Hey, Kids - Leave Those Teachers Alone

First published in the Western People on Monday.

This week is the mid-term break for many schools in the County Mayo. So while people who work have the blessing of a bank holiday today, tomorrow we go back to work while teachers and pupils either lie in or are kicked out of bed by outraged parents and told to clean the gutters or mow the lawn, as appropriate to their station.

We all remember what it was like to be in school as a pupil – if you didn’t, you’re making quite the achievement in even reading this paper – but relatively few know what it’s like to be at the top of the class, looking back at the children looking hungrily up at you. Reader, let’s spare a moment this morning to think of the teachers.

It’s fashionable among some people to say they succeeded despite their teachers, rather than because of them. This is a particularly miserable attitude, but it is by no means uncommon. For instance, during one of those clubby radio shows that RTÉ do so often during the summer, Miriam O’Callaghan interviewed the journalists Sam Smyth and Eamon McCann.

McCann, a Derryman, is a graduate of St Columb’s College, a school that is remarkable for the amount of influential people who have been educated there – Séamus Heaney, God be good to him, and John Hume are both alumni of St Columb’s, and there are many more who have made their mark on the city, the country and the world. Miriam asked McCann if he thought St Columb’s had much influence on him.

No, said McCann. He is the fine man he is today despite, rather than because of, his schooling.

Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, of course, but McCann seemed blissfully unaware of the irony of his disdain for the school that educated him when he went on to mourn the absence of Latin in modern curricula, on the basis that the learning of the ancient language is good for teaching accuracy, mental discipline and giving a taste of the richness of human history.

This is ironic because, if it weren’t for St Columb’s and the teachers therein, where would McCann have learned his Latin in the first place? When the children of Derry were going home in the rain or running up the dark lane it is unlikely they were speaking Latin while doing it. McCann has his teachers to thank for his Latin and his subsequent grasp of grammar, though he seems to little appreciate it.

This is the sort of revelation that only comes with age (or not at all, in McCann’s case). When you’re a young person behind the desk, everything is, like, such a drag. A child who will happily rattle off the Manchester United first XI or can dash off the Kardashian family tree on the back of a copybook may have zero interest in naming the principle rivers and towns in Ireland or being able to recite The Old Woman of the Roads. Something’s got to give.

The worst mistake a teacher can make is thinking that there’s a way for the kids to treat you as one of themselves. There really isn’t, and that’s not the teacher’s purpose. The teacher’s purpose is not to get the children to do what they want, but to get them to do what they must.

Sometimes it seems that the Department forgets this distinction. Different academics publish papers about engaging with the child and that’s all fine but you have to remember that what a child wants to engage in is not what the teacher wants the child to engage in.

Some people say the great teachers are the ones who let the love of the subject shine through. Sometimes, with the major subjects of Irish, English or Maths the gifted and inspired teacher can be swept away by the beauty of a poem by Raifteirí, a short story by Michael McLaverty or the otherworldly beauty of those beautiful, clean lines that only exist on the limitless horizon of the Euclidean plane.

And all that’s true, but those aren’t the only teachers who are great. The great teachers are also those who teach subjects that will not help get a job, but will give joy for evermore. Think of the music teachers and PE teachers, who teach the joys of the eternal battle between the tonic and dominant chords and the incredible benefit of being able to kick with both feet.

And there are also the teachers who know that a real world exists beyond the schoolroom and it can be far more frightening and difficult to deal with than the Tuiseal Ginideach, mischievous trickster though the Tuiseal Ginideach certainly is. Anyone who has had difficulties and was quietly helped by a teacher will remember that kind act until it’s time to turn our backs to this world and prepare to face the next.

So spare a thought, then, for teachers. Every year the department makes their job harder by messing with the subjects and trying devious ways to cut junior teachers’ pay to appease senior members of the union. Every year teachers’ friends mock them for having it easy with those big, long holidays and that blissfully short working day.

But none of the rest of us will have a computer that will talk back and try to get all the other computers on its side, just for devilment. We can take five or ten minutes for a wander around the office when we like. We’re not on duty all the time, with sixty hungry eyes waiting for us to slip up.

But neither are we those who hand on the flame, problematic curricula or no, to another generation. For every ten or twenty children who are just counting the days there will be one who will be lit up by what he or she hears from their teacher, and has a job, a gift or perhaps a source of comfort and joy for the rest of their lives. How many of us can say that we contribute something similar to society?

Magdagate: Another Mortal Wound for Irish Journalism

You can’t have a democracy without a free press. The biggest danger to Irish sovereignty isn’t the bailout; it’s the absence of a free and functioning press.

Why do you need a free press? You need a free press to hold the powerful to account. To tell people what their leaders are doing and saying on their behalf, to interpret it, to encourage discussion and to ensure that, when the people go to the polls, they are as informed as they can possibly be.

The Irish media are failing badly in this regard. Because the country is so small, it’s always been difficult to have a fully impartial media. Unfortunately, the past year has seen such a calamitous fall in standards that it is now at a stage where the main check to governance of the country is hors de combat, and that is a crisis in any democracy.

RTÉ let itself down on the double. Firstly, the extraordinary libel of Father Kevin Reynolds on Prime Time, and secondly, the scuppering of the Seán Gallagher Presidential campaign by a tweet that was sent from a clearly bogus account. Either is a scandal. The combination of both is mind-boggling as regards standards in a publicly funded national broadcaster.

Today FM disgraced itself in its treatment of Sam Smyth. God only knows what goes on editorially in Newstalk, other than to remark if Prime Time wanted to do a States of Fear II, Marconi House would be a good place to set it. Allegedly.

The Irish Times let itself down very badly indeed in its attempt to re-write history in the sad case of the death of Kate Fitzgerald. They probably know it and the libel laws don’t help, but it doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t make it right at all.

But even in the light of all this, there is something about the “Magda” story in yesterday’s Irish Independent that is particularly worrying. These are the facts: the Indo found an interview in a Polish magazine with a Polish woman who spoke about life in Ireland. The Indo printed the story as the woman having a big laugh at the dumb Paddies who are paying her way.

It would be the perfect newspaper story, if it weren’t for one pesky detail. It’s sensational, it’s got water-cooler appeal, and it rings a bell for people. There’s a whole generation of people who came home from J1s laughing at the Yanks and telling stories of the scams they pulled so it was only reasonable to assume that the new Irish were telling the same stories. And now here was proof.

The one pesky detail is that the story in the Indo bears no relation to the original Polish story. This is the Indo story; this is the Polish original, translated into English by the John Murray show on RTÉ Radio One. There is no basis for the Indo story in the Polish original. None at all. It’s all rubbish. Every word.

So how did it get printed? One of two ways. Either the Independent’s editorial process is so incredibly bad that they really don’t care whether or what they print has any basis in reality at all. The second possibility is worse. The second possibility is that they knew full well what was in the Polish original, and didn’t care.

If the article isn’t true, so what? Nobody’s named, therefore nobody’s libeled, therefore nobody can sue. It’s win-win. Sure they’ll be some yap about it but it’ll sell papers and the Indo will get a reputation as the paper that prints what others are too scared or – hah! – too “politically correct” to share with the nation.

The media is failing to self-regulate. No-one in the media will take on a powerful media group because who knows when the day will come when that somebody may need a new job and hope for food from a hand that they’ve bitten.

So journalists end up in the position of men in the women and children’s lifeboats – they feel terrible about the destruction of their profession, but they prefer it to drowning, thanks all the same.

That’s not good enough. Irish sovereignty is in greater danger from the absence of a free press than from the Troika, who only want their money back. Don’t let media cynicism take your freedom away. Don’t let it!

We Are Sam Smyth

The ironic thing about it all, of course, is that Sam Smyth’s show isn’t even that good in the first place. Look at this picture of Smyth and Alastair Campbell – think that’s the picture of a man about to grill Campbell on dodgy goings-on in Whitehall during the Blair years?

It always seemed that Smyth’s guests were drawn from a very small circle, and the show was a sort of dry dinner party held ten hours before its natural time. There was never any danger of real world experience breaking in; it was for people who inhabit that awful Irish Bermuda triangle whose points are the Shelbourne Bar, Paddy Guilbaud’s and Dáil Éireann, and for those elect alone.

But even that has now proven too much. Sam Smyth, a man who does so very little to rattle cages, has found that even a little can finish a man.

It all goes back to 1997 and Smyth’s role in breaking the story that lead to the Moriarty Tribunal. Smyth got a lot of praise for his work as an investigative journalist, but the reality is someone picked up the phone and spilled the beans to start the ball rolling in the first place.

If that phone call hadn’t been made, just how hard would the awarding of the Esat license have been investigated by the Irish media? About as hard as the awarding of the drilling rights to Shell in Rossport, or of planning permission for three hundred house estates outside villages with a population of 150, not counting the idiot.

Maybe Ireland is too small to have a functioning media. Everybody gets to know everybody else very quickly, and it’s hard to be objective about people with whom you socialize. There are so few media outlets, it’s very easy for the powerful to blackball someone and put them out of a job. Investigative journalism of the Woodward and Bernstein school is cripplingly expensive. And of course, like any job, youthful enthusiasm wanes and it becomes easier to go through the motions after time.

The problem is that if Ireland is too small to have a functioning media it is also too small to have an independent government. This cannot be emphasized enough.

It is impossible for the people to make informed decisions about who governs them unless there is a mechanism by which the people can inform themselves about the alternatives. That ability to make informed decisions is now under its greatest threat since independence. What can be done?

The Government talks a lot of hot air about press freedom but the reality is no Government wants a free press. Governments want to control news, so the existence of press barons is in their interest. Once the baron is on board, the rest will follow – vide Blair’s courting of Rupert Murdoch across the Irish sea.

It’s up to the people to demand what the powerful will not give. Right now Smyth is doomed. They’ve put a fork in him, and they’re going to replace his cuddly beltway chats with a PR consultant who likes to talk about motor cars that people up to their snouts in negative equity can’t afford.

But there are still journalists of influence and repute who can challenge for press freedom. Wouldn’t it be great if Matt Cooper and George Hook used their drivetime radio shows tomorrow to explain the importance of a free press to their listenership, and just how vital a free press is to a democracy? Wouldn’t that be so much better than just taking a shilling? An Spailpín is looking forward to seeing people taking stands and putting their money where their mouths are.

I am Sam Smyth. And so are you. Don’t let them keep us in the dark. Don’t let them.