As a self-styled “natural health therapist”, Mineke Kamper could have revelled in the fact that her name even sounds like a herbal remedy. Following last week’s damning revelations, however, the Dutch-born homeopath

has lost interest in self-promotion and is lying low at her home-cum-clinic in Mulranny, Co Mayo, since her reputation as a healer is now as worthless as the watery potions she peddles as medicine.

At an inquest last Monday into the death of Paul Howie, who died needlessly after Kamper advised him against seeking medical treatment for a curable throat tumour, his wife Michelle painted an extraordinary portrait of the therapist as a domineering, controlling woman who required of her “patients” that they surrender themselves to her care. Further tales of Kamper’s “callous manipulation” (the coroner’s term) of vulnerable people also emerged.

These tragic cases should serve as a wake-up call to the thousands in this country who have been suckered by the vogue for new-age quackery, and its accompanying retreat from reason, scientific method and common sense.

Ireland is currently in the grip of a mania for so-called complementary medicine, from Reiki to homeopathy, Tahitian noni juice to Ayurveda. Legitimate concerns about the ethics of the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry have conspired with an increasing appetite for the purported “wisdom of the ancients” to create a booming market for witchdoctors and shamans.

Ironically, it’s the internet, a product of the wicked technological age, which has contributed most to the spread of this gospel. People who are sceptical of pronouncements by conventional doctors will apparently swallow any nonsense provided it’s posted on a sufficiently slick and zealous website.

Political reaction to the Kamper controversy has been a call for the regulation of alternative practitioners — something long overdue. However, this alone isn’t the answer.

Alternative medicine thrives on its unorthodox status. The more reviled these treatments are by officialdom, the argument runs, the more effective they must be. We need national re-education about the difference between verifiable science and reckless charlatanism.

The flag-wavers strike again

Irish academics are responsible for the preposterous symposium on the music of the Smiths taking place this weekend at Manchester Metropolitan University. The three-day seminar was the brainchild of Sean Campbell and Justin O’Connor, second-generation Irish professors of cultural studies in British universities.

The Smiths were formed in early 1980s Manchester by Stephen Patrick Morrissey, whose parents hail from Crumlin, in Dublin, and Johnny Marr (formerly Maher) who has Kildare connections. Clearly besotted with the subject, Campbell is writing a treatise about the influence of second-generation Irish artists on English music, with reference to the Smiths, John Lydon, Elvis Costello, Shane MacGowan etc.

However, a more useful academic study should be undertaken into why so many Irish scholars are so eager to attribute bogus nationalistic depth to stylish cultural surfaces. In the wise words of a Smiths classic, what difference does it make?

You’d want to escape Cavan’s Shinners

It’s grim up north. That’s the conclusion of The Emerald Curtain, a research study published last week into life in the border counties of Cavan and Monaghan. Protestants, young people and former republican prisoners were identified as those who endured the most difficult experiences.

In some border areas, however, much of the misery seems self-inflicted. The highlight of last week’s social calendar for young Cavan republicans, for instance, was The Great Escape, a stage show built around the 1983 break-out from Long Kesh by 38 IRA prisoners. The cast is headed by Gerry Kelly, the Sinn Fein MLA and one of the jailbreak’s ringleaders. His co-stars are Brendan “Bik” McFarlane and Bobby Storey, both of whom were also among the escapees.

The show was staged in Cavan as an Ogra Sinn Fein fundraising venture. How the benighted locals must yearn for the bright lights of, well, Monaghan even.

• Bill Cullen is back with another folksy sermon from atop a barrow boy’s cart. The Renault mogul who scored an international bestseller with It’s A Long Way From Penny Apples, the story of his poor-but-happy childhood among the market traders of the Summerhill tenements, has published a follow-up, Golden Apples: Six Simple Steps to Success, in which he squeezes all the business knowledge he gleaned on his mother’s stall into the inevitable acronym:

  “A is your warrior’s Attitude for Achieving.
  P is your dynamic Plan of action.
  P is your charismatic People Power.
  L is the way you Learn to be Lucky.
  E is your explosive Energy to Excel.
  S is your supercharged Selling Skills.”

  Cullen may not realise that “Apples” is already a popular American buzzword, especially in the IT business, where it’s used as an abbreviation of the phrase “apples to oranges”, meaning an inappropriate comparison.

  A good example of such a comparison would be Cullen’s insistence that every business and indeed life problem can be solved by applying the theory and practice of street trading in 1950s inner-city Dublin.

  Apples are not the only fruit.

• ‘Shorter journey times and greater journey time certainty” is a Department of Transport catchphrase.

  It crops up like a mantra in departmental press releases and in interviews with the transport minister Martin Cullen.

  The phrase appears to be an expression of determination to eliminate gridlock and provide a reliable road network. But don’t be so sure. Last week, Cullen announced the nationwide roll-out of electronic roadside screens which will continuously inform drivers about any expected delays.

  So that’s what he means by “greater journey time certainty” — you won’t reach your destination any quicker but you will be made fully aware of how long each trip is going to take.

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