fools are dismissing it with no rational thinking at all. It makes me despair sometimes. We should teach logical fallacies and critical thinking in school.
We should also hold public representatives who directly endanger lives to answer for their actions.
Paulo – so what would make you change your mind? I suspect that nothing would. You have an opinion and you will go and seek ‘information’ to back it up. In short -the opposite to science.
@Jimbo Jones:
Vaccination should be made mandatory. Any child not vaccinated should be removed from their parents.
Any parent not vaccinating their child is an unfit parent.
My daughter suffers from chronic pain syndrome and I was harassed on twitter by anti-vaxxers convinced it was because of the vaccine even though she suffered with it before she was vaccinated. I would like to know the stats on these so called side effects on children before the vaccine was given. I believe the children I just don’t think the vaccine is the cause.
DR. ANDREW WAKEFIELD google it
Wakefield is a proven fraud…no need to google..
@Joe Harbison have you done your own exstensive research or are you going by what you were told. My Guess is the Later, and yes i do doubt Pharmaceutical companies, because they care more about MONEY, and if that point was proven wrong i would be lees of a skeptic, Do you beleive (joe harbison) Mainstream Media im guessing, yes
Oswald shot Kennedy no need to google
Oh and Nikola Tesla was a mad man didnt you know he put into superman cartoons as a mad man, all to discredit him.
Thank you for this post. It terrifies me to see the rates drop for this vaccine for those very reasons.
Can you link to that proof please?
People will literally die because of lies and misinformation like this.
@jane: lobbying is a dab handy at changing government minds you cant be that naive.
@Joe Harbison you dont have the vocabulary of a physician i very much doubt you are,
@Martin Byrne. The miracles of science you speak of diagnosed me as anorexic and said all my problems were in my head and that the anorexic drinks they were giving me couldnt possibly be making me sicker. Turns out my gallbladder was about to rupture after 4 years of illness and the anorexic drinks were full of fat that my body wasn’t able to process due to my gallbladder packing in. I wouldn’t hold too much faith in them if they can’t diagnose a bloody packed up gallbladder.
@Peter Smyth: correlation does not equal causation is all well and good until it comes to proving viruses cause disease and in particular cancer. Prove it!
“14 year old girls don’t lie en masse.” Umm yes they do, it’s called conversion disorder.
It’s also called “social media”…
And they didn’t die en masse. But when you look at the cancer stats you could perhaps use that term. Many people worked long and hard and came up with this amazing and life saving vaccine. It’s a shame that there are people trying to undermine it and let more young women die of cancer because they read something on the internet.
To those people I’d say; if you don’t trust the medical profession, then when you or your loved ones have broken bones or cancer or heart problems, use the internet or your beliefs as a cure. You can’t have your cake and eat it.
Craughwell is playing a very dangerous game here..these people shouldnt be given oxygen…this vaccine is a life saver..if fidelma eames is involved with these people then i know who to believe…the medical profession…eames is a living walking example of why the senad should have been abolished..
“I am not anti vaccine”… eh yes you are!! Oxymoron
Questioning One specific vaccine does not make a person an anti-vaccer as a whole
Actually it does if you use unscientific evidence to do it.
He’s just not very rational.
This sort of reflexive name calling isn’t helpful. It was used when people first linked the H1N1 vaccine to narcolepsy, and there’s compelling evidence of that.
It’s scientific and rational to be sceptical, both of claims for the medicine and claims against it. In this case, the evidence is clear that not only does the benefit outweigh the risk, but also that the claims of side effects are false – better spelled out in Joe Harbison’s excellent post.
As a supporter of vaccination, I agree with his point. We should never blindly accept any pharma research as gospel. It is too vital an area for this kind of thing not to be thrashed out fully including the experiences and assumptions of the lay community.
This is just one current vaccine, there are many more to come in the future of humanity, all it would take is a refusal to engage with public concern combined with a thalidomide type incident to knock the progress in overall vaccination back decades. So let’s hear them all.
Please don’t give these people more attention than they deserve.
Where is the mass of 14-year-old girls? The HPRA, responsible for medicine safety, has no record of the claimed 400 seriously ill girls, 200 of whom are supposedly on 24-hour suicide watch. RTÉ asked Regret for the list, and Regret refused, supposedly on grounds of confidentiality. RTÉ suggested that Regret anonymise the list and share it; Regret refused without explanation.
There has not been a single personal injury lawsuit matching this claim initiated – let alone heard in court – in the 10 years that it has been used.
There isn’t a shred of evidence that the supposed 400 girls exist, but there is ample evidence that almost all of Regret’s claims are false.
http://blog.hereshow.ie/2016/12/heres-how-52-fiona-oleary-and-riko-muranaka-on-vaccines/
http://blog.hereshow.ie/2016/10/heres-how-49-dr-brenda-corcoran-of-the-hse-r-e-g-r-e-t-s-claims/
@William Campbell:
Craughwell has seen an angle to make some publicity for himself. He is utterly shameless.
Anyone who is remotely informed would know this “debate” is over – there is no evidence linking the vaccine to these illnesses.
Might as well blame drinking water – there is as much evidence that is to blame – i.e. none.
I don’t know why these girls are being dismissed, every drug effects different people differently. It’s just these are the unlucky one’s. They need all the support they can get.
Quick, you should contact the medical profession at once. They probably haven’t tested this hypothesis and proved or disproved it… Oh wait! They have. Why can’t people accept that?
When / where were they dismissed, Aaron?
“I’m not a racist, but…..”
Uptake of 50% that’s a terribly low number, as if cervical cancer is a walk in the bloody park
Thank god social media wasn’t around when Andrew Wakefield was flogging his wares
How dare you try to sully the name of a man who was struck off for unethical medical procedures on kids and whose results were never repeatable by other researchers.
For profit. Dont forget the profit bit.
@KEV :Did you mean whistlerblower!
People were able to get the more balanced reports in the U.K media.
Data is not the plural of anecdote.
There is a problem albeit a small one.Some children cannot assimilate the contents of this vaccine and this needs to be accepted & examined.Medics & Politicos by treating the parents of these children in such an arrogant manner are simply causing more alarm.
There are no problem with vaccine. This has been proven in studies. Your statement therefore is nonsense.
Jonathan – when and where were the parents of these unfortunate girls treated with disrespect by the medical profession.
Or is that just an opinion you have?
@Jonathan Irwin: So ‘Some children cannot assimilate the contents of this vaccine ‘? Where did you hear that? I’m guessing Google…
Their scripts are nearly identical.List as many terrible afflictions the unvaccinated will suffer then blame the girls parents rather than listen to them & never mention smear tests.The very heavy fall in percentage agreeing to consent to allow their child to be vaccinated is in part the lack of showing any sympathy & inferring it must be ME or Glandular fever by the “Experts”Fail to understand why this debate revolves around being plain rude to each other which adds nothing of value
This is about cause and effect. Just because someone of a particular age develops symptoms, doesn’t mean the vaccine they received at that age caused the symptoms. Look at the Andrew Wakefield debacle and how damaging it was. People want to medicalise everything nowadays.
I’m always amused by the conspiracy nuts who think ‘big pharma’ is so pro-vaccine they would fake the data. Think about it for a minute – would big pharma make more from sick people or from healthy people who were vaccinated? There is very little money in vaccinating people, there’s a lot more to be made from people being unvaccinated.
Same for doctors. They make nothing from vaccinations yet they are completely in favour of them. They would make a LOT more from people having chronic illnesses, yet they firmly believe in vaccinations.
When I was a kid, by the time I was 6, I’d had about 6 vaccinations. Now, by that age, kids have had about 40. With the ever expanding vaccine schedule and moves in the US, Australia and elsewhere towards mandatory vaccination, there’s a MASSIVE amount of money to be made from vaccination, estimated at about $20 billion in 2015.
You’re just making up numbers.
Children are exposed to billions of new antigens a day. Vaccines make up a few thousand of these over a lifetime.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
Not making up anything. Try reading.
And if you think antigens are at issue here, it is you who have no idea what you’re talking about. Try reading up a bit of the neurotoxic effects of several constituents commonly found in vaccines.
I have ME/CFS for 11 years now. I wrote an article on here a few months articulating my thoughts on it. Mine was not triggered by a vaccine, but I have met a lot of friends online who feel a vaccine triggered theirs. This vaccine specifically.
One girl in particular I talk to has almost a carbon copy of my symptoms. She developed them the day she received the HPV vaccine. I don’t doubt her. She fully qualifies and has been diagnosed as having ME/CFS. She did not have these symptoms prior to this vaccine.
I will say this, as someone who us up to date on the latest research on this disease. Firstly – it isn’t psychosomatic. There are observable differences in the metabolites and brain matter of patients. Robert Naviaux who is spearheading the metabolic research into ME feels that it’s a hypometabolic disorder, sprung on by a foreign body entering the cell. (This can be anything from a toxin/bacteria/virus).
IE: The body has a diminished ability to produce energy, which results in an impact on the brain, central nervous system, gut function, energy production and muscles. You can read the study if interested here: http://www.pnas.org/content/113/37/E5472.abstract
I’m not anti-vaccine, and fully appreciate the benefits of vaccines. But on these one in particular, I want people to remain open minded and to not insult the pain hundreds of girls in this country are going through. The worst thing you can tell someone with a serious disease is that it is a figment of their imagination. I struggled for years with this with ME/CFS until the evidence became so strong in my favour, it was no long viable to make such a claim.
I feel that the HPV vaccine is in most cases probably safe, but in a small percentage causes serious injury and causes ME-like symptoms. The only way to really prove this from here on in requires an extremely expensive study on the metabolic differences and neurological differences in these girls. This study has yet to be performed by the producer of this vaccine.
He knows nothing about regret? Just look at his twitter. He’s been told plenty about them so that’s just not true. This type of misinformation and innuendo about the vaccine is going to cost lives.
@Steve Mac:@Steve Mac:Gardasil HPV vaccine was not tested for safety in girls under the age of 16!
If the vaccine is so great why is the uptake in the USA only a little above 40% as was said on the Ray D’Arcy radio programme this week!
The vaccine has been used in the USA since 2006 and since that time many thousand of serious side effects have been reported!
@Mairead Hilliard: It WAS tested for safety on children over the age of 9. And the USA health system is hardly something that we should be aspiring to (no matter what Ray D’Arcy says).
With all due respect that’s bull. Take up is low because of Christian evangelists who preach abstinence to prevent cervical cancer and they spread the same lies as regret. The reported side effects have not been shown to be linked to the vaccine in anyway. In fact the incidence of them is the same as in unvaccinated children.
@Dublin Living:There is a huge increase in autoimmune chronic illnesses in children!!
Someone should give the Senator a good book about the Salem witch trials. Young girls do not have to lie to promote a false claim that can harm others.
I’m sure many of these girls sincerely believe their harms are from vaccines. But the inquiry was done. Large scale studies all around the world looked at hpv safety. In over a million.
The claims were found incorrect. The only thing hpv vaccines cause besides local reactions is fainting on the day of.
Hpv infections, in contrast, can cause cancer and kill.
@EvieXVI:It was not Ray D’Arcy who spoke about the uptake of the vaccine in the US it was professor Paul Offit thperson he was doing an interview with!
A few scientific citations, worth reading. “Trials show no evidence that HPV vaccination can prevent cervical cancer, serious adverse reactions are common”. Tomljenovic L. /Shaw CA. Human papillomavirus vaccine policy and evidence based medicine, are they at odds? Ann med 2013 Mar;45(2): 182-93. “HPV vaccines studies are flawed, resulting in unreliable safety and efficacy data”. Tomljenovic L, Spinosa JP, Shaw CA. Human papillomavirus vaccies as an option for preventing cervical malignancies; how effective and safe? Curr Pharm Ses 2013 Mar: 19(8); 1466-87. “The HPV vaccine may cause lupus and other serious autoimmune diseases”. Geier DA, Geier MR Clin Rheumatol 2015 Jul: 34(7); 1225-31. “Orthostatic intolerance and postural tachycardia syndrome as suspected adverse effects of vaccination against human papilloma virus”. Brinth LS, Pors K, et al. Vaccine 2015 May 21′ 33(22); 2602-5. “Adolescent premature ovarian insufficiency following human papillomavirus vacciantion; a case series seen in general practice”. Journal of investigative medicine high impact cae reports 2014 Oct-Dec; 2 (4) Little DT, Ward HR. “Who profits from uncritical acceptance of biased estimated of vaccine efficacy and safety?” Tomljenovic L, Shaw CA. Am J public Health2012 Sep: 102(9); e13-14
Dorit Reiss is a shill. I am the parent of one of the thousands of girls injured by this vaccine.
This vaccine has never been proven to prevent a single case of cancer! There are just 2 strains of HPV in Cervarix, 4 in Gardasil and 9 in Gardasil 9 but there are 170 strains of HPV! Many scientists believe other strains will replace those in the vaccines. It will be 20 years before we know if there is any benefit.
Cervical cancer cases in developed countries providing PAP screening are just 9/100,000. Deaths have come down from 8 to 2/100,000 over the last 40 years with no benefit from vaccine and current PAP screening rates of just 80%. Screening is still required even after vaccination.
However, SERIOUS adverse events during clinical trials were c.2,500/100,000 for both the vaccine and the controls (similar vaccines or aluminium adjuvant, NOT true placebos). Read ‘Highlights of Prescribing Information’ for each vaccine available online from the manufacturers. Reports from the market are at similar levels but being ignored or denied as coincidence. In the UK the Association of HPV Vaccine Injured Daughters (AHVID) found that 27% of members had serious adverse reactions within 24 hours of being vaccinated. Many of them within minutes or a few hours. Some even had repeated adverse reactions because doctors insisted that the adverse reactions were not due to the vaccine! The UK Department of Health publish on the government web site that there have been no serious adverse reactions to this vaccine but Freedom of Information Act requests indicate >21,000 adverse reactions have been reported with 32% being classed as serious, including 8 with fatal outcome.
Do your own research before making an INFORMED choice.
For 20 years the FDA had classified the HPV test as a test for cervical cancer. In 2003 the FDA changed its position advising that HPV virus was not associated with cervical cancer. On Oct12, 2007 HiFi DNA Tech sued the FDA to get their testing device reclassified as Class II based on the knowledge that cervical cancer was not caused by HPV infection .and therefore did not need to be restricted from public sales. The fact that the FDA had already acknowledged in a policy statement on March 31, 2003 that “most infections by HPV are shortlived and not associated with cervical cancer. Most women who become infected with HPV are able to eradicate the virus and suffer no apparent long term consequences to their health.” It is not the HPV virus itself that causes cervical cancer but rather a persistent state of ill health on the part of the patient that makes her vulnerable to cervical cancer. Repeated transient HPV infections even when caused by high risk types of HPVs are characteristically not associated with an increased risk of developing squamous intraepithelial lesions, the precursor lesion of cervical cancer.
This was not revealed when the public hearings over the need for mandatory HPV vaccinations was pushed by manufacturer of Gardasil. The FDA had known for many years that HPV was unrelated to cervical cancer but to have this knowledge disseminated during the hearings would have instantly made the HPV vaccine worthless.
The main push from the drug company has been that we “must save these young girls from losing their lives to cervical cancers.” The FDA knew when these hearings were held that this argument was phony but said nothing.!!!
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