Irish students interested in this election, but not in fairytale promises

As I'm sure the readers of IrishCentral are aware, Ireland is all talk about the upcoming elections at the moment.

What's different to recent years, though, is that there's also a strong level of interest from the traditionally apathetic student voting bloc.

Let me be honest: I'm no great follower or fan of Irish politics, at least in the dismal recent times, but my curiosity and interest have certainly been piqued in the run-up to this election by the severity of our current situation and the importance that the upcoming vote holds for us. It's a time as a country that we simply cannot afford to be apathetic or disinterested.

The reasons are too many to list. As has been mentioned countless times in this blog, Ireland is in the grip of an unprecedented emigration endemic. For want of jobs at home, students are (once more) being forced to foreign shores to escape the desperate plight in Ireland. College students in particular have also seen the increase of tuition fees, the slashing of several grant payments, and recently a commitment (which has been only tepidly reneged upon) to eventually eliminate the final year pay of nursing students who are made work practically the same hours as their full-time counterparts.

Given that this and more is what us students are facing into, it's imperative that we elect a government that shows a strong commitment to protecting our interests in higher level education and undoing some of the wrongs that have been mentioned. Hence, I think, the strong interest from the traditionally apathetic student voting bloc.

Despite that interest, though, I've read a few headlines that have almost convinced me to give up on the whole show again.

One such headline was yesterday's announcement from Sinn Fein that they would offer free education to every man, woman, and child in Ireland from primary school right up to college. You may well wonder what I could possibly dislike about this plan. In two words it's patently unrealistic. The way this magic pill is supposed to work, the brainchild of a political party operating out of offices owned by a convicted criminal, is to introduce a third tax band on the ultra-rich to finance this elaborate welfare state.

This, I think, is several steps too far. Taxes have already spiralled drastically, and simply because someone is well off doesn't mean they should fund the education of the less well off. It's the principle of equity on steroids, which isn't necessarily a good thing; and ultimately it's the beneficiaries of third level education who should be footing the bill, not some random rich guy who's already paying tax at the higher level... isn't that enough?

Sinn Fein may well be a marginal and extreme example to take, but there have been several other moments that students have surely raised their eyebrows at some of the drastic measures being tabled by several of the main political parties.

Mostly I think the educational policies are fairly good, though. Fine Gael's stance on Irish, which I've already supported on this forum will be highly divisive. They have some well-rounded policies and they seem to have been well thought out. Fianna Fail I think have less on offer.

Overall I'm glad to report that Irish students have a drive to put the government that will best look after their needs in power, but unrealistic promises such as Sinn Fein's will never hold much appeal.

A different side to Brian Cowen

Outgoing Taoiseach Brian Cowen must have few friends left in the country at the moment, but amidst all the opprobrium, scorn, and criticism heaped on the beleaguered Taoiseach over the last few years, I think a different side to the leader was entirely missed out on during the media onslaught that has more or less defined his hapless career in politics.

I had two chances to watch the outgoing Taoiseach in action over the past six months. The first was at a swanky function hosted in the Irish Consulate, New York City which was being put on to commemorate a special edition of The Irish Voice commemorating the top 50 Irish-American businesswomen. The second was at a private party function from which journalists were supposed to be excluded from at a local hotel in Cork City.

My abiding impression of the Taoiseach on both occasions was of a very capable and confident politician who commanded respect from his party colleagues he was surrounded by and who was also clearly a capable orator, able to convey complex policy points in simplistic and digestible terms, before leading, on both occasions, to an Obama-style ending which left you convinced, whatever your initial misgivings, that yes, Fianna Fail 'can'. I also spoke to Cowen for a few minutes at the New York function and remember him as being very astute and 'with it'. His parting words to me and the other young interns scoffing down our Consulate's free Guinness for all it was worth (this of course being one of the only surefire ways in life of getting money back from the government), were "be proud and keep representing, lads"; then he took off into the Manhattan night.

Speaking at the Cork function a few months later, Cowen delivered a stirring oration without reference to a single note, unaided by a microphone, and seemingly with little preparation. A hush descended on the crowd of party sympathizers gathered in the Northside Silversprings Hotel as Cowen took to the center of the small function room and delivered a rousing and passionately articulated speech about the possibility for economic and political regeneration under Fianna Fail's leadership, trotting off abstruse employment statistics and facts left, right, and center as if they were Premiership scores, and capturing the crowd with his lively energy. Although he may not have looked the part that day (nor, for that matter, did he ever really look the part) I was more thanimpressed by his sharp memory, eloquent rhetoric, and confident poise, and got a very different impression of him as a politician than I did from the news, caricatures, and criticism which as I said almost singly defined his tenure as Taoiseach.

But why then this very obvious disconnect between the private Cowen talking happily and fluidly among party colleagues and the not so well-liked 'Biffo' (an acronym standing for big, ignorant fec**r from Offaly, ...) who was practically the daily whipping-boy of the Irish press and media? Local Fianna Failers explained to me that Cowen comes across much better at private party functions than he does at larger scale and higher pressure gatherings such as press conferences but this is hardly the stuff that politicians are supposed to be made of. Pressure and hostility are par for the course in politics and if this was the reason that Cowen didn't communicate his ideas well to the general public then he really only has himself to blame, but it's still something worth reflecting on.

That be as it may be, I have no doubt that Cowen presided over a great deal of incompetency during his tenure as Taoiseach, but there's still something in the incessant and overwhelming criticism from all quarters of the Irish media and public that leaves me a little bit suspicious to say the least. One man along cannot single-handedly have ruined an entirely country and to say that the whole thing reeks of scape-goating and McCarthyism is, I believe, an understatement.

Cowen undoubtedly committed a lot of errors in his running what has become a now broken and bankrupt country, many of them surely graves ones, but there was a much more capable, confident, and inspiring side to the man that simply never surfaced to the public eye, that was never broadcast, but was understood and seen to exist by party colleagues, friends, and no doubt also political aides. That may be only his own fault, but I think it's a pity that that shining confidence, capability and leadership that I saw on those intimate gatherings in New York and North Cork never got a wider airing than that. If it had done, who knows what the outcome could have been and how different a situation we would have found ourselves in today.

Cork Airport must evaluate main runway safety after crash

Cork, Ireland is still in a sense of shock after yesterday morning's tragic air crash which killed six and injured several others, when a light aircraft crashed at the airport on its third attempt to land in thick fog.

Strictly speaking this isn't the first crash at Cork (an Aer Lingus Viscount went down en route to London in '68, crashing into the sea off Tuskar Rock, County Wexord), but it's the first one to occur at the airport itself, and the first in many years.

Without wishing to take away from the seriousness of the crash, and the huge sense of tragedy that's accompanied it, I think it also needs to serve as an opportunity to evaluate the safety of Cork Airport, which is frequently plagued by thick fog due to its location on a hilltop to the South of the city.

Without bogging this blog-post down in technical jargon (I'm building hours towards a private pilot's licence myself), an Instrument Landing System (ILS) is what guides an aircraft down to the runway in instrument conditions such as these. ILSs come in various grades: I, II, and III(A&B) and the higher the grade ILS the more powerful the system and the lower visibility the aircraft can land in. While runway 17, the most commonly used landing runway, is equipped with Cat II ILS, which gives landing aircraft a decision height of just 200ft above the runway surface, the opposite Northerly-facing end of the same runway, 35, only has a Cat I approach, which to me has always seemed very inadequate given how frequently fog plagues Cork; runway visibilities of just 100 metres are common during the winter, and visibility was so poor yesterday morning that the crash couldn't even be seen from the terminal building, just a couple of hundred metres away.

The second problem with Cork Airport - also due to its location and surrounding topography- is the sharply falling ground to the South of Runway 17.

Aircrafts use altimeters to gauge height. Most altimeters calculate height based on air pressure (a pressure altimeter) but commercial aircraft are also fitted out with radar altimeters which work - as the name would suggest - by sending back a laser team to allow for a more precise reading as the aircraft makes its final approach to the landing runway.

Above: Instrument Landing System: physically is just a radio antenna, but projects an electronic beam which guides aircraft down to the runway during adverse weather conditions

The only problem with Cork is that radar altimeters often stop working during the final stages of approach to 17 because the ground is sloping upwards so quickly. Again, this is a problem that's made particularly worse by Cork Airport's situation as extremely precise altimeter readings are needed in instrument conditions in order to asses the all-important 'decision height', which is the height above the runway at which a pilot has to commit either to land the aircraft or else to 'go around' and try again.

The third problem is that because the land falls so sharply at either end of the main runway - 17/35 - there's very little room for further expansion (the runway was already expanded from 6,000ft to 7,000ft). This means that Cork Airport can't ever have anything than a relatively short runway, which prevents big aircraft from landing and taking off, and therefore limits (in fact eliminates) its potential for long-haul or transatlantic travel. This is a huge negative to the future growth of Cork. A rumour has circulated around the airport and flying school for many years that the East-West runway would be extended to the appropriate length, but this has never happened.

Despite all these points though, Cork Airport and its navigational-aid infrastructure was almost certainly in no way to blame for yesterday's accident. A piece in this morning's Irish Independent speculates that the pilot may have descended past the decision height hoping that the fog would clear, but either way, it certainly wouldn't hurt to improve things.

Nothing we can do can take back the lives of the six people who died tragically at Cork Airport yesterday, but every disaster like this prevents an opportunity to see what went wrong and find out how we can prevent this from happening again in the future. The Irish Air Accident Investigation Unit (AAIU) will take a few months to produce a comprehensive report of what exactly caused this terrible tragedy, but perhaps once the money comes back in we can invest some money in Cork Airport's navigational aids to make sure that the frequent thick fog which plagues the airport presents only the minimum of safety hazards.

Correction

Contrary to what was stated above the Minimum Descent Altitude (MDA)/ decision height for the ILS Cat. II approach to Rwy. 17 at Cork Airport (EICK) is 69ft not 200ft.

Update: Continuing media coverage seems to be pointing in the way of a finding of pilot error on the part of the dead pilot who was captaining his first flight. See here and here.

GAA beginning to feel the pinch of uncontrolled emigration

Above: passengers waiting to board a flight at Shannon Airport, Ireland's Western gateway to the US. Unless students demand of politicians that they take steps to address the emigration problem, there'll be plenty more of these flights.

Excuse me if I've come to be known as the weekly bearer of doom and gloom from Ireland, but there's so much about student emigration that's worth reporting on, and so little seemingly being done about it.

I found a few pieces from Ireland's newspapers this week that shed more light on what's becoming an unstoppable problem for Ireland.

Ranking them in order of misery and dismalness, this piece from the Irish Independent surely leads the field: the GAA is losing 250 players a week to emigration.

This is a fairly shocking fact. The gravity and scale of the emigration problem is perhaps better and more keenly felt when you limit the statistics to a certain group or class of people rather than just paint the picture in terms of the entire country, which makes it fairly difficult to get a grasp on just how many people are leaving when the numbers are so large.

That fact about the GAA is far from the worst of the statistics, though. The ERSI (Economic Research and Social Institute), widely regarded as Ireland's leading think-tank, has estimated that 100,000 young people will leave Ireland between Apr. '10 and Apr. '12 alone; that's a shocking amount that is in fact even worse than the recession of the '80s when the net outflow reached a mere 44,000, but in truth both are catastrophic figures.

Other countries are certainly beginning to take cognizance of this problem, which perhaps is not surprising giving the enormous scale of it. A Dutch television station is to make a documentary on the situation, according to this morning's Irish Examiner, but what's revealing about that is a quote from the documentary's maker which shows just how unusually strange and terrible our situation is: "In Holland people emigrate because they have to, in Ireland it's an economic necessity," the documentary maker says.

In Canada, a traditional stronghold of Irish emigrants, they're even offering a new visa which will make it easier for Irish emigrants to extend their stay in the country to a second year and perhaps even longer.

The point of all this wordage, besides to show how bad the problem is, is to highlight that nothing seems to be being done about this.

Student unions, such as the national USI, have made some tepid steps towards highlighting the situation, but this has amounted to little more than an angry march on Dublin city centre which saw a few arrests and the surfacing of allegations of police brutality, but nothing substantive was done, no commitments were made, and the problem remains as bad, or worse, than it ever was before.

Coming into the upcoming general election now is the time for Irish students to get on the backs of their local politicians and ask them what they propose to do to solve this problem.

The alternative is a very bad one.

Post-script: I noticed a Google video ad for Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny in the sidebar of Irish Central when editing this post. That in itself is a huge positive for me as a 22 year old voter. Neither Fianna Fail nor Labour have bothered to make anything more than perfunctory use out of social media which for me is a sign that they're out of touch with young people and how they're influenced. Use of social media should be preached as a fundamental when devising national election campaigns. I think that a party that ignores this crucial area is simply shooting itself in the foot...

Another perspective on student emigration

I had a very interesting talk with the President of the university I attend this morning, to write an interview for the news website I run in Cork.

We talked about a wide range of topics pertaining to student life, but the one I thought would be of most interest to Irish Central was the whole theme of student emigration; the problem that Irish students are facing into whereby for want of any jobs going in Ireland, they're (once more) turning to emigration in an effort to try to forge a more prosperous future overseas.

Being perhaps not the most organized of persons, I realized as I walked in the door to his office that my trusty voice recorder was nowhere to be found, so for want of any precise verbatim quotes from the interview, I'll offer a general overview of what he said on student emigration, which I found interesting.

Prof. Michael Murphy, the President of UCC and the highest paid university president in Ireland, surprised me in that he said he saw student emigration as a largely positive phenomenon, which is an alternative and scarcely articulated perspective to the common dogma of student emigration being some sort of malignant "plague" of life for young people in Ireland. Irish college students and their student unions think that emigration is the great tragedy of modern Ireland, but maybe they're missing the point.

Yes, the sons and daughters of Éire are literally being forced out of the country by the doom and gloom of our economy, as they have been in previous generations, but student emigration could also, and perhaps as validly, be construed as a positive phenomenon rather than a 'curse'.

I think it all depends on your perspective.

The current batch of Irish émigrés are depressed and bitter because they see themselves as 'emigrants'.

The word itself is laden with meaning and connotation. 'Emigration' implies a state of no return; a severance of ties with friends and family; a change of identity; a change of culture. But maybe that needn't be so. Ireland's economy will eventually rectify itself, or so we hope, and those same emigrants now joining the throngs of people boarding trans-Atlantic flights out of Shannon Airport may one day return back home to find a more prosperous Ireland, a more stable Ireland, and - most importantly for our future - a better governed Ireland.

Not only that, but they'll also (hopefully) return as the beneficiaries of a wealth of experience gained in foreign climes, most often of course America, absorbing and learning how other countries do things, gaining experience in life, which they can then come home and inject into a new revitalized Ireland. The net effect, in other words, would be beneficial rather than detrimental. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but it's an interesting opinion and one worth considering; perhaps a small change of attitude would indeed go a long way.

Perhaps this lesson needn't be limited to student emigration, though. Maybe, strange as it seems, the Irish could learn to take the positives out of the recession, however few they may be, and use that as a springboard to graft change for future generations.

Even those wild geese as far-flung as America must now realize that the Irish are currently being subjected to a seemingly unending inundation of negative news from the press and media; perhaps that's a large part of the problem and if we could only learn to view the whole fiasco as a chance to rectify failed policies, implement new ideas, and change government, maybe we would be better off for it. Wishful, stupid, naive, but it would certainly be worth a try.

It may be wishful, perhaps even naive, but at least it's not pessimism.