Student Unions ratch up pressure on "half baked" Minister

The students are revolting again.

And while that may not be news to anyone, their latest spate of irateness may.

An unusually strongly-worded press release from the University College Cork (UCC) Student Union called Ireland's Minister for Trade, Employment and - ironically - Innovation "half baked" and "lackluster" in his approach to stemming the rising tide of graduate unemployment.

Daithi Linnane, the Union's Deputy President, repeated a call first made by the national equivalent of the UCCSU to "get real" on the issue.

The press releases capture acurately a building frustration among Ireland's youth at the fact that despite holding enviable academic qualifications like Masters and PhDs they're unable to hold down or even get a job position - even at the local grocery store. Openings at petrols stations are regularly inundated with hundreds of resumes - that's how bad it's gotten.

A recent protest in Dublin was directed against the exact same phenomenon. Students chose to protest outside the famine ship memorial, the message being that the Airbus 330 has replaced the old bows and oars of the infamous famine ships which were the visible symbols of the last wave of forced emigration; the e-ticket and Shannon Airport being the iconic images of this one.

As a student this latest news-piece has a more visceral effect than most.

Unlike, say, a piece about the American recession, which I may read with distant and detached empathy, there's something very personal about the graduate unemployment dilema.

The reason, of course, is that in a little under a year I'll be one of those graduates. Holding a BCL law degree from UCC I too may be joining the ranks of the SU and discommoded students protesting against a bleak future - and heading into an unknown one.

No easy answers for government on third level fees issue.

The Irish government looks bereft of easy answers to the increasingly complex third level fees issue.

With Ireland just beginning to peek its head out of a recession of staggering depth and proportions, the Government has some hard choices to make if it’s going to abide by its promise to not bring in third level fees, as Minister for Education Mary Coughlan made last week.

Ireland’s avowed economic mission for the twenty-first century is to become a so-called 'smart-economy', one based on its citizens' educational skills and abilities. This mission, though, hinges largely on its ability to produce a large crop of graduates with advanced degrees every year, and for this third level funding is requried.

Such graduates, however, require extensive training, and this, of course, is provided in the nation’s universities, which run – as do all institutions – at a cost.

But therein lies the problem.

Ireland is in the anomalous situation of being one of the few countries in the world which doesn’t charge tuition fees for a university education, a concept which must seem absurd to Americans' used to forking out or borrowing six digit sums to keep their children, or themselves, in 'school', as Americans call it.

And while that’s good news for Irish students, for the Irish government it translates into something of a headache, or more recently perhaps, into a massive migraine.

On the same day that the Minister for Education swore her promise to not introduce tuition fees during that government's "lifespan" in power, she told the Irish nation that economist Dr Colin Hunt, the man heading the Government-appointed commission to look into the fees funding issue, is leaning increasingly in favour of concluding that third level fees are both inevitable and drastically necessary.

This looks likely to pit Ireland's leadership against expert opinion on the matter, something makes the economic viability of the decision look even more improbable.

To make a bad situation worse, though, 77,123 students applied through Ireland's admissions system, the CAO (rough equivalent of the Common Application) to enter third level education in 2010-2011.

Although this figure may seem small by American standards, it's the largest ever recorded in Ireland, and seems likely to make an already difficult financial situation impossible.

The figure is the by-product of a trend in Irish society to continue in third level education rather than enter the desolate workforce, where jobs are as scare as water in an African desert, though doesn't look likely to abate in future years as the recession hangover draws on.

Newsweek magazine recently named Ireland's Prime Minister Brian Cowen as one of the ten top leaders in the world. If Cowen and his cabinet can find a way to grant entry to this year's massive application-load without compromising on the no-fees promise he will well and truly have earned that accolade.

Larry Murphy release shows Irish justice system up for the joke that it is.

Although it's hard to draw many positives from the release after a mere decade in jail of a sexual offender whose attack was so astoundingly violent that even the police service seem to remain in palpable fear, perhaps the one good thing to come out of it is that the world is now talking about - and laughing at - the decrepit state of the Irish justice system.

As one commenter did well to note on this website: "you double park you get a day in court , you kill someone you get a pat on the back." Of course that's a bit exaggerated, but there's more than a kernel of truth there.

The Irish justice system was built on the solid backbone of our own ancient Brehon law, and more recently from the English Common Law. Yet from these solid foundations, something began to crumble.

Among the many problems facing the Irish justice system as it stands today is that unlike Ronseal - the trust gardening paint of that famous commercial - it doesn't do what it says on the tin.

A 'life sentence', according to the latest figures, now works out at a little over 17 years, which is just one year shorter than the average lifespan of a black forest bear, but certainly comes nowhere close to matching the natural lifespan of a flesh and blood mortal.

But the real problem - besides these farcical 'life sentences' - is the ubiquity of the 'suspended sentence', whereby the 'prisoner' avoids prison by abiding by certain conditions, most of which are usually met.

Unlike in America, where suspended sentences are generally reserved only for first time offenders, the suspended sentence is a staple at almost all levels of the Irish criminal justice system. In 2008 a sister convicted of the manslaughter of her brother got such a deal from the Central Criminal Court. Calling this a shambles wouldn't go far enough.

One of the 'courts' section articles which abides in my memory was an absolute gem of a story which the trusty Irish Independent picked up on last September.

The article stated that one in seven prisoners had to be released from Irish prisons because of of overcrowding.

This meant that up to 600 inmates at a time were walking free on temporary release simply because there wasn't enough room for them in the nation's prisons. There could be one outside my window.

There are times, many time, when the famously laid-back Irish approach to life provides great humour.

When you come back home from somewhere as high stress and hard working as America to road work crews packing up for the day at 4:00pm there's a bit of a laugh and a charm there.

But having arguably the most inefficient and hopelessly lenient criminal justice system in the world - as demonstrated by the Larry Murphy release - is cause for only shame. Yet who's counting on change?