Disbelief in the quiet streets

ALAN MURDOCH

Dungarvan

When Father Michael Kennedy dropped the bombshell in Dungarvan's St Mary's Church on Sunday, the general reaction was stunned disbelief.

Two days later, locals in the quiet Irish south coast town were only barely accepting the enormity of the tragedy and that it may be all too real.

The absence of health-authority confirmation that the 25-year-old woman at the centre of the affair, born to Irish parents but brought up in England, has infected up to 80 local men with HIV has added to the bewilderment.

Local young people stress Dungarvan is no rural backwater living in innocent isolation. An industrial town of 7,000, it has big employers in Waterford Glass and pharmaceutical and food plants. Its pubs and night clubs are well equipped with condom machines; safe-sex programmes are taught in schools.

Father Kennedy commands respect and most parishioners said he was unlikely to make wild claims. Outside Noel Cummings bookmakers in the town centre, Brian Meehan, an easy-going young man with an ear-ring, said he disagreed with what the priest had done: "He should just have gone to the families. That would have been more sensible. This is terrifying the whole town ..." He and friends heard rumours six months ago that a number of local people had become HIV positive but heard no more about it since.

More sceptical views were voiced by two elderly brothers who asked not to be named. Like half the town, they were watching the media circus before them and exchanging opinions. They pointed to medical opinion that the chances of women infecting men were relatively slight.

"If it is eighty that have been infected, that means one in 10 of the men she slept with have it. Can you believe that?"

Other local people spoke disapprovingly of the prying outside interest, appalled at the invasion.