An Irish woman’s social, political and domestic commentary
I was on the Dave Fanning show the other night (Wed) doing a “meeting Mr. Right” thing. It’s light hearted drivel but some decent advice in there and it was a real laugh. The best bit was towards the end when Dave caught me out pretending to be interested in his football stories. Go here and click on Wednesday’s show. Fast forward to about 22/23 minutes. He plays the live version of Bad in the middle. It was Bono’s birthday.
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Driving around the car park of a supermarket. All the good and vacant spaces are for disabled drivers and mothers with children. “How about spaces for Young Single Women?” she demands. “I’m in a hurry. It’s RIDICULOUS”.
My uncle is getting the “loan” of a ferret. Apparently they get rid of the rabbits. They don’t like ferret piss. And the rabbits are annoying my aunt. I wonder could I get a ferret? They’re annoying me too. Anyone want to loan one?
Good: Took my shoes off and sat outside. Hurrah!
Bad: Haven’t brushed my hair today and my legs need waxing. Damn. But I’m going on holidays in early June. Will I get them waxed now and risk them not being ready for another one in June OR stick it out and get the wax in another few weeks but reduce my wardrobe options in the meantime?
Problems, problems.
Update: I got them waxed. The weather might stay nice and I can get them in the sun before the holiers.
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Scene: the car park of a suburban pub. Three men, Mick, Bill and Paddy sit in a car waiting for the contact to arrive. They are all 70+. Reasonably presentable country men. Ill-fitting sports jackets and comfortable shoes.
Mick: “How will we know him?”
Bill: “We’ll know him”
Paddy: “And he’ll know us”.
A battered 4×4 drives in.
Bill: “Here he is.”
The 4×4 identifies the prospective customers immediately and pulls up beside them. Greetings are exchanged and the 4×4 takes off again, the men in anxious pursuit. After 10 minutes and a maze of turns and roundabouts, they pull into the back yard behind a bungalow. Everyone gets out and they enter a shed where a beaten up old threshing mill lies, dusty and neglected. Paddy is in the market. Mick is his friend. Bill is the consultant who will lead negotiations. They inspect it, and Bill is unimpressed.
Bill: “How much do you want for it?”
Owner: “How much will you give me for it?”
Bill: “Not a whole lot”
Owner: “Well, if I don’t get seven and half thousand for it, it’s going to England on Thursday”.
Bill: “You’ll get that in England but you won’t get it here”
Owner: “How much will I get for it here?”
Bill: “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want it anyway”.
Owner: “If you did want it, what would you give for it?”
Bill: “Five hundred pounds” [not euros, pounds]
Owner: “Well I’ve 5 more men coming to see it today [shows list on piece of paper]. I’ll deal with them so”
Bill: [eyeing list]. “Who’s coming?” (Owner shows list)
Bill: snorts with derision when he sees a name ” Huh, well I know him and I can tell you, he won’t give you seven and half thousand either. [pause] Where’s the driving belt? I’m interested in a driving belt. ”
Owner: “It’s there”
Bill: “It’s not there”
Owner: “It’s on the top”
Bill: “Why would it be on the top?”
Owner: “It’s on the top”
Bill: “I’ll buy the driving belt”
Owner: “I’ll sell it to you so”
Bill: “How much?”
Owner: “Seven and half thousand. And I’ll throw in the Mill. You can burn it for all I care”
Bill: “It wouldn’t even burn it’s that bad. We’ve things to do and won’t waste your time any more”
Owner: “I’m in a hurry too”
Bill: “Well we’ll f*ck off so”
Owner: “Do.”
The men pile into the car and leave. They are disappointed but satisfied. They get lost and have to ask for directions back to the motorway. They don’t mind. It’s all part of the fun.
The comedian Stephen Colbert ridiculed George Bush last week, saying the American president believes things to be true because he feels them in his gut. Bush doesn’t care what the “factanistas” who read “elitist” books have to say. If he believes something in his gut (like there being WMD in Iraq), he will cling to that belief regardless of the facts.Sometimes I find myself in the same position. Experts give me “facts”, but I feel in my gut that they aren’t true. It happened last year when I heard Mary Hanafin, the education minister, talking about a new “standardisation” plan to put extra teachers in disadvantaged schools. It sounded perfect, but my gut felt queasy.My gut may be so twisted that it can’t listen to anyone from Fianna Fail without going into convulsions. Nevertheless, Hanafin’s “facts” seemed incontrovertible.
Then, a fortnight ago, St Michael’s CBS primary school in Inchicore, Dublin, announced that it was closing and the minister’s standardisation chickens came home to roost.
Hanafin’s big idea was to deliver equality of opportunity in schools — the so-called DEIS scheme. This was a plan to set the maximum class size in 32 disadvantaged schools at a ratio of 15 pupils per teacher for junior classes and 27:1 for seniors. In a further 211 schools, the maximum class size for juniors would be 20:1 and for seniors 27:1.
If your son or daughter is in a class of between 30 and 40, 20:1 probably sounds like magic and 15:1 would be an educational nirvana. But if you’re reading this article, I’m assuming you’re middle class. At worst you’re one of the “coping classes” — the demographic first identified by Eoghan Harris when he was advising John Bruton.
As a “coping” mother or father, you send your child to a class of 40 with a decent breakfast and lunch in their schoolbag. You collect them from school and give them dinner. They may loll idly in front of Playstation or watch too much telly, but at last you harass them into doing their homework before persuading them to go bed. Begrudgingly you hand over €5 every so often for the raffle tickets sent home for a draw to raise funds for new computers. It’s all hassle, but still you’re coping.
It’s hard to describe how dire things are for the non-coping classes. A friend with no teaching qualification got a job in an inner-city project for primary school children thrown out of every other school. Since nobody else wanted the job, she found herself in front of a class of six to 10 severely disadvantaged children with phenomenal problems.
One 10-year-old boy explained he wouldn’t be able to go to school the next day, even though daily attendance was part of his probation agreement. Child benefit payments were due and he had to go shopping with his mother for his younger sister’s communion dress. The mother was a heroin addict and if he didn’t go with her she’d buy drugs instead of the dress.
When school finished in the afternoons, my friend would try to keep the pupils back long enough for the drug dealers at the gates to get bored and go home. She was sure most of the children were hungry. They had few books and the 12-year-olds couldn’t even read. She tried teaching them from the tabloid newspapers. They were interested in Wayne Rooney, so that held their attention.
Eventually there was a dispute over funding and her hours were cut back and then axed.
St Michael’s announced closure because, under the new “standardisation” scheme, it was going to lose teachers. The school currently has eight, one for every eight pupils, but was about to lose half of them, bringing the ratio up to one for every 16.
A lot of St Michael’s pupils are the ones other schools have turned away because of disruptive histories, learning difficulties and special needs. St Michael’s needed every last one of those teachers to have any chance of success.
According to last Thursday’s Morning Ireland programme, Hanafin was “very annoyed” with the school for its “lack of consultation” about the closure. She was probably also annoyed that the scheme was so clearly exposed for making things worse. Now she’s thrown the school a lifeline; they can keep their staff for one more year. That should give the pupils enough time to find another school with 30-something other classmates where they can get sucked into the factanista’s claim that pupil-teacher ratios are being reduced.
It’s so depressing that we still can’t get the Department of Education to accept the importance of tackling social deprivation in primary school. One to 20 is a useless ratio when you are dealing with problem children; one to 27 is disastrous. Even from an economic viewpoint we should be able to persuade the wretched Department of Finance that throwing bucket loads of money at primary schools would save us a fortune in the long run.
I was bitterly disappointed when Niamh Breathnach, as minister for education, abolished third-level fees in the 1990s. It just meant that the middle classes on Dublin’s southside got to go to UCD for free, and paid for posh secondary schools instead. It did nothing for rural students, who still face high rents in cities, and it sure didn’t help one single disadvantaged pupil get into college.By the time it gets to third level, it’s too late. By the time it gets to second level, it’s too late. The only hope is to get the disadvantaged children when they are four, or even three.I would like to see a reintroduction of third-level fees, on condition that the €50m or so raised would go to the most severely disadvantaged schools in the country. Imagine what that money could do? A hot breakfast, a dinner, classroom assistants, homework clubs. You could transform an entire generation in a poor locality.
But ministers will tell you “it doesn’t work like that” and you can’t just go taking money from one crowd and giving it to another. Weird, I thought redistributing wealth was exactly what governments and taxation systems were supposed to do.
Of course it won’t happen because other unpalatable facts are in the way. The coping classes are bigger than the non-coping classes, and they vote more. The “factanistas” know that there are more votes in free third-level education than in doing something truly visionary for the disadvantaged.
It’s these kind of facts that make my gut feel so queasy again.
I love it. My new word. Coined by Sandra Tsing-loh in last month’s Atlantic. She’s complaining about a spate of recent books where middle-aged middle-class media-focussed women write essays about their appalling conflicts – take fabulous new promotion and feel guilty about neglecting children or stay-at-home unfulfilled and defensive but smug at the same time – oh and all of them have nannies and buy designer label clothes for their children. Excellent.
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