By 
About two years ago, I was sitting at my desk toiling away at some all-too-earthly assignment – a council meeting or perhaps something even more bureaucratic and boring – when the monotony was broken by an unexpected ping.
It was a Facebook ‘Friend Request’.
I clicked to see who my would-be buddy might be, but recognised neither his name nor face.
Curious though, I accepted anyway.
“Hello!” he wrote.
I deliberated over whether he was a real person or a bot. Then, suddenly convinced that, yes, there was something believable in how harmoniously his Sperrin hillbilly-sounding name matched the potato-esque head in his profile picture, I tentatively asked: “Do I know you?”
A few minutes passed, then I received a reply I will never forget. Without any explanation, he sent me an electronic folder labeled ‘The directory of cures’.
I opened it quickly, almost surreptitiously, and inside found pages and pages loaded with lists of illnesses, names of people who could purportedly cure them, and phone numbers and addresses where each healer could be found.
I started to read.
Ringworm – Jack Maguire – Drumquin. If he’s not about, you could always give Francis Colgan in Omagh a bell.
For shingles, it had to be Paddy Hughes from Coalisland. No better man.
Generic skin ailment? Try Mick Fox in Carrickmore. Or if it’s a sore you need sorted, look no further than Peter McGahan in Ballyjamesduff.
And the list went on and on, right down to Rita, whose cure for ‘something in the eye’ presumably consisted of her sticking her finger in the sufferer’s affected eyeball.
According to the directory, so long as you were willing to make the journey and submit to whatever weird ritual was required, there was always someone somewhere who could take away your affliction, be it croup, colic or – wait for it – cancer.
I wrote back to your man and asked, “Where did you get this?”
But he never replied.
The whole thing started me on a journey – a short journey that led to a cul de sac – but a journey nonetheless.
This mysterious list got me thinking about that occult world of Old Ireland, where, depending on your viewpoint, the magisteria of mysticism and medicine married, met, diverged, or came into irreconcilable conflict.
Of course, the directory did not awaken me to the concept of cures. On the contrary,
I was already well acquainted; my grandfather cured warts with spuds and my own mother comes from a long line of women who, armed with just their wedding rings, can see off a stye with a few swift signs of the cross.
But what was shocking about this voluminous catalogue, other than the fact somebody had gone to the effort of compiling it, was the severity of some of the conditions that people were comfortable claiming they could cure.
I mean, it’s one thing if John does not heal your sprain, if Brian can’t expunge your wart, or if Sean fails to sooth your haemorrhoids. I mean, whatever happens, fair play to Sean for trying.
But what if, say, Margaret cannot get a handle on your blood pressure? And what happens if old Robert makes a mess of his cancer charm? What then? Surely the repercussions of such a blunder could be very serious indeed, especially if the person seeking help, convinced of the miraculous powers of their healer, decides to forgo hospital treatment.
I wanted to find out more. I wanted to know how much of it was physical, how much was transcendent and how much was psychological. Which local practioners charged money and who was sharing their god-given gifts free of charge? Were some conditions more curable than others? How much of a part did the faith of the patient play into their chances of recovery? Is placebo a dirty word to faith healers? And, crucially, because I am a skeptic by nature, could the answer to any of these questions provide me with clues about whether any given self-professed healer was the real deal or a faker?
I started making calls. However a few pages into the directory, I found most lines were dead, from which I drew a series of morbid – but likely – conclusions.
And yet my perseverance eventually paid off in a small way when I got through to a house of someone the directory said had the cure for shingles.
Unfortunately, the husband answered and refused to put his wife – the curer – on the phone.
“To be honest, it’s more hassle than it’s worth. There used to be ones calling to our house morning, noon and night looking cured,” he said, sounding exhausted.
I made dozens more calls, but the few people who did answer told me they were not interested in doing anything with the newspaper.
To the last, they declined: “Sorry, we’re just not interested in publicity.”
In my experience, there are innumerable reasons people are media-shy.
But two common ones are as follows: (A) They are doing things for selfless reasons and think publicity will give people the impression that they have an ulterior motive.
Or (B) they actually are trying to hide something and are afraid that media exposure may draw unwanted attention to their less than scrupulous – and often quite lucrative – enterprise.
So the trail petered out… not with answers, but with silence.
And perhaps that, in its own way, says as much about cures as any charm or ritual ever could.
