The weather was glorious, we had a lovely group of people canvassing, and our message that a Yes vote couldn’t be taken for granted was getting a positive reception with people.
Four of us had canvassing experience (two of us were from the Green Party, one from Labour, and one who had canvassed for an Independent candidate), and so we paired off with people who were knocking on doors for the very first time.
Normally I wouldn’t be conscious of peoples’ sexual orientation, but this time it was different. It was different because those of us who were straight were simply doing some campaigning on a political issue.
The people in our group who are gay were asking people for permission to have the right to get married.
That seems wrong to me. They shouldn’t have to ask. Those of us that already have the right to marry should be working as hard as we can to ensure our gay friends, brothers and sisters have the same right.
So even if you think the marriage equality referendum doesn’t directly affect you, please think about joining your local canvassing team for the Yes Equality campaign. If you’re in Limerick, a quick email to yesequalitylimerick@gmail.com will get a quick response. If you live elsewhere in Ireland, you can find your local group at https://www.yesequality.ie/yes-equality-map/
The day I got married was the happiest day of my life. I passionately believe in marriage, and being married has been a consistent and powerful force for good in my life.
Those of us who have the right to get married need to step up to the plate and go door to door on behalf of those who don’t have that right.
Limerick, that small city in the west of Ireland that I call home, has had somewhat of a challenging time of late.
Limerick City has always had an unemployment problem. But it’s worth restating how bad that problem is since the economic crisis hit. The last census showed Limerick City to have the highest unemployment rate (of any local authority area) in the country, at 27% (national average was 19%). The only two electoral divisions in the country where more than half the working-age population are unemployed are both in Limerick. The Central Statistics Office defines an unemployment blackspot as an area with over 35% unemployment. Six out of the seven worst unemployment blackspots in the country are in Limerick. Just under half (18 out of 36) of our electoral divisions are considered unemployment blackspots, and we have more than in Dublin City.
I could go on for paragraphs. The numbers for educational attainment and a host of other socio-economic indicators are equally dismal. Our city is dying. Limerick is in crisis. A crisis that is exacerbated by poor planning leading to a suburban doughnut around the city, a generally poor quality (with some honourable exceptions) of public representative (even by the somewhat dismal standards of Irish local councillors), an even poorer quality of local governmental and quasi-governmental agencies, each overlapping in remit with at least five other agencies, and a population that has, not unreasonably, given up a little hope of things being a bit better.
Of course Official Ireland’s answer to a crisis is to publish a long report, hold a snazzy launch, and hope nobody reads the thing, because while it is very important To Be Seen Doing Something, it is equally important Not To Offend Anyone By Doing Something Which Might Actually Make A Difference. The latest example of this was the 170-page Limerick 2030: An Economic and Spatial Plan for Limerick back in June 2013.
Sadly I’m one of those nerds who actually read the whole thing, and even put in a brief submission (although by the deadline for submissions, the plan had almost completely disappeared from view on the City Council website, which should have told me all I needed to know about how seriously the Council takes the views of its citizens). Brian Leddin posted his (much more eloquent) submission on his website so I thought I’d do the same below.
This article is a Part 1 because I’ve been thinking over the last few months about how things could be better in Limerick. I think it’s important that we don’t leave the future of our city in the hands (and half-baked ideas) of anonymous overpaid consultants. I came across Richard Florida‘s writings some years ago and I remember that they had a certain resonance for Limerick, luckily a 20th anniversary edition of his landmark (and not uncontroversial) work Rise of the Creative Class has just been released so I’ve got a copy and plan on adding a follow on post in a few weeks to add my own humble thoughts about how Limerick can overcome its crisis and look to 2030 with confidence.
A few brief comments on the Economic and Spatial Plan for Limerick: (submitted to Limerick County Council 12th July 2013):
The whole document needs proof-reading – there are a number of typos and mistakes throughout which undermine the strategy – e.g. it’s the Logistics sector, not the Logistic sector (p 17), the M20 will go to Cork, not Tralee (and the M21 will go to Tralee, not Cork!) (p28).
More serious than that, the document suffers from a lack of structure and flow which make it difficult to navigate and digest. I appreciate that there is a lot to cover in this Strategy, and multiple revisions and authors can militate against coherency. The Strategy jumps all over the place, there is excessive verbiage in some areas, the same points are repeated throughout the text, and the Strategy could greatly benefit from a comprehensive rewrite. The success or failure of this document will depend in part on the degree to which it is adopted by the key stakeholders involved, and a clear, structured and legible Strategy can only help to achieve this aim.
Many of the issues addressed in the strategy have been successfully (and not-so-successfully) tackled in other small European cities. It is a bit frustrating to see that the only comparators are to cities that are mostly to a completely different scale than Limerick, e.g. Oslo (pop 570k), London pop 8m) and New York (pop 8m). There was a real opportunity to examine the spatial and economic strategies of similar-sized small cities, like Koblenz (pop 106k), Wurzburg (pop 133k), Esbjerg (pop 115k), Quimper (pop 63k), Västerås (pop 110k) and Shrewsbury (pop 70k). All of these cities are relevant to Limerick not only in terms of their population, but other socio-economic and geographical factors as well. What international comparators exist in the Strategy seem to arise from whatever city breaks the authors have been on in the last few years, rather than any desire to benchmark and learn from international experience. And it is disappointing that none of the lessons from ‘research visits’ taken abroad by council officials (and funded from the public purse) in the last few years made its way into the Strategy.
Some of the sections dealing with traffic and roads are a little odd. The Strategy deals with the pedestrianisation of O’Connell Street in little over a sentence, giving no reasons why the street should not be pedestrianised. There’s a strident assertion that Henry Street should be two-way, without any evidence at how this would help traffic management or pedestrian permeability.
It’s a shame that the economic cultural and artistic assets of the city are not explored more. The proposed Theatre Royal development gets only a brief mention, and there’s hardly any mention of the Creative Limerick project and no mention of how it could be extended.
There is no evidence of any commitment to good practice in public consultation. This is a good document, but it could be a great document through engaging with the people of Limerick. Public consultation is an area that Limerick City Council has historically been bad at, and it would be good to see some commitments in this area.
Finally, I am no means a marketer, but the marketing plan listed in the appendix is pretty terrible and needs a complete rewrite. Surely we have more innovative ways of communicating our message than spending tens of thousands of euro on signage and paying journalists to write nice things about us.
Friends of ours in Limerick are having a party tonight. A young couple, just about to buy their own house. They are successful in their careers, are active in helping to make Limerick a better place. My wife and I are lucky to be friends with them. We were delighted when they came back from holiday recently and announced they were engaged. There’s not much to be cheerful about these days, but two fantastic people looking to commit their lives to each other is surely something to be celebrated.
Except they can’t.
Two people in love, people of integrity, intelligence and a deep-rooted commitment to making their communities better. Two people in love looking to get married.
Except they can’t.
They can’t because we as a society seem to believe because they are of the same gender, they are less equal than heterosexual couples and can’t get married.
I’m a bit ashamed that I live in a society where some couples are less equal than me and my wife. And it’s about time we changed that.
I’ve read a lot of arguments on why we should continue to discriminate against gay couples. I know that some religious people have a difficulty with gay marriage, but I would respectfully suggest that religious beliefs, even when they are in a majority, are not a licence to discriminate against our fellow citizens.
There are two other arguments that I wanted to touch on however, and they both centre around children.
The first is that marriage is primarily about children, therefore gay people shouldn’t be allowed to get married. This argument pushes my buttons a bit because I am in a marriage where we cannot have children, and I would be extremely upset if anyone insinuated that my marriage was in any way less valid than my friends’ just because we don’t have kids. The love I have for my wife and my commitment to my marriage is no less strong because we can’t have kids, and I think it’s faintly ridiculous to view marriage purely in terms of reproduction.
The second is that kids suffer if they don’t have a mummy and a daddy. It’s true that kids can be cruel to each other some times. And some kids, no doubt picking up on the intolerance of their parents, may tease kids whose circumstances are that little bit different to their own. I remember being about six or seven and having stones thrown at me on the way home from school with the words “Proddy” followed by epithets that seven year-olds probably shouldn’t have been using. But the concept that we might stop members of the Church of Ireland, like my parents, from getting married because of the possible reaction from some County Limerick yokels is surely ridiculous. And it’s a cheap trick to use children as an argument to promote intolerance.
It’s no longer conscionable that we continue to discriminate against gay couples. The restriction of marriage to heterosexual couples is an embarrassing anachronism. I hope that my friends, and gay couples around the country, do not have to wait for too much longer before they are allowed to get married.
Today was a glorious February day with searing sunshine, and I spent it picking up rubbish with friends.
And it was brilliant.
We joined the indefatigable Limerick Riverpath Volunteers who organised a Spring Clean of the canal banks between the city and the University of Limerick. It’s a lovely spot, made even more beautiful by the blinding February sunshine. It was surprisingly fun spending three hours picking up rubbish, there was great camaraderie and there is something satisfying about doing something physical with tangible results
There were over 30 people at today’s cleanup. On the face of it we were perfectly reflective of Irish society: some pensioners, families with kids, students, and all ages in between. But there was one difference: according to the 2011 census in Limerick City, less than 14% of the population have a nationality other than Irish. Yet by my reckoning, around half of the volunteers today were from outside Ireland.
The symbolism is stark – ‘foreigners’ turning out to collect our soiled nappies, cider cans and all the other detritus that Irish people like to throw away on our nature sites.
It’s a powerful slap in the face to the those who complain about people from outside Ireland who choose to come and live here. My friend Carla got chatting to a lovely Romanian student, here on an Erasmus programme studying at the University of Limerick. It later turned out she had only been here a few days. When asked had she done this sort of thing before, she said:
The canal after we had finished!
Not here but I have joined cleanups back home. They weren’t as bad as this though.
I am humbled that people who aren’t Irish would volunteer their Sunday to clean up our mess. It’s a reminder of how much our country has been enriched by ‘foreigners’ who have come to settle here. It’s maybe not surprising that they’re making a disproportionately positive impact on our society, but it is easily forgotten. I hope we never forget how lucky we are to have them here.
Every Tuesday evening I volunteer with the St. Vincent de Paul, giving leaving certificate Maths grinds to secondary school students in Moyross, Limerick. It’s been ten years since I last taught in a classroom setting and it’s a nice reminder of the buzz you get when teaching, getting to witness that ‘aha’ moment when one of the students grasps a concept.
Corpus Christi primary school in Moyross, taken last week as I was going in to give my maths grind
Moyross is an area known to many Irish people as one of the most disadvantaged areas in Ireland and the statistics bear this out: according to the Census 2011 Small Area data, the area around Corpus Christi primary school where I go to give the grinds has well over 50% unemployment, nearly 80% of families have only one parent, and less than 5% of adults have a third level eduction [1]. Yet despite the fact that many people from Limerick would never venture this direction it’s actually quite a pleasant place to stroll through: one of the few places you would ever see kids kicking a ball around on the street for example.
Teaching for two hours a week in Moyross isn’t going to drastically change the education landscape, granted, but for me it’s an important contribution. The culture of ‘grinds’ is well-embedded in the Irish education system, and it’s almost compulsory to get some form of extra tuition to help you through your leaving cert. This works well for kids who have parents wealthy enough to pay for it (and, anecdotally, many working teachers seem happy to accept payment in cash for this work without bothering the taxman), but for kids who don’t have access to wealthy parents, it puts them at an immediate disadvantage. I used to rent a house in Dublin where over 75% of my neighbours had a third level education: again the equivalent statistic for the area around the primary school where I teach is less than 5%. It’s sad to think that our system might be serving to maintain or even widen that gap, rather than close it.
It would be naive to assume that there are easy solutions here, but it’s always struck me that we’ve never managed to have a good discussion about education in this country. We spend a lot of time talking about inputs (e.g. teacher’s salaries, class sizes and the size of the education budget), but little time thinking about educational outputs and outcomes. Focusing on our standardised test results in literacy, numeracy and science might be a start. The 2009 OECD PISA report (results of a standardised test of 15 year-olds across 65 countries) ranks Ireland 21st out of 65 for reading, 32 out of 65 for maths, and 20 out of 65 for science (data taken from this PDF report, from the table on page 15). Perhaps not extremely shabby, but not exactly wonderful either, especially for a small society hoping to get out of a recession through reaping the benefits of the knowledge economy.
One of our problems is that the debate about education in Ireland is mostly about the producers (i.e. the teachers) rather than the consumers (i.e. the students). Not that I’m trying to apply some third-rate business thinking to our education system, it’s just that when most of the discussion about education comes from teacher’s unions, who for good reason are concerned primarily about their members’ pay and conditions, we end up missing the point a bit. I don’t have an irrational hatred for the teaching profession or their trade unions – for the record I think the teaching unions do a great job in advocating for their members (indeed, their professional approach makes me think that we’re not making the best of the organising ability of some of our best teachers…), I just think we as a society need to shift the debate a bit on to how we can improve educational outcomes for all our children, but particularly those who live in the country’s most disadvantaged areas.
When I was in first year in college, I shared with an American, Tim, who is now president of TNTP, an American non-profit which focuses on working “with schools, districts and states to provide excellent teachers to the students who need them most and advance policies and practices that ensure effective teaching in every classroom”. I’d love to see a similar organisation in Ireland, advocating for more effective teaching, including better teacher evaluation systems. Another innovation across the water that I’d love to see in Ireland is Teach for America, a programme which recruits graduates (mostly from the top Ivy League schools – competition is fierce to get in) to teach for two years in inner-city schools.
I did supply teaching for a few months in Ireland before I headed off to Ghana to do volunteer work for two years – I loved the teaching but it was the atmosphere in the staff room which put me off any notions I had of training to be a teacher when I returned from Africa. It wasn’t just that I was the only one with a lesson plan and a scheme of work, but the pervasive atmosphere of cynicism and unprofessionalism put me off. My heart goes out to committed teachers who have to put up with that every day.
The kids that I teach every week in Moyross are great, they’re eager, intelligent, funny, and ambitious for their future. Teaching them makes me optimistic about the future. I only hope we can give them the education system they deserve to fulfil their potential.
[1] – see http://maps.pobal.ie – you’ll need a Silverlight plugin and a few hours to waste – really this is nerdvana for stats-minded political people…
My laborious notes trying to plan a public transport trip *before* I found the excellent GetThere.ie
It’s always been a challenge to try and plan public transport journeys in Ireland that don’t begin or end in the centre of Dublin. Irish Rail and Bus Eireann have their own journey planners, but they don’t integrate together with each other, never mind with some of the excellent new private coach operators who are taking advantage of the new motorway network to offer quick and comfortable direct services.
Enter GetThere.ie – a proper public transport journey planner for Ireland. You can enter your origin and destination, and the site will spit out all your available options. The site is very clever at integrating between different services, so for example a search from Kilkenny to Limerick will offer you the option of taking Dublin Coach to Kildare Village, and then taking Irish Rail to Kilkenny.
What’s more, the site has an integrated carsharing facility – you can request or offer a car share, and it shows up immediately in the search results.
The guy behind it is very responsive and responded very quickly to a comment I made on the site. I love the fact that something so useful and complex has been developed by one guy plugging away with (presumably) a shoestring budget. Although presumably his job could have been a lot easier if the National Transport Agency mandated that operators share their timetables in an open format. Knowing the NTA they’ll probably drop a few million on a competing website which won’t be nearly as good.
Given I’ve been doing so much mucking around with WordPress for other peoples’ sites, I thought it was probably timely that I migrate my own little site-ette to WordPress. I’ve also migrated the page on SailRail between Dublin and London, and the faintly narcissistic About me page. I’m not sure if I have what it takes to become a blogging addict though.
