Healthcare can no longer be an expensive privilege in the private tier and a catch-as-catch-can system of firefighting in the public tier, where patients present at ever later stages of their illness costing both lives and resources that could have been saved with timely access. 5 minute read.
Drunken, brawling, criminal, lazy, as thick as two short planks nailed together, and not wanted over here—that’s what ‘everybody knew’ about the average Mick when I was growing up in England. Creating a racist stereotype doesn’t need any basis in fact, just an ugly image repeated often enough. (10 minute read.)
Social media algorithms created separate information tunnels leading to echo-chambers fed not with information but with affirmation of what their readers had already liked. Each tunnel built up ‘truths’ that appeared incontrovertible: anything that offered a different perspective had been sent down a different tunnel.
The pandemic has drawn a sharp divide between those who could lose their houses, jobs, or lives, and those who are calculating how to foreclose on newly ‘distressed’ mortgages, or who will use job losses to depress wages, or who talk about the death rate among older citizens reducing the cost of pensions.
Albert Einstein said that we can’t solve problems with the same thinking we used to create them. Swinging endlessly between two parties from a socially conservative, right centrist, and redundant tradition of party politics got us to the mess we’re in. But take Einstein’s word for it, it’s not going to get us out of it. (10 minute read)
Upwards of 17,000 people moved into the Ballymun flats in one go. The bus arrived late as did the shopping centre with its one supermarket and two pubs. The promised health centre, swimming pool, library, meeting rooms, community halls, and gym didn’t happen. Anyone spot a problem?
All other things being equal—Leaving Cert results, for instance—students who attend schools in working-class areas are less likely to graduate to third-level study than those from more affluent areas. Why is that? Two classic studies partially explain the disparity, but it took a pandemic to break it open.
The debacle surrounding calculated/manipulated Leaving Cert grades made it possible to see why students from private schools are disproportionately more likely to graduate to third-level study than all others. That’s the intention—to maintain the socio-economic status quo.
Two recent studies asked students whether the skills taught in their Leaving Cert courses prepared them for third-level study. An overwhelming majority said ‘No’, that they had not learned the intellectual skills they would need.
Owen Connolly interviews Liam O’Sullivan of Trasna na Tíre – Ireland’s online history lecture series, adapted to work with the restrictions of the lockdown. ‘We bring in experts from outside our locality to explain aspects of our history to us.’
