President Higgins' last big push to hear the voice of the diaspora - Seeking a new vision of Ireland

Ireland's President Michael D Higgins wants to hear from the Diaspora

The President’s landmark series of Young & Irish seminars may nearly be at an end (the final seminar takes place this weekend in Galway) but there is still a chance for young Irish people abroad to have their say on the burning issues affecting them, with the deadline for submissions to The President being the 29^th September. In fact, that’s why the seminars are so-called.

Speaking to a small group of reporters (of which I was one) on Saturday in Monaghan, President Higgins revealed that originally the title of the series was Young in Ireland, but was amended to facilitate the great throngs of young people who have since left the country and to make sure they were not forgotten. Higgins takes his role as President of all the people of Ireland very seriously and is confident that the emigration of now is not the same as that of the 50’s or 80’s, due in no small part to the advances in technology. He said that Ireland’s young people abroad, no matter how let down by the country they’ve felt, are determined not to turn their back on the country and noted that submissions to him both foreign and domestic were very similar in tone and scope. No matter where they were, young Irish people’s hopes and dreams for the country were one and the same.

One thing that has been remarkable about the seminars so far is the way in which the young people attending have responded to the President, and how he responded to them. During the day he said that no young person wanted anything at the expense of anyone else, they just wanted a better Ireland. In a world where young people are often portrayed as selfish, wanton and inert, it goes a very long way to hear someone in authority say that as clearly as President Higgins. Young people respond to him because of the clear respect he shows them, and his want and need to go to bat for young people is clear.

And ultimately, that is what we all, not just young people need: someone to go to bat for us. To fight our corner. To be an assuring force in a very uncertain world. The scope of the Being Young & Irish seminars is very wide and everything from education and innovation to tourism, sport and national pride have been mentioned in the discussions, and they’re vitally important things. But, the world could be instantly made better with two things taken into consideration: that your opinions and aspirations as a citizen no matter your status matters, and that the hard work and effort you do to express them and make it real is appreciated. President Higgins knows this, and lives this.

All over the world, young people from Ireland are currently living and working, trying to make their way in the world, but not giving up hope on the country from whence they came. If you’re one of those young people, The President wants to hear from you, and though your vision for Ireland might be several years down the road, Michael D Higgins wants to travel it with you. 

You can submit your vision of Ireland to the President by the 29th September at http://www.president.ie/makeasubmission/

Being Young and Irish - Our disappointed generation should learn from past mistakes and make Irish education something to be proud of

During tough times in Ireland education is key

Being a young Irish person is hardly something that lends itself well to a one size fits all definition. But there is one unifier this generation does have in common: a collective sense that things aren’t quite going as well as we’d hope.

For young people in their twenties, there’s an overriding sense that the life we’re living wasn’t in the script. When people of my age went to college just as the century turned, Ireland was reveling in a Gilded Age where it seemed opportunity and prospects and hope were going to be plentiful for ever more. Emigration was something you saw referenced on Reeling In The Years, and foreign travel didn’t have the specter of necessity about it. For those in their teens they face a situation where, through no fault of their own, their chance of enduring employment at home after third level education is starkly diminished. That is assuming they’re able to afford third level education in the first place.

It’s not that young people want or feel entitled to instant success, far from it. Success is something you should work hard and strive for, but it should feel within reach eventually. It should be difficult to get your big break, it shouldn’t be impenetrable. Chasing dead ends and living with disappointment is just part of everyday life for this generation.

But even despite our current difficulties, resilience and positivity will always shine through. For President Higgins’ upcoming Being Young & Irish seminar young people are making suggestions on how to make Ireland’s future better, on a wide range of topics. For me, with such challenges for young people finding their way in the world, and the best way to use their skills, my main priority is education.

If Ireland is to advance in the future, it needs to seriously overhaul what we teach and how it’s taught. 100 years since Pearse blasted the murder machine, it’s still fully functioning. The Leaving Cert, the results of which had thousands of students nationwide up to high dough this week, is a pathetically inefficient method of measuring achievement, value or talent. In a world of high speed bullet trains, the Leaving Cert is a pony and trap. But mild-mannered reform of the Leaving Cert won’t be worth a hill of beans unless the lead up to it is also drastically overhauled.

In my experience, every ten year old I’ve ever known has possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of something. Sometimes it’s football, music, a particular TV show or film or something more academic like history or geography or dinosaurs, but I’ve never met a 10 year old who can’t rattle off knowledge about their interests at the drop of a hat. By secondary school, that instinct to learn what interests you is blunted. In focusing such rigor on exam preparation, the whole education system funnels people into a format which seriously undermines creativity, independent thinking, open discussion and deeper exploration. Knowledge, such as it is, is crammed into the short stay car park of our minds for the purpose of splurging it on as many pages as you can as quickly as you can. You literally have no time to think, and there’s our problem.

Now more than ever, Ireland needs people of skill, talent and imagination to speak up and share the ideas that will shape and influence the way we think, act and work well into the future. We owe it to ourselves and to generations ahead to build an education system that helps encourage that, and all the incredible things borne of such a system. Ours is a generation that faces disappointment regularly, but we have to use that disappointment to strive to do better for ourselves and the young people that come after us. Ireland needs to learn from it’s mistakes, and then become a better teacher.

Support rallies for Sean Quinn is everything that's wrong with Ireland -- we're addicted to local sugar daddies

Sean Quinn

There are many things in Ireland that are popular that I can’t quite get. The government’s insistence on selling off our natural resources to highest bidder, for example. The Saw Doctors. Ray Foley.

But the thing I don’t understand the most also seems to be our biggest problem: the inability to divorce a positive personal interaction with a powerful bigwig, and the egregious wrongdoing they’ve committed.

We’ve seen it with Charles Haughey. For years and years and years his fabulous wealth and the origins thereof was all but an open secret, and yet he was Taoiseach over the course of four parliaments and had the most hysterically loyal following in Christendom.

We’ve seen it with Bertie too, when everyone knew full well he was a devious little gurrier, but sure wasn’t he just an ordinary man who liked a pint and a football match, loved his mammy and got his ashes at the start of Lent?

We’ve seen it with Lowry, who in spite of resigning from the cabinet and his party due to the overwhelming smell of rat, has topped the poll in Tipp North for fifteen straight years, and will only be displaced when his head is chopped off in a sword-fight at the top of a mountain.

And now, we’re seeing it with Sean Quinn. Last week, thousands turned up to a rally in Cavan in support of their friendly neighborhood beleaguered ex-billionaire. Several respected luminaries were in attendance, among them Fr Brian D’Arcy and Tyrone manager Mickey Harte, and a letter was read out from that known paragon of virtue, Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary. The great local conglomerato himself was there too, he even gave an emotional speech to his adoring public, Irish Citizen Kane style. Throughout the rally people paid tribute to his generosity, loyalty, decency and the fact he provided employment for a troubled, deprived area, and he’s been given an awful unfair hard time of it. Paying tribute to someone is perfectly fair and fine, but everyone seemed to be willfully blind as to why he’s in trouble in the first place.

He put a monster bet on Anglo Irish Bank shares that would have seen his fortune go stratospheric, but it didn’t and instead lost billions. To give the whole thing a metaphysical, Alice in Wonderland feel, the money he used to amass a 25% stake in Anglo was borrowed from, eh, Anglo. Worse yet, he borrowed another half a billion to buy some property to use as security. To compound matters, the company siphoned off funds from the profitable sectors of his business to keep the struggling ones up, and played an extended global game of Hide The Assets with the Irish courts, which is what landed his son in prison, made his nephew a fugitive and makes Quinn’s freedom shaky at best.

So in other words, an uber-capitalist takes a massive gamble and loses, to the extent that everyone with an insurance policy in Ireland has to pay an extra 2% because of it, broke the law explicitly and engaged in a flagrantly obstructive and obtuse game of chicken with the courts. But sure, isn’t he a decent fella?

Sean Quinn is merely the latest exhibit to prove that Ireland will never be a country free of corruption, gombeenism or a near-feudal loyalty to parochial heroes. We simply love our blameless, imperious regional sugar daddies too much. People in Cavan and Fermanagh decry the Anglo swine who ruined the country and why aren’t they being put through the ringer, though they’re perfectly blasé about the fact that, at a 25% stake in the company, Sean Quinn *was* Anglo. They hold asinine placards like “Bring back Quinn and let him create jobs”, apparently unaware of the connection between his actions and those like him and the state of the economy that makes expenditure cuts and layoffs the order of the day. Sean Quinn’s net contribution to Irish society at this point is firmly in the red, and it’s an absurd case of mental reservation or blind, bewildering, unwarranted loyalty to say otherwise. But, loads of people are, and why? Because he’s local, and a good honest man he is too. 

How the IMF are killing the Irish patient -- more austerity cuts are the wrong diagnosis for ailing Irish economy

IMF fail to fix what ails Ireland

When I was about ten, I was diagnosed with asthma. I was given an inhaler, one of those tubes you have to blow into to measure your lung capacity, and an amount of information and fact sheets along the lines of “So, you’ve become dust’s bitch” that would have stunned an ox. There was just one problem: I wasn’t asthmatic.

After the initial diagnosis my health was getting worse if anything, and every time my mother and I protested as much, I was fussed around by confused doctors like I was The Six Million Dollar Technology: “We can rebuild him, we have the technology...we just have to give him more asthma stuff.” Eventually we just decided to unilaterally stop using the inhaler, the lung capacity thingamajig and everything else, and sure enough, I got better.

Turns out I had just a standard level of childhood sickness for a kid with glasses as thick as mine, but after I was diagnosed something weird started happening. Loads of children who I knew from school also started being diagnosed with asthma. Like, loads of them. It seemed if you had a cough, splutter, took a drink and a bit went down the wrong way or got a bruise in the shin, asthma was probably the problem. People started to wonder what the hell was going on.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it feels like some of those childhood diagnosticians have given up medicine for economics, and ditched their MDs in favor of the IMF. Recently it was announced that the International Monetary Fund, Ireland’s economic proctologist, wanted more cuts to social welfare payments, child benefit, raising a property tax and, their most bristly resolution, removing the automatic right for old age pensioners to have a medical card.

The IMF was set up after World War 2 with the intention to help and invest in countries in perilous economic situations. In more recent times, it has become the ultimate arbiter of asymmetric free market policy, the adherents of which believe they are the only show in town. So, when the IMF detail countries to make such structural changes, they do it not entirely out of sheer bean counting necessity, but ideological prerogative and zeal. Ireland is sick alright, but asthma medicine isn’t going to make us better.

What Ireland has needed for years and needs now more than ever is wise investment made in the right areas. The free market notion that if you throw enough money at it things will cascade into their natural positions is simply not viable or practical. Every decision made at government level effects many others and all a cut in the dole payments will do is make it harder for people to live rather than easier for people get a decent job, because the investment simply isn’t there. A wiser use of the government’s time and money would be to make the social welfare system more comprehensible. As it stands, if I was on the dole but got a couple of weeks of stand-alone, temporary work, I wouldn’t have my money deducted for the few weeks, as would be the rational thing to do. Instead, you have to sign off, and then undergo the whole desperate rigmarole again when you’re done as if you’ve never been in the office before. It’s a small example but one that exemplifies the wider logic gaps and inefficiencies of that department, and the government as a whole.

To paraphrase the Hippocratic oath, “first do no harm”. But, in even given the IMF’s best intentions, their fundamental wrong-headedness in dealing with economic crisis is doing just that. Cuts, hikes and universal entitlement revocations is the wrong medicine for the wrong symptoms, at the wrong place at the wrong time. I truly hope the IMF will realize that flinging an inhaler at us will not solve all our ills, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. 

Starbucks Ireland macchi-atone for their "British" sins, but who really cares?

Maybe it’s because summer is closing in, but this week we may have already got the silliest story of the season.

On Tuesday, Starbucks, the most famous thing to take its name from a Herman Melville book now that Moby doesn’t seem to be making records anymore, launched a UK marketing campaign to dovetail nicely with all that Jubilee business. Except, they made a now infamous geography malfunction. Now, social network marketing campaigns can be a difficult needle to thread at the best of times, but whenever you send out a tweet asking what makes proud to be British from your Irish account, you’re just asking for a hiding.

I’m not going to add to the mountain of puns (If it gets to court, will they be represented by a barista? Ha-cha cha cha cha!) but inevitably the quips came thick and fast, some of them about how Ireland is actually German and not British, and some of them funny. But in some quarters it seemed to cause genuine, high-handed annoyance. The Irish Times went as far to say it prompted “outrage." Outrage, I say! Why anyone would be annoyed by such a blunder seems almost as perplexing as people following a coffee outlet on Twitter in the first place.

After all, it’s a well-worn trope that successful people from the Emerald Isle are co-opted as British when they’re successful, and as they’re on the way down they’re Irish. Such custody battles don’t bother me, if anything we should be a bit flattered that the UK want to co-opt our famousers. After all, we take in abroad dwellers as our own all the time, from David Gray to Counting Crows to basically everyone who played football for us in the late eighties.

Ireland seems to have mastered missing the point completely. In the last few days, news eccentric TD Mick Wallace was avoiding tax to the tune of €2 million has been met with a worrying amount of moral equivalency, while last week the country essentially sleepwalked into accepting a treaty that will have far-reaching implications, with just half the country showing up at the polls. But no, it’s the coffee that really seems to get us energized.

The EU and Ireland - the importance of being close to Boston and Brussels

During the tremulous time following the 1992 general election, the embattled Taoiseach Albert Reynolds was handed a lifeline. With his grasp on power hanging in the balance, Reynolds went to an EU summit in Edinburgh at the end of that year and secured £8billion in European structural funds. Even his most optimistic supporters were expecting something closer to six. Emboldened, Reynolds told his press secretary, “Now watch me put a government together”.

That money was not only was an instrumental element in keeping Reynolds in power, it also became a vital element of policy. In the years since 1992, all manner of capital projects have the EU’s starry prints all over it. From the Luas and the M50 to research facilities and local enterprise boards, and whether it’s widely known or accepted or not, the EU’s structural funds helped build an entire national infrastructure.

Small wonder then that the EU’s Open Days event, run by the Directorate General for Regional Policy, is such a big draw. It’s the single biggest event the EU hosts every year, with thousands of interested parties coming from every townland in Europe. This year, I was one of them. 

A couple of things struck me from the start. First, structural funds may not be the silver bullet they once were, both because of relative year-on-year improvements and the banking cataclysm, but they’re still vital as a means of realising key investments. The second thing I found striking was how clear the focus was on what those key investments would be: emerging business and research. It may have been roads in the past, but from here on in, it’s SME and R&D.

There were other talking points and debates that ran through the week. “Macroeconomic conditionality” became the unlikely catchphrase of the whole event, with a strenuous debate revolving round whether sanctioning regions or countries that don’t use their funds properly would disproportionately affect the poorest countries who needed the money most. Then there was the issue of credit. For once in a European context, we weren’t referring to the debt kind.

Often, money distributed to the respective government departments of Europe is appropriated as such. Since any structural fund money has to be matched by national governments, the European influence can often be underplayed or lost altogether. In a time when passive Euroscepticism is becoming more and more fashionable, the way the EU asserts itself in this regard is becoming more and more important. 

Plenary sessions and debates aside there were also a host of seminars where people could showcase the ways they used their funding. One particularly interesting session involved Holland and its approach to tackling youth unemployment, the scope of which puts our own much-maligned Job Bridge to shame.

Over the next weeks I’ll be considering the finer points of some of the issues brought up in Brussels, and with the announcement in the last week of The Gathering in 2013, it’s important to balance the relationship with our friends within and without Europe. Being close to Boston doesn’t mean we have to ignore Berlin.