Being born into a Protestant family – but growing up in the 1950s and 1960s Catholic Ireland – made NHF Board Member Erica Murray, by definition, a bit of an “outsider” from the very start. At the time, Protestants represented only 3% of the population; and the Church and State were totally intertwined. So, Erica grew up with Catholic social teaching, enforced by the State, dictating that: (a) Education be segregated into separate schools for Catholics and Protestants; (b) Mixed religion (Catholic/Protestant) marriages could take place only if the Protestant partner took a vow before marriage to rear any children as Catholic; (c) Contraception was illegal; (d) Divorce was illegal (legalised in 1995); (e) Termination was – and still is – illegal; and (f) Catholics were forbidden by their Church to attend Trinity College in Dublin until the 1970s.
Recently, Erica reminisced to me that, “Ireland at that time was a poor country. It was common to see newspaper boys barefoot in the streets of Dublin. In the 1950s, the country experienced mass emigration both to the United Kingdom and the United States. It was difficult to find work at home. Many emigrants never returned, and to this day we often comment that more of us live abroad than at home.” All of these sights and events made a big impression upon Erica that she was to take with her into later years.
Education & Early Years
During her school years Erica’s parents were broad-minded enough to send her on schoolgirl exchanges to France to learn the language, despite the fact that they themselves had travelled very little. This experience gave her a love of and appreciation for the French language that opened her up to another culture at an early age.
After those earlier school years, it also led to Erica working as an “au pair” for a family in Geneva, Switzerland, in order to improve her French. As an interesting side note and another one of those “small world” stories, one of the two children Erica minded grew up to become a nuclear physicist and subsequently married to the American astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria. On April 23rd of this year this same Michael returned to Earth, having spent almost five months as Commander of the International Space Station. Erica has remained in contact with this family.
After leaving school, Erica worked as a secretary for some years, first in her father’s legal firm and then in the Royal Dublin Society. In 1970, Erica then went to University College Dublin to study social science and, after graduating, completed a professional postgraduate qualification at the University of North Wales.
A Fighter for Legalized Contraception
Returning to Ireland, Erica began working as a social worker in a Dublin hospital for several years and then as a community social worker. As Erica noted about those years, “Through my work with families at risk, I became increasingly aware of the Catholic Church’s grip on Irish society and of the inequality that this forced on the population: if you had money, then you could access contraception or termination by travelling to the UK. You could also escape from an abusive marital relationship more easily. As is always the case, if you were poor, you were extremely powerless. Children in this society had no rights and, as we now know, many of them were being subjected to horrendous physical and sexual abuse by the guardians of the Catholic Church.”
Erica was invited to join the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA), which, at the time, was fighting for the legalization of contraception. While this might seem extraordinary now, at the beginning of the 21st Century, this was truly Ireland in the 1970s. She worked first on the organization’s Information & Education Committee and then on its Executive Committee for several years. But it was not until 1979 that their goal was partially attained – contraceptives (including condoms) could be sold in pharmacies on the production of a doctor’s prescription! As is still said, this represented an Irish solution to an Irish problem. The IFPA got around the law by giving out condoms in its clinics in return for a donation. (Visit http://www.ifpa.ie/about/hist2.html for a taste of this era.)
Early Exposure to Health Issues
As a child, Erica had had the good fortune to have parents who very rarely used pharmaceutical drugs. Part of this was due to the fact that they were much less common back then, but Erica’s mother also showed that marvellous maternal instinct to be distrustful of medication. So, despite Erica’s severe eczema, which was congenital, and despite the proliferation in the 1950s and 1960s of steroidal creams and ointments, nothing more invasive than calamine lotion was ever applied to her skin.
However, beginning in the 1970s, Erica was placed on oral steroids repeatedly. Feeling that there had to be another way of dealing with her eczema, Erica sought out alternatives that, in those days, were few and far between. Still, she discovered the Pandora’s Box of alternatives – acupuncture, herbs, homeopathy, and nutritional supplements. Successfully weaning herself off steroids for all time, she has reached a point of being able to satisfactorily manage the eczema. It has been a long and sometimes arduous road.
Lead to Adventures in Health Businesses
In 1979, Erica married Jimmy Murray and within three months they had opened their first healthfood store – in fact, the only healthfood store in Dublin at the time. They called it The Hopsack.
They went vegetarian, both as a means of experimenting with the foods they sold and also as a specific strategy for treating Erica’s eczema. Over the following six years, Erica and Jimmy were quite productive. They had two children (Finn and Kate), opened two more stores, and founded the Irish Association of Health Stores, which today represents over 80% of all independently-owned health stores in the Irish Republic. To this day, Erica still remains actively involved with the Association, which hosts its own annual trade and consumer Show in Dublin (www.rudehealth.ie.)
A Passion for Health-Freedom Issues
While business is business, the healthfood store has also kept Erica’s passion alive for freedom-of-choice issues, particularly in relation to health. As with many countries, the government in Ireland promotes many anti-health policies.
For example, Ireland is the only democracy in the World that still has mandatory national fluoridation of its water system. Erica has been active in campaigning for safer water through the elimination of mandatory fluoridation.
The Irish government also endorses genetically-modified (GM) crop trials, although to date no company has been willing to take on the anti-GM campaigners in the fields. Again, Erica has been quite active in this campaign to preserve non-GM crops.
In 2000, the Irish medicines’ regulator (Irish Medicines Board) made the herb St. John’s Wort a prescription-only medicine, arguing that depression is a condition that people should not self-medicate. Ireland is the only country in the World to have taken this action and it is a supreme example of the Nanny State in action. At the time, six people (including Erica) set up an action group – the Health Products Alliance – which ran an intensive campaign to prevent the banning of the herb. In the end, they were unsuccessful; but the campaign had a major positive outcome in that it helped to launch a revival of herbal medicine by focusing media attention on herbalism. In fact, since then, the number of practising herbalists in Ireland has increased exponentially, reflecting heightened consumer demand.
And since there were still a few unused minutes in the day, Erica decided for a time to act as the Irish Campaign Manager for the Alliance for Natural Health, which had just undertaken legal action in the European Court of Justice to challenge the European Union’s harshly-restrictive Food Supplements Directive. It was her work in this context that led her to network with an even-wider international group of health-freedom advocates in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere, and that led her eventually to becoming a member of the NHF Board.
Erica’s Observations on Ireland
Erica has lived through many of the most fundamental changes to hit Ireland in modern history. As she puts it, “Ireland is no longer a ‘priest-ridden’ country, largely due to the pedophile scandals that have ravaged the Catholic Church (referred to as ‘the Church’ in Ireland) over the past decade or so. We have become increasingly secularised, with no sense of spirituality yet filling the void left by the declining religiosity of the people. As one commentator says, here in Ireland we are in social and moral freefall. Yes, the economy is booming and with this we see a welcome mix of races and nationalities for the first time in the country, many coming here to take up those jobs the Irish are no longer willing to do. With the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy – the fastest growing in Europe – comes a major downside. Materialism is the new God.”
Deeply concerned about the proportion of the Irish population taking pharmaceutical “life style” medicines, Erica notes that “In our store we spend huge amounts of time and energy talking diet and life style. If only people would straighten this side of their lives out, while supplementing.”
In fact, she says, “Up to 10 years ago, only a minority of our customers were medicated. That has changed radically, and now I would say that the majority are medicated and are usually on multiple medications. Changing people’s mindsets is a daily challenge!”
Too, Erica has seen how Ireland has become the biggest exporter of pharmaceutical medicines in the EU, which amount to 40% of total Irish exports. There is, therefore, a huge dependence on jobs in this sector, with all the political support for this industry that such dependence implies. This makes the large pharmaceutical companies operating out of Ireland seem like the friends of the people and any criticism of them is not taken kindly.
“In Ireland,” Erica laments, “we don’t have doctors practising alternative medicine, with the very odd exception. These ‘odd exceptions’ have learnt to keep their heads below the parapet and not speak out, because of the ridicule they are subjected to within their own profession.”
“The sustainability of health strategies in the alternative sector bothers me: people come into us not wanting to take their medication – whether it is a statin or HRT [hormone replacement therapy] for instance – but expecting us to be just as prescriptive as their doctor or pharmacist. It is only a small minority who will walk the talk, and I personally find this very frustrating.”
“The Irish diet is very bad,” Erica told me, adding that “it has the highest intake of sugar per capita of all EU member states – even our Coca Cola has higher levels of sugar than in the UK or US! As in the US, people are into convenience meals and the ‘healthy options’ are just fooling people. People are armchair cooks – they buy the books and watch the cookery programs on TV – but they don’t cook real food any longer. They lead very stressful and busy lives and cooking the family dinner is becoming a thing of the past. And of course, the Irish proclivity for alcohol is well-known internationally and there is every sign that our young people are consuming more and more.”
“The best thing,” Erica said, “is that we can make a difference in peoples’ lives by educating them on good nutrition and healthy living.”
The Farm and the Future
In 2001, Jimmy purchased a farm, which he now runs organically. In 2006, Erica and Jimmy’s son, Finn, moved into the business and now manages The Hopsack, although Erica and Jimmy are still very much “hands on.” Finn, along with their daughter Kate, is hoping to bring the business to the next level in the future and the two of them have plans to move to larger premises in due course.
In 2005, Erica embarked on a multi-year training course with the Irish School of Natural Healing (affiliated to the American School of Natural Healing, which was set up by Dr. John Christopher and is run today by his son, David Christopher). It is the only school in the UK and Ireland offering a course in Master Herbalism. In 2009, Erica will graduate at the tender age of 60; but what she will do then is undecided. One thing is for sure, Erica will remain committed to the work of raising awareness of the positive benefits of alternative approaches to health and, conversely, of the negative outcomes to a life driven down the pharmaceutical road. And, according to her friends, she will keep doing this important work with that incredible sense of humor for which she has become well-known.
