The Irish community in Birmingham is integral to the great charm of the city’s people, a people as resilient to bombs as to town planning. Growing up there in the 1970s, it was with my Irish and Asian friends I shared most and whom I most still see today.
Shortly after becoming clinical editor of Optician, I remember jumping at the opportunity to go (again) to Ireland. The plan was to travel to Waterford and interview ophthalmologist Stephen Beatty and a young Dr John Nolan, then fresh from acquiring his PhD and already a major player looking at nutrition and eye health.
Since then, the team at Waterford have become world leaders in this area of research with output that is always worth checking out. Their latest paper is an eye opener as it shows evidence of a link between nutritional supplementation and ‘improvements in vision-related quality of life and visual function of patients suffering from vitreous floaters.’ This surprised me, but the paper is robust.1 I also learned that there exists a Floater Disturbance Questionnaire to help clinicians assess the impact of our irritating little muscae volitantes.
The more general and rapid evolution of eye science in Ireland will be more than recognised next year as Dublin is to host the always excellent annual conference of European Academy of Optometry and Optics. You may want to keep May 12 to 15 clear next year, and be ready to check out Phil Lynott’s statue.
Back to 1970s Brum. A joke used to do the rounds and act as some minimum retort to the implicit racist stereotype often suffered by the Irish, especially back then. To catch out his Irish co-worker, a patronising Brit builder asked, ‘Do you know the difference between a joist and a girder?’ ‘That’s easy,’ his mate replied. ‘Girder wrote Faust and joist wrote Ulysses.’