What is the Point in Watching the Budget?

Pascal O'Donoghue, TD, Minister for Finance

Do you plan to watch the budget today, Reader? Will you listen to the Minister, thrill to the analysis, and carefully ponder the responses to the budget from the parties’ various spokespersons on finance when they, too, address Dáil Éireann?

And are you entirely sure that’s wise? All things considered, would you not be better off beating yourself unconscious with a brick instead?

You say that’s crazy talk. No, it’s not. Beating yourself unconscious with a brick is every bit as sensible as listening to the budget and expecting the government to exercise any control over the public finances – insofar as they government can figure out what the public finances are in the first place, of course.

The one reason the country hasn’t sunk beneath the waves – and I thank almighty God for it – is that we must have our budgets signed off in Berlin anymore, even since that time we went crazy buying two-bed apartments with one parking space and thinking they were little goldmines. The majority of the spending is already spent before the Minister got out of bed this morning. What the Minister will actually be talking about is what he’s allowed to spend from the change discovered at the back of the couch, as the big money is only handled by the big boys any more.

And even then, the unhappy man will still make a bags of it. His is an impossible task.

Professor Séamus Coffey, head of the Fiscal Advisory Council, was interviewed on This Week on RTÉ Radio One on Sunday. Professor Coffey noted that every year for the past fifteen years the Department of Health has been unable to calculate its spending correctly.

This is phenomenally bad practice, and what makes it worse is that every time the Department manages to underestimate spending. It’s not that the Department of Health gets its sums wrong, as such. It’s that it always gets them wrong in the same way.

For fifteen years the Department has tried to calculate how much it needs, and each year it’s underestimated its budget and had to be dug out. This is despite always going higher than last year for each of the fifteen years.

This isn’t bad maths. If it were bad maths, they’d have over-estimated at least once. This is something else.

Let’s put that in perspective. Let’s say you’re saving for a mortgage, and you decide to cut down on the pints. You budget yourself a fifty-Euro-a-fortnight pinting allowance, and swear never to break it.

At the end of the fortnight, you do your sums and you find that instead of blowing fifty Euro on porter, you’ve blown eighty. OK. You were unrealistic in your initial calculation. There are few places in Dublin city centre where you can get a pint for less than a fiver, and five pints a week isn’t even half the weekly limit as set out by the killjoy Department of Health. OK. So you recalibrate, and your new fortnightly pinting budget is now eighty Euro.

You examine your spend after this second fortnight and find out you’ve spent one hundred Euro.

This isn’t great. Not only are you still over budget, but you’ve doubled your initial estimate. This is bad. You feel bad. You’re not looking forward to telling your girlfriend, who’s counting on you pulling your weight for this mortgage. But at least you know now what the price of booze is. You budget for a hundred bucks this time, and go again.

That’s three budgets reader. The Department of Health have got this wrong for fifteen budgets in a row. If that were the case where you were saving for your mortgage, it’s safe to say that you could forget about the mortgage. You could forget about the girlfriend too, as she’d long ago have walked out. But you yourself are not bothered about a mortgage now, of course. Why would you need a mortgage when you now live under a bridge, off your cake on a cocktail of Buckfast and dry sherry all the livelong day?

Minister Harris, a man borne down by the sense of his own dignity, is inclined to respond that there is no discretionary spend in Health. If some invalid, some wretched soul, were to call to a hospital, how could the hospital send him or her away?

Such an unfortunate should not be sent away, of course. But your faithful correspondent can tell you who should be sent away. The genius who agreed to pay €6.5 million per year in rent for the new Department of Health offices eighteen months before anybody actually moves into the place could do with sending away.

The only reason whoever is monitoring how well hospital consultants are maintaining their working division between private and public patients while working in public hospitals can’t be sent away because it seems that person doesn’t exist in the first place.

According to last week’s report of the Comptroller and Auditor General, no more than 20% of beds in public hospitals are meant to be set aside for private patients. However, beds are considered plain beds, not public beds or private beds, and “the HSE does not draw comparisons on activity levels between hospitals or individual consultants in order to monitor trends in activity over time.” So that’s bound to be going well.

You may think your faithful correspondent is picking on the Department of Health. Not at all. Consider this shaggy dog story, as reported in yesterday’s Times Ireland:

The Irish Greyhound Board had their old stadium in Harold’s Cross valued in March of last year. Savills' reckoned it was worth twelve million Euro if developed, six million if it remained a dog track.

A few weeks later, the Department of Education asked the Valuation Office to survey the dog track at Harold’s Cross, and see how much it was worth. Harold’s Cross could do with a new school, you see.

Where Savills' considered the site worth €12 million, the Valuation Office thought it worth more €23 million. The Department of Education bought the site for €23 million in May of last year. Did the site more than double in value in two months? What exactly are we missing here? Other than our shirts, of course - we lost those long ago.

Now. Suppose you’re some sort of nut who thinks maybe the country would be in better shape if we spent money wisely, instead of finding new and, frankly, quite astonishing ways to waste it? For whom exactly should you vote in the coming election? Whom can you trust to get a start on that task?

I’ll give you a minute, dear Reader. Then you can go off and find yourself a brick.

a brick.

Education Policy and Teacher Conferences

An intelligent child participating in class, yesterday.

The second week of the Easter Holidays is conference season for the three main teachers’ unions. This year, the INTO meets in Belfast, the TUI assemble in Cork and the ASTI meet in Killarney of the lakes.

Your faithful correspondent’s crystal ball can predict the coverage of the difference conferences right now and save everybody a lot of gas. The biggest single topic will be money, of course. There will be stories about school divestment, all focusing on the urgency of the thing and none trying to figure out how two sides who want something to happen can’t make something happen.

And there will be earnest thought pieces about the need for greater emphasis on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects in both secondary and primary schools. STEM advocacy is so popular now that it wouldn’t surprise your correspondent if the only thing stopping some advocate form suggesting STEM subjects be taught in the womb is the fear of raising a hare in the matter of the Eighth Amendment, and we’ll get plenty of that in days to come, thank you very much.

All of these motions will be discussed by mostly earnest people who have an interest in their profession and are trying to make it better. But there is an elephant in the room that is seldom discussed, and that was only drawn to your correspondent’s attention over the weekend.

While browsing in the top floor of Hodges Figgis bookstore on Dublin’s Dawson Street, your faithful quillsman got talking to a maths teacher, who was in there because, he told me, he likes to stay on his game and ensure he has fresh questions with which to challenge his students.

We got talking about maths in general, and the nature of the subject. I half-expected a jeremiad against Project Maths, a recent initiative of the Department that is roundly despised by any maths teachers of my own acquaintance, but no. This man told me that the single biggest problem that he sees in his classes is that the poor standard of verbal reasoning among the children means that some of them struggle to understand the question itself, to say nothing of being able to answer the thing.

Stephen Leacock wrote a much-loved essay called A, B, and C: The Human Element in Mathematics, in which he speculated about the real lives of those mysterious characters who appear in maths questions – A can dig a hole at twice the speed of B, who himself digs holes at half the speed of C. If C digs three holes an hour, how long does it take A to dig five holes?

A glance at current Leaving Cert papers suggests that these sorts of problems are all over the shop, as part of making maths more “relevant.” But what it’s actually doing is making maths harder, because the child doesn’t have the skills to read the question. It seems nobody was paying attention to that one.

It’s very hard to get to the truth of these things. Teachers can feel a little paranoid about people always having a go at them, and journalists find divestment so much more box-office than dull educational theorizing. But if this anecdotal evidence is generally reflective of the current state of affairs, this is a time bomb that can fracture the state even further when it blows.

It seems the notion of the homework-less school is more and more in fashion at the present time. And that’s fine, for those who realise that, while one agrees with it at supper in Sandymount, one has been reading to Meadhbh and Conchobar since they were toddlers and making damn sure they were literate before they even got to school.

But what about the kids whose parents don’t read, and aren’t literary, or well-educated, or even educated at all? The State education system is meant to provide a safety net for them, so that they are given the one and only shot at escaping a poverty trap – education. But the State is failing badly in this remit and politicians who claim to represent the disadvantaged and marginalized in society are too busy making jackasses of themselves time and time again over water charges and other nonsense rather than trying to do something, anything, useful for once in their careers.

Class doesn’t matter. This isn’t the 19th century anymore. Education is what separates haves and have-nots now, and it is legitimate to wonder who is shouting for the have-nots when it comes to education. Not one damn person from what I can see.

Enjoy the teachers’ conferences. I am not looking forward to the 1,500 word think-piece in tomorrow’s Irish Times drawing a shrewd parallel between the divestment delay and the Tuam babies cover-up, but I am grateful that I would be able to read it if I wanted to. There isn’t a day that goes by that I’m not grateful for that ability, and my heart breaks for those who will never get the opportunity to learn as I learned. God help them.

FOCAL SCOIR: One hour and forty minutes, of course.

Coding in National Schools Isn't a Good Idea

See, kids? Coding is fun!

The Minister for Education, Richard Bruton, has written to the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment to request that the NCCA consider the teaching of coding in national schools. This is a bad idea, for three reasons.

The Basis of Coding is Already on the Curriculum
The basis of coding is already on the curriculum. It is called “maths.” Maths and coding go hand-in-hand. If you can do one, you can do the other. Both work on the notion of orderly thinking. If this, then that. It is possible for a talented coder to have been poor at maths in school but that coder’s mind for maths will have clicked just when the coding clicked for him or her. The two are intertwined like Maguire and Patterson.

Sadly, we teach maths the same way we do most other things – arseways. OECD studies regularly show that Irish standards of literacy and numeracy are consistently poor. The Irish Times reported at the start of the year that Ireland ranked 18th of 23 countries in literacy, and 21st out of 23 in numeracy, among 16- to 19- year-olds. It also reported “about one in five university graduates can manage basic literacy and numeracy tasks – such as understanding the instructions on a bottle of aspirin – but struggle with more complex tasks.” University students.

These are terrifying figures. The OECD reports can be behind the curve timewise, and advocates of Project Maths will claim that once that initiative kicks in the results will go right up. Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence suggests that the Project Maths course simply adds another layer of confusion to a subject that is intimidating to begin with. It’s a grim prospect.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All
The only way a minister could dream of better publicity than talking about this strange thing, ‘coding,’ would be if he or she were to announce that the DoE were bringing in some specialists from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as consultants to discuss adding transfiguration, charms and potions to the curriculum. Coder is the astronaut job of our times, the job that is done by pioneers who create the future.

But reader, a job market where the jobs are made up entirely of coders – or astronauts, or witches and wizards, for that matter – is not exactly ready to survive in the choppy seas of Ireland’s open economy. How many coders do we need per head of population? Probably not as many as we need nurses, or doctors, or teachers, or shopkeepers, or a thousand and one other jobs that are just as relevant if not quite as buzzy.

Short-Term Populism is the Curse of Irish Politics
Why, then, with a need for diverse skills in an open economy, with basic literacy and numeracy red-letter issues in education, to say nothing of dealing with eternally bolshy teachers’ unions and getting teachers trained as coders, did the Minister write this letter to the NCCA? It is impossible to look into another man’s heart but the politician’s eternal quest for good publicity is a reasonable assumption.

Twenty-five years ago, gay marriage was a taboo subject. Now, Irish politicians are tearing the backs of each other trying to photographed having a pint in the Pantibar. Is this because a wave of social liberalism has swept through Leinster House? Or is it because every politician knows this is guaranteed good, criticism-free publicity and you can’t have too much of that?

The success of the coder dojo, a movement that introduces children to coding at an early age, has been mentioned as a reason for coding to be introduced at a more general level in primary schools. But a certain amount of – delicious irony! – what statisticians call “response bias” is at work there. The children who are doing well at coder dojos are the children who would do well at pretty much any academic subject, and who enjoy the priceless support of a home environment that encourages that sort of endeavour. The OECD stats suggest that such an environment is sadly atypical of the nation’s children in general.

But what difference do facts about literacy and numeracy gaps, diverse talents in a diverse economy or response bias make to a politician who wants to get in the papers? None at all. He or she is certainly due for claps on the back the next time he or she is out on the town, because politicians typically socialise with people who send their children to coder dojos, and ballet, and hockey, and the Gaeltacht. These people are also those who write for and edit newspapers, so it’s winner all round. And when the thing grinds to a halt, what odds? It'll be some other minister’s problem by then.

What the Election Should Have Been About

From the Irish Examiner

The final leaders’ debate is on tomorrow. Miriam O’Callaghan will doubtless introduce it as a debate about the issues. But these things are never about the issues. Not around here.

The Irish nation doesn’t do thinking in generalities. Whether that’s the media’s fault or the politicians’ fault is a chicken-and-egg situation – we would have a higher level of political debate if the media would report it, politicians would frame issues in a different way if they thought the media would report it that way. Who knows?

The only thing we do know is that one leader saying that, if elected, he or she will hire 500 new guards, and the next seeing the five hundred guards and raising 300 teachers, is rubbish. Rubbish. Here are the questions that should be asked during tomorrow night’s leaders’ debate, but won’t.

The Economy
As an open economy that does not control its own currency, what would different parties do to exert control on the economy? If inflation is rising, for instance, a government will usually raise interest rates to make it harder to borrow. This lessons the money in the economy and means that prices don’t go up quite as high.

But if inflation is rising in Ireland but flat in the Eurozone, that’s not an option for Ireland. One of the reasons the crash happened was that interest rates were too low relative to the money available, and this created a bubble. What has the current government done to protect the state from that happening again, or from recession in China? What will an alternative government do to protect the state from those and other external economic threats?

The Electoral System Itself
Irish politics is engineered to favour clientelism at every step. To survive, a TD must put local interest ahead of the national interest, even though TDs are elected to govern the nation, not the local area. This is partly why it will be so very difficult to form a government after this election. What steps has the current government taken to address this systemic failure? What steps will the alternative governments take to address this issue?

Education
One of the reasons for Ireland’s current economic prosperity is that the reputation of Ireland’s workforce as being well-educated is very good. But grade inflation has become more and more obvious in STEM subjects at secondary level, and it’s only a matter of time before the tech firms realise the educational system isn’t quite as advertised. What steps has the current government taken to address this issue? What steps will the alternative governments take?

The Distribution of the Recovery
Although elected to govern for the entire state, and by aspiration the entire island, successive governments have favoured the development of Dublin at the expense of the rest of country. A spatial developmental strategy was proposed as far back as 1969, yet nothing has been done about this issue. There are number of reasons for this, bribery, corruption and plain stupidity among them. What steps has the current government taken to address this issue? What steps will the alternative governments take?

Health
Hard case stories are terrible, but governments have to look at big pictures. When it comes to patients on trollies, there are questions not being asked. Are patients on trollies localized – do some hospitals regularly have more patients on trollies than others? Which ones? Why? Are patients on trollies seasonal – are there more patients on trollies in winter than in summer? On Saturdays rather than Wednesdays? This isn’t a medical issue. A medical issue is finding a cure for cancer. The vast majority of issues in the health service come down to poor management. What steps has the current government taken to address this issue? What steps will the alternative governments take?

Crime
We have a Special Criminal Court in this state. We have abolished trial by jury in certain circumstances, an extraordinarily totalitarian situation about which the normally vocal liberal lobby are strangely quiet. Why not use these extraordinary powers to break up Irish gangland, rather than seeing them being glamorized in the gutter press and in TV dramas? What is the Government’s position on this? What are the alternative governments’ positions?

Media Ownership
There can be no real democracy without a free press. A free press keeps the people informed on what their leaders are doing. Without a free press, how can the people know how they’re being governed. Recent technological and business changes have turned the Irish media landscape on its head, to the extent that whether or not a free and independent indigenous media is now under question. What is the Government’s position on this? What are the alternative governments’ positions?

The ESRI and the True Nature of Education

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The Economic and Social Research Institute, the ESRI, have published a report about the Leaving Cert. The report, titled “Leaving School in Ireland: A Longitudinal Study of Post-School Transitions”, is a sequel to the Institute’s 2011 hit, “From Leaving Certificate to Leaving School: A Longitudinal Study of Sixth Year Students.”

This year’s report is shorter than the 2011 version – it is seventy-four thousand words long, five thousand shorter than before. One would like to think it’s shorter become some editor, with his cigarette, eyeshade and blue pencil, returned the first draft to the authors with instructions to “punch it up a little bit,” but hope may be in vain.

As may be any hopes of the authors that anyone would read their reports. Seventy thousand words qualifies as novel-length – who on earth is going to plough through all that, and why? A look at what appeared in the press last week would suggest that not only does the ESRI’s Leaving Cert Report tell us nothing we don’t already know, it is based on some painfully naïve suppositions about how the great world turns around.

The ESRI report tells us that social class is a major factor in whether or not a child goes to university, a revelation equal in shock to hearing that night follows day or water is wet.

Some years ago, possibly as many as twenty, Fintan O’Toole wrote a genuinely magnificent column in the Irish Times about the nature of social class. He considered two children, both born on the same day, and rolled dice at each pivotal stage in their development to see what their luck would be like in life.

At birth, the middle class kid rolled a six and the working class kid rolled a one. By the time the kids were in school the gap was of the order of 24-4 or 30-6 and will never be bridged. That’s how the world turns, and has done for as long as humanity has recorded its own history.

The ESRI report does address the problem of students learning off answers for the Leaving Cert, but not quite in the way you might expect. Should the State make an effort to make the foremost exam in the State less predictable than clockwork and taxes?

Why, sure they could do that but the ESRI would be much happier if “discussion could usefully focus on the potential role of project work and team work within senior cycle in equipping young people with the kinds of skills they need for lifelong learning and the labour market.”

This is the sort of stuff we have to listen to all the time about education. Forget all those fuddy-duddy notions about learning stuff you didn’t know. Project work and teamwork are very much where it’s at.

Reading these sorts of theories, you would be forgiven for wondering if some of the theorists have ever worked on a project or in a team, because the chief thing you learn from working on a project or in a team is that Hell is other people.

Projects aren’t collaborative efforts. The majority of people on a project aren’t pushed. They’ll do enough to keep the boss off their backs but after that, well, life is for living, not projects, as far as they’re concerned.

One person on the project will do more than half the work, for different reasons – enthusiasm, natural leadership, fear, whatever. But as sure as God made little green apples there will also be at least one person on the project who won’t do a tap, not even under threat of violence. He or she has figured out that the leader and/or the others will crumble and cover for him rather than shop him to the bosses. And that sort of Machiavellianism is not a lesson that we should be teaching our children.

The other thing you have to wonder about these educational theorists is if they ever met a child. They seem to have a very vague idea of how children operate. The theorists will tell you that, rather than hammering home times tables and handing out mountains of homework, if you just open the child’s minds to the wonders of mathematics, they’ll light up like tiny stars on every point of the co-ordinated plane.

The theorists tell you that people shiver and break out in hives at the very mention of the world “maths” because the teachers are teaching it badly. The theorists may be assured that if the maths teachers knew a better way to teach maths they would do, for the same reason they walk into the classroom, rather than hop.

The current vogue in teaching maths seems determined to make what was once straightforward complex, for no apparent reason. Its proponents say it’s because it encourages the children. But being confused isn’t the same as thinking, a fundamental point the theorists seem to miss.

The US equivalent of our Project Maths is called the Common Core. One of the Common Core support materials outlines an old school maths question – “If 3(y-1)=8, what is y?” – and goes on to say it’s no good because “this question is an example of solving equations as a series of mechanical steps.”

How is that a bad thing? All maths is built on one single sentence, written by Euclid of Alexandria, three or four hundred years before the birth of Christ. “A point is that of which there is no part” is the sentence with which Euclid opens his book, The Elements. Euclid took the smallest thing there is, a thing can cannot be broken into smaller parts, and built a whole mathematical world on it, in a series of mechanical steps.

Reader, if it was good enough for Euclid, it’s good enough for you. If you got your Leaving Cert results last week, congratulations and the best of luck to you. If you’re facing into the Leaving next year, there is one little-known and under-exploited trick that will stand to you. Keep doing your homework. Everything falls into place after that.

The Real Purpose of Education

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The trips to the teacher conferences in Easter can be a trial for a Minister for Education during hard times. The teacher conferences allow gamekeepers to play poacher, and a Minister takes his dignity in his hands before them.

Last week, Minister Quinn was like nothing so much as a B-29 bomber flying over Germany during the Second World War, dropping tin foil in the hopes that the radar doesn’t pick him up and stick a few Messerschmitts on his tail. And with the way history is currently being treated by the Department, it might have occurred to some history teachers to stockpile a few those Messerschmitts in a hanger somewhere, just in case.

The Minister’s tin foil came in three species – the ongoing debate about school ownership, reform of the Leaving Cert marking system, and an extraordinary suggestion that all National School teachers should have passed Honours Maths during the Leaving Cert before being handed their box of chalk and a few tidy cuts of marla.

Of the three suggestions, the change to the Leaving Cert grading is most likely to happen. The school ownership debate will drag on for decades, while the Honours Maths requirement is utter nonsense. But while the grading change may happen, that does not necessarily mean it is worthwhile.

The reason behind the proposed changes to the Leaving Cert grades – changing them back to ten per cent bands, rather than the current five – is that the Department feels the current system leads to too much targetting of exams, and exams aren’t what education is about at all.

Education, according to the Department, is not about cramming or learning by rote. Education is about giving students the ability to think for themselves, and not some outdated legacy-of-the-slave-trade theory about teaching students stuff that they didn’t previously know.

There are two points to note about the theory of education. Firstly, the idea that students are inhibited from thinking for themselves by the current system is usually put forward by the third level sector, who report that students are getting thicker every year, damn them.

The universities are inclined to be a little more diplomatic in delivering this bad news, but wall-to-wall thickos in the lecture halls is what it boils down to. Students, they say, are spoon-fed in secondary school, and are therefore incapable of working on their own at third level.

The evidence of this is purely anecdotal – the universities do not stoop so low as to back this argument up with figures. Nor indeed does anybody ask just how much regular feeding, as opposed to spoon-feeding, goes on in the lectures hall of Erin.

Not only are the third-level sector’s complaints about students needing spoon-feeding not backed up by evidence, there is evidence to the contrary. The fact that students target their exams so precisely is clear evidence of strategic thinking, such target-setting being an clear instance of short term operations aimed at a long term goal.

You say the students did not figure this out this targetting themselves, but are taught it in school. Very well, but what they are surely not taught how to do in school is how to get into nightclubs when they should be at home either studying or working on the land. It is in this difficult art that you find young people’s analytic thinking at its finest.

Consider two friends who regularly swapped glasses and donkey jackets before attempting to get into nightclubs in Ballyhaunis during the the Saturday nights of their youth, in the 16th or 17th Century, I believe. The baby-faced one didn’t look so cherubic without his glasses, while the donkey jacket added that certain air of maturity – he could have been just home from the buildings in London.

As for the donkey jacket’s original owner, he was sufficiently alpha in those days to wear two pair of glasses and still carry himself like Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart. No lack of analytical thinking in those excellent products of the Irish educational system.

Besides. The second point is that teaching students to think isn’t, in fact, the sole purpose of education. Thinking is something that human beings are programmed to do. Education can polish it a little, but the best practical thinking is done on the feet, in the real world, when the pressure is on.

The true purpose of education is to take a body of knowledge and hand it on to the next generation. Thinking is like breathing. It’s not so much an achievement as a base requirement.

When students go out into the great world they invariably find out to their horror that employers don’t employ people to think. Employers employ people to do, which is a completely different thing.

If you are employed by the ESB, they will appreciate it if you have some little understanding of electro-physics. Accountants are often praised for their ability to do sums. And flawed though the HSE may be, they still prefer doctors who can identify elbows from other items of anatomy.

There is no way to analyse these facts, nor is there any purpose served in thinking about them. You just sit down and learn them off, just like others have done before you for hundreds of years.

As for your richer life, outside of the office, the case for the Old School was best put by Professor Harold Bloom of Yale University in his book How to Read, and Why. When it comes to poetry, Bloom makes the point that not only should you read poems but, where-ever possible, you should memorise them as well.

How did Nelson Mandela survive twenty-seven cruel years on Robben Island? Tremendous character and fortitude of course, but also by little things, like reciting William Earnest Henley’s Invictus, night after night. There was a man who was armed for the world.

Good poetry learned by heart is a gift to treasure forever. Would that the Department of Education were interested in ensuring our current schoolchildren were armed so well.

Religion in Schools

First published in the Western People on Monday.

A cold and deathly chill must have run down Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn’s spine when he heard that even the Association of Catholic Priests reached for the trusty crozier and came out swinging.

There is a thing in politics called playing to the constituency and, difficult though it is to look into the heart of another, this is almost certainly what the Minister was up to when he suggested last week that teachers should spend less time teaching religion in national schools and more time teaching English and Maths.

The Minister was responding to complaints at the Irish Primary Principals Network annual conference that the curriculum was overloaded, and shot for what he must have thought an open goal at the time.

Now, when the most liberal wing of the Irish Church is giving him the business, the unfortunate Minister must surely feel more like Paddy Cullen in that infamous moment of the All-Ireland Final of 1978. If the Minister knows who Paddy Cullen is in the first place, of course.

This is a minor skirmish in the larger national battle, as the country re-organises itself for the post-Catholic reality. One of Ruairí Quinn’s stated aims as Minister for Education is to give parents more choice in their children’s education by having the Catholic Church hand over schools to non-Catholic patrons, but he’s meeting no small amount of resistance in this regard.

Why this is so is harder to understand. It may be residual loyalty to the fallen Faith, or it may be general terror of another quango terrorizing the land, or it may be some other thing. But it is an interesting moment in the country’s history, as a page slowly turns.

The Irish Education System began in 1831 when Lord Stanley, who would later become Prime Minister of Great Britain as the Earl of Derby, wrote a letter to Augustus FitzGerald, Duke of Leinster, proposing that His Majesty’s Government establish an Irish Schools Board. Stanley was Chief Secretary for Ireland at the time, and his idea was that children of all denominations should be educated together with no regard paid to religion.

Or at least, only a biteen of regard. Just a hint, like. In the early years of the scheme, the schools taught “common Christianity,” which was based on either a piece of Scripture or a lesson on Bible history, from texts chosen by the Commissioners of the Irish Schools Board.

The Catholic hierarchy split on the Schools issue, with both sides of the divide represented by two of the major figures of the time – Daniel Murray, Archbishop of Dublin, and John McHale, Archbishop of Tuam, and after whom McHale Park is named.

Archbishop Murray was twenty years older than Archbishop McHale. Having lived through the penal laws and Catholic Emancipation having only recently been passed, Murray was an advocate of softly, softly diplomacy. He didn’t much care for Stanley’s idea, but he thought it better than the hedge school and therefore viewed it as progress.

Archbishop McHale, by contrast, loathed Lord Stanley’s idea and made no secret of that loathing. McHale’s issue was that the schools were an insidious effort to convert the Irish to Protestantism, and that was not going to happen on McHale’s watch.

One hundred and eighty years on, this seems a strange stand-off. But the entire history of Ireland, the nature of the state and our long and difficult history with our nearest neighbour, at once our best friend and worst enemy, all centers on differences of religion.

Why has there been so much strife between countries as similar as Ireland and Britain? Why couldn’t the Irish get with the program, just as the Welsh and the Scots had? The Normans invaded Ireland, but they invaded England first! That’s how it works! Why couldn’t the Irish get that?

The answer is religion. The Scots and Welsh embraced the Reformation. The Irish clung to the Faith, through the Elizabethan Plantation, Cromwell, the Flight of Earls and the Penal Laws. And now in the 1830s, having stuck it out this long, they were going to lose the Faith by stealth through a schools system where texts were chosen by someone other than the Church itself? Not on your Nelly.

It was a long struggle for McHale, but he won in the end. The Catholic Church held its first Synod in Ireland in two hundred years in Thurles in 1850 where it said it wasn’t one bit happy with the Schools Board, and by 1869 McHale’s victory was complete. The Irish Church condemned mixed education and their condemnation was ratified from Rome by Pope Pius IX.

McHale had already banned the English schools in his own diocese as soon as he could, and brought in religious orders to found Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Tuam instead. After 1869, this was the case all over Ireland. The Church of Ireland saw which way the wind was blowing, and set up their own schools with just as much fervor.

Fifty years later, when Ireland had rejoined the nations of the world, the new governments knew that the sectarian divide was a time bomb, not least if the sectarian seed were planted so early as at primary school age. They made it a priority to reclaim education as the preserve of the people, rather than the church.

Ah no. They didn’t do any such thing. It could be because Irish governments soon realised the country was broke and were grateful that someone, at least, was educating the children. Or it could be that there was an ugly and disgraceful Catholic triumphalism about the early years of the state, and successive government of the Free State and the Republic thought Church-controlled schools the natural order of things.

Who knows? All we can be sure of now is that we have an educational system at primary level based on historic distrust between two religions that no longer have much, if any, influence on the people. And that’s without even mentioning the Tuiseal Ginideach…

Time to Cut Peig a Break

Originally published in the Western People on Monday.

Poor Peig Sayers has got another box on the ear. The British Sunday Telegraph published a story yesterday week about the return of 92-year-old Mike Carney to the Great Blasket Island. Carney left for the USA in the 1950s and this was more than likely his last time to visit the place where he was born.

The piece was written warmly and sympathetically by Cole Moreton, an English writer who already has a very fine book on the Blaskets, Hungry for Home, to his credit. Unfortunately Moreton, for all his sympathy, couldn’t resist joining the long queue that pins the blame for much childhood trauma on a little orange-coloured book with a picture of an old woman in a shawl sitting by the fire on the cover. Morton describes Peig herself as a “salty, witty, wise old woman” but bemoans the fact that her book makes her sound like a “pious misery-guts.” He goes on to remark that the book was “inflicted on generations of Irish schoolchildren who shudder at her name, even now.”

Harsh. Not a hundred miles from the truth, of course, as Peig Sayers’ (in)famous autobiography is by no means a laugh-a-minute page-turner guaranteed to split your sides with laughter, but can it really be as bad as all that? A book to elicit shudders every time it’s mentioned in society?

How Peig got to become such a touchstone for the culture that the first Irish governments strove so hard to restore is an interesting one. It speaks to our own insecurity as a people, our feudal desire, even after independence, to get approval from our former masters, and, by the end, the sad hames we’ve made of restoring the first language of the country to the people.

The story begins with the Blasket islands themselves, and their discovery by two English academics, a Yorkshireman called Robin Flower and a Londoner, George Thompson. Flower’s specialty was Anglo-Saxon English culture, from before the Norman invasion, while Thompson went even further back, to the classical world of Greece and Rome.

When Flower and Thompson discovered the Blaskets, they thought they had gone back in time. Because life on the Blaskets was so primitive, they thought they had arrived in the historical eras that interested them. Their reactions would have been similar to that of Sam Neill in the movie Jurassic Park, when he first sees the dinosaurs.

It didn’t take them long to reach for their notebooks and start telling everyone about this amazing slice of the medieval world still extant in twentieth-century Europe. And then the books were published – the three famous autobiographies of the Blaskets, the stories of a young boy, Múiris Ó Súilleabháin, an old man, Tomás Ó Criomhthain, and an old woman with, as she said herself on the very first page of the book, one foot in the grave, and one foot on the side of it.

Think back to how things looked to people in Ireland one hundred years ago, when Robin Flower first started visiting the Blaskets. All things Irish are celebrated everywhere in the country. The Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association are flourishing, the IRB is doing a spot of gun-running and now along come these two college-educated Englishmen telling us that only in Ireland, and on the most western part of Ireland at that, is society still pure and innocent and righteous. Is it any wonder it went to our heads?

Ten years later, we had the key to the car ourselves and we wondering just what in God’s name would we do with it. And, consciously or unconsciously, the original vision was to build the Blasket society on the mainland of Ireland itself. In his famous speech to the nation on St Patrick’s Day, 1943, Eamon DeValera described “the Ireland that we dreamed off would be the home of a people who … satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit.”

If that’s not a description of a Blasket islander, what is? Is that what made Peig Sayers’ book the template for the ideal Ireland – the idea that the people’s piety would counteract the people’s misery? Is that why Peig became the standard school text for so long, rather than An tOileánach or Fiche Bliain Ag Fás? Because Peig Sayers set the best example of how to grin and bear it?

Unfortunately for Dev, while he himself might be satisfied with frugal comfort, most people found (and find) it a contradiction in terms – there’s nothing comfortable about frugality. The traffic of scholars travelling to the Great Blasket was far outweighed by the traffic leaving, as people preferred running water and central heating to the frugal comfort of huddling in a currach into the teeth of an Atlantic gale.

The jig was up for the Blaskets, but nobody had the honesty to come out and say it. To say that Plan A hasn’t worked, and it’s now time for Plan B.

Seán Lemass tried to industrialise the country in the 1960s, but he wasn’t as culturally concerned as DeValera, even though he was of the same revolutionary generation. As such, things were left to drift.

The world of Peig and its importance in the culture became more and more distant to actual people’s lives, and all the energy that was put into the promotion of Irish dissipated and was lost in those endless government corridors where hope atrophies and the only light is provided by the piles of money that burn continually into the night.

But reader, none of this is Peig Sayers’ fault. She didn’t ask to be the heroine of the new state. She was a woman who lived a hard life and got on with it, just as so many generations of Irish did. Cut the old girl a break. She doesn’t deserve the abuse.

Education is the Only Key to the Poverty Trap

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Independent TD Denis Naughten floated an idea the week before last about making a connection between child benefit payments and a child’s educational record. The idea got no traction whatsoever, which is a pity – Denis Naughten may just have stumbled on a philosopher’s stone for a very modern problem, the problem of the poverty trap that is inherent in the welfare state.

The fundamental question of a welfare state is one of balance. In all the changes that have occurred in Ireland, there is no system of morality that suggests the less-well-off should be left to paddle their own canoes. However, legislators looking at the big picture have to ask themselves at what stage does the balance change and, instead of the state giving the less-well-off a chance to get back on their feet, the state atrophies hope, institutionalises despair and condemns the less-well-off to a fate as hopeless and without chance of improvement as that of the serfs in Imperial Russia for generation after generation?

This isn’t an Irish problem; this is one of the great questions of modern civilization. Prussia was the first country to introduce a welfare state, that is to say, a state where the government made provision for those of its citizens who could not make provision for themselves, but the it was only after the Second World War that the modern welfare state as we know it came into being. Of the major western countries, it’s only the USA that doesn’t operate a welfare state of some kind, and that’s partly to do with the balance between the balance of power between the individual US states and the federal government itself – the poor tend to fall between the cracks as each expects the other to act.

The state should have some role in looking after those who cannot help themselves. In his memoir of his time in public life, the first ever full minister for the Gaeltacht, Pat Lindsay of Gaoth Sáile, defended his creation of breac-gaeltachta, areas that were designated as Gaeltachta even though the actual level of Irish in those areas wasn’t great. As far as Lindsay was concerned, those were his own people who were suffering and if he could help them he would, and would not let insufficient expertise in the use of the Tuiseal Ginideach stand in his way.

Who would argue? Who would deny the woman of the roads her little house, with dresser, hearth and all?

The problem is that sixty and seventy years on, communities have developed that now know nothing but the welfare state. What was once a source of shame or embarrassment is as normal as having hands or feet. It’s highly politically incorrect to say so, but this is the reality. There are families in Ireland who have not had anyone working and paying taxes into the third generation. This is the poverty trap inherent in the system. A poverty of ideas and ambition as much as a poverty of material wealth.

In an earlier generation, the idea was that there was progression in society. The idea was that, even though your background was humble your opportunities were just as good as those whose backgrounds were better and if you worked hard you could change your circumstances, and guarantee a better background for your own children to enjoy.

What precise incentive exists for people in a long-term poverty trap to ensure that their children have different lives to them? Are they happy with their lives as they are? Are they worried that a change of life would alienate their children from them? Are they concerned for their children’s welfare but lack the wherewithal to effect a change?

This is where Denis Naughten’s proposal comes into its own. The only true weapon in the fight against poverty is education. It’s not money; money comes and goes. It’s education. It’s knowing what’s important and what’s not, it’s understanding delayed gratification, it’s planning for the future and it’s having skills to allow you to make more money than you could if you were unskilled.

Whatever about the prospects of adults caught in a poverty trap turning their luck around, the possibility exists for their children. But the possibility only exists through education. It’s not easy – for all the rhetoric about equality of access, children going to private schools will always have a jump start – but while not easy it is possible.

The problem is that people in a long-term poverty trap don’t always realise the difference that education can make to their children’s future, for any or all of the reasons already mentioned. They may not put the same pressure on their children to attend school as other parents do, they may not monitor homework, there may be other issues at home.

Denis Naughten’s proposal addresses all this. At a stroke it deals with people claiming family benefit who do not have children in Ireland at all, and it reminds parents of the vital importance of their children’s education by hitting them in exactly that spot where we all feel it the most – the pocket. A generation later an area that was a wasteland could be thriving, and populated with people who will pass on the value of education to their children and their children’s children.

Not only that, it also sets a bar for state intervention. It’s been the case when family tragedies occur that the newspapers ask why didn’t the State intervene sooner, and the State invariable shrugs and says but sure we didn’t know. If Denis Naughten’s idea is taken seriously, we will have a number of flags in the system that will help identify real problem families and concentrate resources on them.

Are there sticking-points? Of course. There are several details that have to be ironed out, but the kernel of Naughten’s idea is excellent. It identifies education as the single best thing the state can provide to a child, it rewards responsible parents who school their children well and it identifies problem families where full State intervention is needed. Well done, Denis Naughten, and more luck to you.

The Vandalism Inherent in the Leaving Cert

First published in the Western People on Tuesday.

A creature, made of clay

The Leaving Cert results are due this week. This will almost certainly result in the children of the rich and privileged disgracing themselves out foreign on holidays, and the publication of po-faced reports of same in a fortnight’s time that will not neglect any sordid detail.

Happily, no Mayo boy or girl would do such the thing – who could leave the country while the footballers are once more on the cusp of glory? Greece, how are ye.

What is a more interesting topic than boys being boys is the actual exam itself, and how the Leaving Cert, like Irish society itself, has changed with the times and not always for the better.

The impossible triangle of the Maths paper made headlines back in June, but that was a once-off blunder, and one that is unlikely to recur. What is of greater worry is the state of the syllabuses themselves, and the dumbing down that is getting more and more apparent as he years go by.

For instance, Project Maths is the great fashion now, rather than the old method of students swallowing their theorems and formulae whole, like so many boa constrictors.

The theory behind Project Maths, that of awakening the mathematician within, is fine but every maths teacher who has spoken to your correspondent about Project Maths does not think it’ll work. On the bright side, they are looking forward to a bull market in grinds for as long as it exists, and the grinds will be conducted in the old fashioned way. Open wide, scholars.

Irish is a tricky one. People involved in the promotion of Irish are generally very reluctant to confess any bad news about the language, and this prevents honest discussion of what’s actually happening.

The press looks no deeper than whether or not Peig Sayers is still on the syllabus, and take her exclusion as a sign of progress, without ever wondering what will replace her. Suffice it to say that the ancient language remains in mortal danger in our schools, Gaelscoileanna notwithstanding.

And then there is the sorry state of the English syllabus. The teaching of English, like so many other things, underwent no small upheaval during the 1960s. Prior to that unhappy decade, there was a Great Tradition of Literature, with every age adding its Great Writers to that Tradition.

The sixties, being the time of revolution it was, had no time for anything as unhip as tradition or standards, but did manage to generate a righteous fury that the so-called tradition was actually a power-structure that supported Dead White Males.

Fifty years on, nobody is really sure what a “great book” is anymore, and that level of insecurity is evident in the current Leaving Cert syllabus. As a matter of fact, the syllabus is so insecure about what a great book is that some of the books aren’t books at all. By the clever use of the word “text,” you can now go to the movies and call it school.

There are six films listed as prescribed texts for the Leaving Cert, ranging from Citizen Kane to Blade Runner, and they have no business there at all. The fact that each film lists its director as its author shows that not only does the Department not know that a film isn’t a text, the Department is equally unaware that film is the ultimate collaborative art form. Who signed off on this?

Bad and all as that is, a look at the poetry section is even worse. Geoffrey Chaucer is the man who wrote the Canterbury Tales, the poem that established English above Latin as a language worthy of literature. There is no sign of him on the latest syllabus, due for 2015.

The gallant and courtly Andrew Marvell – no sign. John Milton, second only to Shakespeare as a writer of blank verse and the only man to successfully write an epic poem in English, Paradise Lost, doesn’t make the grade.

Alexander Pope, “little Alexander the women laugh at,” the greatest of the Enlightenment poets? We don’t want his kind around here. George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron, a man whose celebrity in his time echoes the madness of our own? Not good enough for the Leaving Cert.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron’s great contemporary and the man whose Ozymandias gives the culture its great lesson the importance of worldly power? His poems are no good here. John Keats, the last of the great Romantic Poets to be the born and the first to die? Nope, sorry.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the twelfth British poet laureate and the man whose poem “Ulysses” Judi Dench’s M quotes in the blockbuster James Bond movie Skyfall, goes right over the heads of children we now consider educated.

Patrick Kavanagh, second only to WB Yeats as the greatest Irish poet of the 20th Century and the authentic and eloquent voice of rural Ireland? A mystery to those who will sit their Leaving Cert in 2015.

And who’s there instead? Greg Delanty, Kerry Hardie, Liz Lochhead, Richard Murphy and William Wall are all on the syllabus for 2015 and there isn’t one of them whom your correspondent could pick out of a lineup.

This is an appalling state of affairs. Verse is the highest expression of language, any language. English has tradition of poetry that is over a thousand years old, predating even Chaucer, and that thousand-year tradition is being sidelined, and ignored, by the current Leaving Cert syllabus.

The great works are touchstones of what we consider important in life, once the dinner is eaten and the mortgage paid and we sit back and wonder what it is to be human. These poems have travelled down the generations and given wonder and consolation to countless people where-ever English is spoken.

Irish children are now being denied that heritage for reasons that are impossible to understand. This isn’t education. This is cultural vandalism and it’s time someone called a halt to it.

Missing the Point About Textbook Rental

Soundings was a sensation of Irish publishing two years ago. The Leaving Cert poetry anthology, long gone the way of the dodo, was swept from the shelves on its return to publication by people eager to reconnect. It was never entirely clear what it was the wanted to reconnect with – the Great Tradition, their lost youth, a Christmas present list run out of control – but Soundings touched a chord deep in the Irish nation. It is a beautiful book, and it really did make a magical present.

The publication last year of the Inter Cert short story anthology, Exploring English 1, was a little too obviously a rip-off for people to take. It was branded a little too much like the re-issued Soundings, with the cod drawings on the front and all, for people not to get a strong smell of old rope.

But then there was Deirdre Madden’s All About Home Economics. It had no connection for the Western Canon, and it didn’t have a pithy introduction by Joe O’Connor. Yet still it stormed off the shelves. Yes, there was charitable donation for the royalties, but that alone can’t explain the book’s success.

Nor can it explain the success down the years of the original Strunk and White or Waterhouse on Newspaper Style, when people bound photocopies of the original lecture notes and passed them about like contraband while the original texts were out of print.

The majority of textbooks are dull and workmanlike affairs. Some are just plain bad. But there are those which are transcendent, that bring the student to a world he or she could never have dreamed off. These are the textbooks that are loved almost as if they were actual people, because these are the books that have made people what they are.

One of the things about love is that you can never rent it. It has been bought, down through the years, but it has never been rented. Which sad truth makes the current small news story, lost in the empty bellowing of the referendum campaigners, all the sadder.

The Department of Education released a report yesterday claiming “Book rental schemes in schools could reduce family bills for school books by as much as 80%.” The Department is missing the point.

If you’re a disadvantaged child, your only hope of escape is through education. There is none other. If you’re going to be good as a student, you have to love your books, and how can you love something that you have to give back at the end of the year?

By imposing a book rental scheme the Department is subtly hinting that all this is a bit of a cod, really. We’re going to go through the motions for you Johnny, because we don’t want to be shamed on Prime Time, but once the school year is over we’re taking back our books and throwing you back to your damned flats.

Colm Toibín wrote a nonsensical piece in the Guardian recently claiming that it is an insult in Ireland to say that someone’s house had no books. That has never been an insult in Ireland, but Ireland would be better if it were.

If the Department of Education wanted to do those kids a favour they’d tell them to keep the books. They’d tell those kids that these aren’t books – these are magic carpets that can fly you to another world, way out of here, where you can make something of yourself and be all that you can be.

Would it cost money? Of course it’d cost money. But there’s always money. There are lots of subventions in education as it is. You can cut one to give to another. There are always ways.

Those cocktail making courses that were part of the Springboard initiative would be no great loss. Or how about the state subvention to private schools? I’m sure a bit of belt-tightening would do no harm there in these austere times. There are always ways to turn a shilling when you need it.

And these disadvantaged kids need it, because education is their only hope. Their only hope. What the Department has to realise at a very fundamental level is that education is the only thing that can save kids on the margins, and education can only come through school and schoolbooks.

If you want kids to love education, they have to love the books. And if they love the books, they can’t give them up at the end of the school year. They have to keep them and treasure them and know that they and they alone are the key to escape.

All that forcing children to give up their schoolbooks does is tell those children is that they’ve never been part of process, that this is all for show. That the world of books is only for those who can afford them, and not for those who just want to live a better world. And that’s a poor policy for any country.

The Government's Springboard Initiative: Learning to Mix Cocktails Does Not Count as Reskilling

The Irish Independent published a supplement yesterday called Springboard. It’s about getting people back to work; Springboard is described in the supplement as “the new initiative aimed at helping those who have lost their jobs to upskill and improve their chances of getting back to work again.”

Upskilling is a very necessary thing, as the skill base of Ireland’s workforce does not match the hiring needs of the market. And as Kathleen Donnelly, the Indo’s Education Editor rightly points out, qualifications are the single best protection against unemployment.

So you can imagine your regular correspondent’s disappointment and horror when a little research revealed the whole Springboard project to be an exercise in lost opportunities, waste, window dressing and despair.

People who want to reskill are encouraged to visit a website called Bluebrick.ie by the Independent supplement. According to its own about us page, “BlueBrick.ie is part of the HEA Strategic Innovation Fund project: Flexible Learning. This project represents 14 institutes of technology including DIT.”

Spidey senses should already be tingling at the clumsy prose in both those sentences. But reader, gentle reader, remove yourself for potential sources of self harm; you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

A cursory search of what’s on offer unearthed a gem, a twenty-four carat gem from DIT: they’re offering a course in Advanced Cocktail Making. Not regular now; sure any eejit could do that. This is advanced cocktail making.

You can’t just walk in off the street and do it. Oh no. “Learners should also have successfully completed the Continuing Professional Development Programme in Cocktail Making TFBS 1021 or equivalent qualification.”

How much does this course in Advanced Cocktail Making cost? Why, it costs €650. And what qualification do you get? (You know, this is my favourite bit. Out of all of this, this is my favourite).

Completion of DIT’s Advanced Cocktail Making course gets you a Certificate in Continuing Professional Development, which scores an eight on the National Framework of Qualifications. The same as an Honours Bachelor Degree or a H Dip. So, reading left to right, we have the guy with the B Comm who’s running a business, every educator in Ireland and Tom Cruise in the 1988 movie Cocktail, all on the same training and skill level.

Is this a freak result, as can happen? So what if a guy who’s working in the hospitality industry – about the only indigenous industry we have – wants to egg his pudding a biteen? What else is an offer at DIT?

I’m so glad you asked. DIT will charge you €670 for a course in Advanced Wine Studies. You have to have taken Wine Studies regular first, of course, before your brain is able for “deepening the knowledge of the matching of food and wine in terms of taste, quality and price.” Again, you can’t just walk in off the street.

To say you couldn’t make it up is a cliché. But my Lord and my God, you couldn’t make this stuff up. And more pertinently, why would you want to? Aren’t things bad enough as they are?

The mission statement for Springboard on page 4 of the supplement says its purpose is to develop employability skills. You can paint An Spailpín blue and call him a smurf if doing courses in Advanced Cocktail Making or Advanced Wine Studies makes anyone more employable in Ireland, 2011.

One hit, one, from a Bluebrick.ie search for German when the EU has never been more important. Carlow IT will charge you €300 to do a course that will get you a Certificate in German that scores a six on the National Framework of Qualifications, one higher than the Leaving Cert.

They’re running course that will give you better German than five intense years of the Leaving Cert? That’s not very easy to believe. Not least as you don’t have to the primer course, as you do in Advanced Cocktail Making or Advanced Wine Studies. For German you can just walk in off the street, because the National Framework of Qualifications presumably judges it an easier skill to pick up than mixing a gimlet or slugging a bottle of Blue Nun.

If a man were a cynic, he'd think the National Framework of Qualifications is a bit of bloody joke.

Do a Bluebrick.ie search for “cloud,” as courses on cloud computing are all over the course lists in the centre pages of the Indo supplement. Nothing.

Go to the IT, Tallaght site, which lists cloud computing courses in the supplement, and do a local search there. Nothing.

Don’t click the Gaeilge link in the Bluebrick.ie top nav. It’ll only make you sad.

Page four of the supplement tells us that “Springboard is a government initiative managed by the HEA on behalf the Department of Education and Skills.” And that part does make sense.

Because one worthless public body on its own couldn’t make as big a balls of something as this. It’s only by combining their resources that they could make a pig’s ear of such monstrosity that it wouldn’t surprise me if it were visible from space or had its own gravity.

Yes we can? Nein, wir können nicht, actually. We really, really can’t. God help the country. Run while you still can.