On Friday I will be voting in the notoriously volatile 4-seat Dublin Central constituency. I am very excited. If I weren’t so ignorant of popular culture, I might say something like CAN’T WAAAIT in a poor attempt at a Limerick accent. Election literature has been pouring in through my letterbox for weeks and the candidates are interesting to say the least. With Bertie Ahern gone – the ex-Taoiseach turned sports columnist is hiding in a PVC cupboard until the Presidential Election comes around – it is almost assured that Labour stalwart Joe Costello will top the poll and be elected on the first count.
It is predicted that he will be followed Dáilward by rattly old puffin Maureen O’Sullivan (Ind), Tony Gregory’s campaign manager, and Fine Gael’s Paschal Donohoe, who received a First in Economics & Political Science from this very college. The fourth seat will be a toss-up between Sinn Féin deputy leader Mary-Lou ‘Mouthpiece Without A Mandate’ McDonald, Cllr. Áine Clancy (Labour) and Fianna Fáil’s Mary Fitzpatrick, who has a degree in German & Italian. The latter was, in her own words, “shafted” by Bertie Ahern and running mate Cyprian Brady on the morning of the 2007 election, when letters instructing voters to put Brady down as #2 instead of her were distributed to 30,000 homes. Thus, she may benefit from the “Ah Jaysus isn’t that dreadful” sympathy vote.
Coming up the rear is devoted community worker Christy Burke [pron: Booorke], formerly of the IRA and Sinn Féin, who will no doubt affect McDonald’s chances of gaining a seat, and various no-hoper independents with silly policies and no qualifications. Notables include bald tattoo artist and motorcycle enthusiast John “Pluto” Hyland, racist postman Pat Talbot of Immigration Control Platform, who presumably doesn’t deliver post to people with fordhen-sounding names, a gammy-eyed homophobe called Paul, a bus-driver-faced man whose CAPS LOCK LEAFLET reads like a Howler from Harry Potter, and niceguy Phil Kearney of the Greens who likes bicycles and is very NICE. I am tempted to give the lattermost my Number 1 just so that I can track the progress of my ballot paper when his 13 first preferences are distributed. It’ll feel like voting twice! Also, if there’s any justice in the world, Cyprian Brady will come last.
Good ol' Bertie
What does this have to do with literacy I hear you ask. Don’t be so impatient, I’m getting there! The plethora of election leaflets are horrendously vague. They are bite-sized, dumbed-down, patronising. They are indistinct, inexact and ill-defined. They use buzzwords, alliteration and tripartites. They are woollier than a Wicklow sheep. They insult our intelligence. They are like fun-sized Mars bars. Programme for Employment! Real Political Reform! Job Protection & Creation! New legislation! Honesty, integrity and courage! Jobs, reform and fairness! Serious challenges! Leadership and innovative policies! Renewing Ireland! Where’s the detail? It’s almost as if they think a large body of text will put us off… like we’re LAZY or something.
I am Class Rep for JF Italian and I have found that extremely concise emails with keywords CAPITALISED and emboldened always get a better response than those of the long, rambly variety. Of the recent glut of Provostial candidate messages, I only read the short, succinct ones. We are the Google generation. We google things. Very rarely is a globule of desired information more than a click away. Look up an encyclopædia? Ha! What is this, 1989? We tweet our thoughts in 140 characters or less. Our Facebook statii are slightly more generous at 420. We have lightning-fast broadband connections and would probably burst a vein if we ever had to use the CLCS computers, let alone go back to the dark days of dial-up.
This superabundance of information has grave consequences. When we are given a month to read a book and do an essay on it, we grimace and groan and inevitably leave it until the early hours of Sunday morning to get going, simultaneously tweeting “246 words down, 1,754 to go. FML.” (Thank you calculator.com). According to American psychologist Nicholas Carr, the result is “cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning”. He makes a very strong argument for internet usage rewiring our brains: the parts of the brain that deal with temporary, fleeting morsels of information are heavily encumbered and those parts that allow for deep thought and the attainability of hard-won knowledge are neglected and weakened over time. Scary stuff. Maybe I’ll restrict myself to ‘Top Stories’ in my fb news feed from now on.
We spend far more time checking our profiles than we do reading books or newspapers. Perhaps this is why many political parties disregard the youth vote. They assume we’re politically disengaged, illiterate in terms of current affairs. Election? MEH. In a recent survey conducted by a lesser publication in UCDD (University College Dublin, Dublin), 24% said they would vote Labour, 20% Fine Gael, 20% Independents / ULA / others, 5% Fianna Fáil, 4% Fine Gael and 17% MEH, EFFORT OF FORMING AN OPINION! At present, there are NO Dáil deputies under the age of 30 and young upstarts like Dylan Haskins are very much the exception to the rule.
At the risk of sounding like a complete Luddite, the language used on Facebook is also extremely detrimental to literacy. PeOpLe RaNdOmLy CaPiTaLiSe ThInGs AnD r3pLaC3 ‘E’ with ‘3’. This is disastrous in cases where the user is already from a background of low educational attainment. Ireland has a functional illiteracy rate of between 20 and 40%. That is to say, 20 to 40% of the population have massive issues with reading things like train timetables and prescriptions. How are such people expected to make an informed choice on polling day? Another startling statistic is the number of people from socially-deprived areas going on to third-level education: 10% from Ballyfermot-Inchicore and 87% from Foxrock, a stark difference. Ballyfermot-Inchicore is an area with double the national average rate of functional illiteracy. Serious action must be taken by the next government to break the vicious cycle of underachievement there.
The poverty cycle begins with a book-free childhood, struggling in primary school, really struggling in secondary school and very often ends in underage pregnancy / drug use / alcoholism / a menial job / the Dole. These people, victims of poor education, end up replicating their parents’ environment. The links between functional illiteracy and violence are also well established. Humans are highly emotional creatures – we constantly feel the need to express ourselves, one of the reasons Facebook is so popular – but a lack of facility for language can seriously hinder self-expression, leading to physical expression. And I don’t mean interpretive dance. Violence is a sort of thwarted speaking. Reading, on the other hand, has a softening, humanising effect; it is a hallmark of humanity.
German philosopher Immanuel Kant talked about personal Aufklärung (enlightenment / age of reason) being achieved by emerging from beneath a self-imposed Unmündigkeit (voicelessness). How does one go about achieving this? By reading of course. Knowledge is power! Reading from an early age is crucial to educational success and self-advancement, a message which Fianna Fáil has failed to propagate or instigate for the past 16 years. There are fully-grown adults out there with the reading capacity of a 4th Class pupil or worse. These people are ‘half-baked’, to borrow a term from Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winning book, The White Tiger.
It is possible to get a decent mark in the Leaving Certficate and still be half-baked. Rather than encouraging individual thought, it encourages the regurgitation of rote-learnt material in an inhumane timeframe. On arrival in college, students spend months unlearning bad habits. Computers do not feature at all, Ireland having been ranked 25th of 27 in an EU-wide survey of computer literacy. Subjects vital to self-expression e.g. Drama, Psychology and Politics are nowhere to be seen. As for Irish… tubaiste ceart is ea iad na modhanna múinteoireachta a úsaidtear. We also refuse to acknowledge the ascendant world powers – we should be learning Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Russian… German!
Could these factors be behind our illiterate political system, rife with gombeen clientelism, as epitomised by Jackie Healy-Rae? Could this be the reason we treat out Teachtaí Dála as little more than local councillors? Could this be why the farmers only ever vote FF (Dev) or FG (Collins)? Could this be why we keep going back to Fianna Fáil, despite the fact they are clearly Éire’s figurative abusive boyfriend, constantly letting us down and reneging on promises? (Pat Rabbitte recently remarked “at the beginning of the campaign, my view was that if PJ Mara [FF kingpin] was caught buggering Micheál Martin in Brown Thomas’s window, they would still get 25 per cent of the vote”). I reckon so.
Nom Nom
We, the functionally illiterate Irish people, will be taken in by ridiculous empty guarantees such as John Gormley’s “100,000 jobs in green energy”. We could probably power 100,000 houses if we put a solar panel on his forehead and connected him to the National Grid. Fianna Fáil has copied and pasted most of their ‘Plean Ceart don Todhchaí’ from Dermot Desmond, a man with a railroad baron moustache who makes frequent appearances at the Court of Dodgy Dealings. Fine Gael, under the stewardship of Inda ‘Sexy Daddy’ Kenny, Michael ‘Bald’ Noonan and Leo ‘Abrasive’ Varadkar, have a gaping €5bn euro hole in their plan. Sinn Féin live in Cloud Cuckoo Land (aka their HQ at Parnell Square West, opposite the smoking preggos of the Rotunda) and seem to think that we can just not pay back the EU/IMF fund. Crazy talk. Illiterate talk!
All joking aside, there is a solution. A slow, painful solution that will require large investment and grassroots passion and enthusiasm. A solution that will not come to fruition for several years, unlike a Facebook frape, which takes effect instantly. It ought to be the cornerstone for any recovery. What am I talking about? EDUCATION, EDUCATION, EDUCATION. The Labour Party has proposed a literacy scheme that would involve 120 minutes of intensive reading in the classroom every day. I would go further and suggest some kind of legislation whereby parents were given incentives to read to their kids. The Dole – money for sitting on one’s scratcher – needs huge reform. FÁS courses or voluntary work or training places ought to be a prerequisite for receiving such payments. And we need to stop throwing money at those Goddamn banks.
In the Celtic tiger days, we had giveaway budgets, light-touch financial regulation and the Anglo-Irish Golden Circle. We invested in roads and the LUAS and an unhealthy HSE. We attracted the likes of Dell, Intel and Google. The one thing we didn’t invest in was the people. We became complacent, the Moët went to our heads. Like the dodo that found a perfect island home free of predators, we became complacent and lost the power of (educational and economic) flight. We are wallowing in mediocrity. Project Maths? Knowledge economy? TCD-UCD Research Alliance? We need to start at the very beginning. We need our Junior Infants to be voracious readers. We need to mol an óige (ionas go dtiocfaidh sí). We need the post of Minister for Education to be the most sought-after Cabinet position. Look after education and the rest will look after itself. Oh and Firewalling Facebook wouldn’t be a bad idea either.
Sam Ford
