Loneliness is a toxin that poisons the mind... a silent and remorseless killer

Erosion of human interaction has left a trail of desolation

- BY ROY CURTIS

CHECKMATED by fate, ravenous for friendship, they seek to arm-wrestle scraps of conversation from another companionless day.

Pope Francis characterised the lonely as the "abandoned tabernacles", "our brothers and sisters in need."

Ireland is overflowing with the forgotten people compelled, to quote Donal Ryan, "to carry their sadness around quietly."

The certainty is that somebody in your broad circle a neighbour who lives alone or without love, the lady who seeks to strike up a conversation on the bus journey, somebody who has lost a life partner, the teenager who rarely lifts their head from their smartphone, the bullied schoolchild is among those struggling.

In the week the heart of a Pontiff who dedicated his papacy to the marginalised was stilled, it was authentically shocking to read that one in five Irish people feels lonely most or all of the time.

Or to realise that Croke Park could not accommodate the avalanche of the desolate - 89,000 who contacted the Dublin Samaritans in 2024.

Many of their calls were prompted by an unbearable hunger for the music of human interaction, a need to hear the grand piano of another voice tinkling in their ear.

How incredibly sad to be confronted by such an epidemic, an endless cascade of cries for help.

It is not for nothing that solitary confinement has, since medieval times, been regarded as one of the most brutal forms of torture.

BADLANDS

Research has shown that loneliness is as damaging to health as smoking 15 cigarettes daily. It is a scientific fact that those who are marginalised later in life suffer more rapid cognitive decline.

Not that it is exclusively those of older generations who have crossed the borderline and advanced into the badlands of isolation.