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Conor Lenihan’s ‘Facist’ Furore and Education Cuts
Read more about: Comment, Education, Fianna Fail, Fine Gael 
Is it really a big story? Really? Personal insults do not mark out a quality debater but nonetheless the big picture last night was that many thousands turned out in the hail, sleet and snow to protest at education cuts.
Those cuts have yielded horror stories around the country. Like the school in Cloneen, Tipp which will have a class go from 28 to 37 after losing a teacher or the one in Tralee with 180+ foreign born students set to lost 4 out of 6 language support teachers.
Kids everywhere are getting their prospects cut short with cuts that might last 2-3 years, years they won’t get back. It is not like they spend a huge amount of time expose to learning – it is a relatively short space within which to make sure they are equipped for the world of work, relationship and responsibility.
Speaking to a number of teachers last night the very clear point was many of those layoffs in Janauary and September are the youngest teachers, the ones who are recently hired but teach the ICT classes and liase with Leaving Cert Applied students. They do donkey work that older teachers don’t have time or skills to do (I was told that the ICT training grant has gone). So we are indeed setting kids back years.
Focussing on Lenihans comments or non comments [Pat Kenny led off with it this morning delving into education much later], leading the political debate with this kind of personalised nonsense (facilitated by both parties) does the worst of all worlds. It paints politicians as insular and the media as the kind of idiots who follow this nonsense slavishly.
Ah, as long as the real issue gets lost in the furore. That’s the real point: increased class sizes and the loss of English support teachers mean that the most vunerable children are going to get left behind for the next 2-3 years (yeah right, does anyone really believe Education cuts will be rolled back in that timeframe?): those with learning difficulties and those who don’t speak English as a first language. They can’t get those years of falling behind made up to them again: they’re academically fucked, and it’s this government that’s doing the fucking.
“It paints politicians as insular and the media as the kind of idiots who follow this nonsense slavishly.”
Well, our politicians are insular and the media is made up out of idiots, so that probably makes for a photo-realistic painting, you know, provided that the artist manages to capture the idiocy of the politicians and the insularity of the media while he’s at it.
Above: “Tralee with 180+ foreign born students set to lose 4 out of 6 language support teachers.”
What has Tralee got to support its own not to mind 180+ foreign born students. How long more can we continue to imagine that we are the most generous nation in the world?