PROPHETS AND LOSSES

The year is barely up and running and it seems just like the old one. Murder and mayhem, wind and water/water everywhere. Bastards bashing the knees off victims in Northern suburbs. And a Budget that neither pleased nor offended anybody too much. So what’s new?
The murder of a small boy in County Kildare, the ensuing search, the awful sadness of the little one’s funeral, the quiet rural nature of the place, the sheer unexpectedness of the whole thing had eerie and deeply upsetting echoes of the murder of Imelda Riney and her little son last year. And there have been others, including the strange mystery of the three men missing in Cork.
I don’t know what they tell us of our condition. No doubt there will be prophets who can interpret these signs and wonders with great wisdom. But I won’t even try. Except to say that modern communications systems may well be responsible for our sense that things are getting worse. It isn’t just the growth of tabloidism, though the rucks which accompany any newsy story these days are hugely distasteful.
No, it’s more. Fundamentally, I think, it is that we hear and see these things at greater speed and in much greater detail. There is a forensic quality to reporting, and many newshounds pride themselves on how much they can find out, and how close they can go to blowing the whole gaff, without getting committed for contempt of court.
Many have lost any real sense of propriety. They have also neglected a broader understanding of their role. When you work the coalface, you believe that nothing is more important. You become inured to wider issues. You lose the run of yourself.
Thus it is with the media. And so, the cameras go in way too close.
Moreover, we hear about things in minutes. I suspect that outrages happened just the same in times gone by, but news travelled more slowly. In a more dispassionate reporting era, the onlookers weren’t wound up to quite the same degree, and if they were, it was over a longer timescale and on a more local, intimate stage.
None of which eases the scenes of horror and despair that we all feel. A very sad time.
Recently, we also had the leakage of selected cuts from the Framework document on the future of Northern Ireland. The whole thing was incredible. Pure 19th century. Conspiracies. Favourable to the cause . . . every phrase harked backward rather then forward.
By the time you read this, the document may well be published. I hope that it will, and that the two governments will have seen off the unsubtle attempt to divert them from their course.
The puzzling thing is that the Unionists are so suspicious of the unseen document. Paisley has gone on the record as saying that any cross-border body means that the UK has yielded sovereignty, and hence is unconstitutional. Where that puts the Foyle Fisheries body, the clearly stated model for cross-border bodies, is anybody’s guess.
Fume fume fume.
The papers in the Republic meanwhile have been full of reports of new initiatives and operational programmes to get people back to work. But they also note a mismatch between consumer expectation of a job at the end of the programme and post-scheme reality in the case of some, such as the Community Employment Scheme.
Now let’s be exact here. I don’t believe that anybody next or near FAS ever promised that there would be a job. And there is some excellent work done in the CEP. But at the same time, the lack of jobs at the end would suggest that we all need to be more realistic about this kind of employment scheme.
Training and education are just one side of the equation. There’s another side, job creation. If the jobs aren’t there, then a scheme like the CEP simply cannot deliver a job to participants at the end. And it’s no use leaning on the people who are running the scheme. The ones to lean on are those who are supposed to be generating new employment.
This is not a simple task. The scene keeps changing by the week. For example, some of you may remember a time before supermarkets were everywhere. I know younger folk will find it hard to believe, but supermarkets are only a generation old in Ireland.
They changed patterns of shopping. They didn’t ruin small shops entirely, though they squeezed them. But consumer demand rose a lot during that generation, so supermarkets were also tapping into a new market.
Whatever, new jobs came with them. Like checkout operating. And now, just a generation later, a new retailing revolution being pioneered in the UK threatens to make that job obsolete.
It is based on the idea that shoppers would check their own goods out, using a scanner and barcode. Apparently, since goods carry a security tag which is deactivated by the scanner, nobody rips the shop off. If anything, people seem to overcharge themselves.
And what’s the main advantage? Speed. You can have loads of checkouts, so customers never have to queue. I thought the British loved queueing, but it seems I was wrong. They like this system, and it may now go national.
So an employment scheme that had targetted the supermarket industry would be on sticky ground. That’s the way it is. There is an unemployment crisis. But there is also an employment crisis, especially in the area of lower-skill jobs. Blaming the messenger, or in this case the trainer, is a bit much.
In this context, I was fascinated to hear a bloke telling Pat Kenny on his radio show, about his unit in Tallaght, which makes rubber mats for outdoor playgrounds in South east Asia and Australia.
The mats are made from rubber crumb, which you can make using rubber stripped from tyres. However, as you might have guessed, there is no rubber crumb in Ireland, and he has to import everything from the UK. He could utilise all the used tyres in Ireland (ecologically sound, this!) if he had a particular machine to strip the rubber from the tyres.
Maybe he has it now. If he does, it becomes another small cog in a comprehensive recycling industry, an industry which by its nature is directly relevant to people without other marketable skills.
The many schemes announced or expanded in the Budget all have a contribution to make to wider prosperity and what the EU calls social solidarity. But their delivery must dovetail with other measures.
There’s a lot of Government Departments at work in our disadvantaged areas, and a lot of politicians claiming credit for one thing or another. But from the consumer viewpoint, where’s the beef? Are all these measures pulling in the same direction?
It is no secret that an unseemly amount of lamp-post marking goes on, what they call turf wars. All very wasteful. The real issue is whether the consumers benefit from the service.
Beyond that, the many measures to tackle unemployment and social exclusion must be placed in a framework of support and inclusiveness. Without that, we’re talking about using band aid to treat a malignant condition.
It just won’t work.