Letters to The Editor 2005-02-12

In response to Vincent Browne's query as to what we citizens can do to help the dire situation in the Irish peace process, I recommend that we hold a protest and call on our fellow citizens to march on our streets for the end to this very serious impasse.

The people of Ireland need to show the powers that we will not play politics at the expense of life. I call on anyone who has the ability to stage such a protest to please do so and let me know what else I can do to stop the madness that may very well lead to war and death. I believe it is time for the people themselves to directly intervene in this process and finally bring peace to Ireland.

Get all players together, do it, and do it because we want it, and do it now.

Tim Brennan

Dublin 1

In his letter (Village, 29 January) Frank McGowan fails to clarify precisely which collective "we" mandates him to dictate: "does Adams think we are eejits?" I can only speak for my sceptical self, and reply that if he is quite happy to swallow unchewed the "intelligence" reports of the crew that brought us the blockbusting Iraqi WMD certitudes, I feel forced to include him in the category of the slow learners, proverbially renowned to be capable of being fooled at least most of the time.

And given that this evidence is delivered so harmoniously, as grounds for the exclusion of Sinn Féin from the sacrosanct "democratic process", am I the only one hoary enough to remember those ancient days when due process was considered integral to the same venerated "democracy"?

Or are we all so progressively democratic now that we can dispense with such trivial details?

Might I mention that in all the accusations and parsing of Nazism that have gone down recently, nobody seems to have alluded to another little detail. As I recall it, one of the defining characteristics of fascism, and the Nazi state modelled on it by the admiring Adolf, was the corporate marriage of big business to the institutions of political control.

Those of your readers who have a smattering of the lingua franca of the neo-con tribe will be well aware that the purported demand for less government, spun as a war against wasteful bureaucracy, is the Trojan horse for the breaching of the walls of what little participative democracy has been achieved.

They say the trick is to keep your mind just open enough to ensure the brain doesn't tumble out.

Damien Flinter

Galway

The lack of action in relation to the HIV/AIDS pandemic has been described in many ways: genocide by apathy, or mass murder by complacency. Whatever the description, it changes nothing for those who are suffering.

The more you see on the ground in sub-Saharan Africa, the more incredulous the lack of reaction from the "developed" world becomes. The sheer scale of human suffering remains beyond description. The tears, the heartbreak, the disbelief – these are all a huge challenge to one's humanity.

Last week, two major meetings took place where AIDS was discussed in some detail: the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil and, concurrently, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Yet scanning the media in its various forms, coverage of these events was minimal.

In the case of the World Economic Forum, perhaps it is understandable, though regrettable. The relevance of this group to Africa has become questionable. However in the case of the Social Forum, it is a real pity that it failed yet again to gain the coverage it deserves.

This year has been named the breakthrough year for Africa. A major push to make a difference on the continent is coming from Britain. And with their presidency of the G8 and EU in the same year there is real opportunity for change.

The media have a major role in bringing about this change. They need to drive home the message that we cannot continue to ignore the greatest humanitarian catastrophe of our time, HIV/AIDS, and that action by everyone is required, not just for the sake of security but for the pure sake of ameliorating the horrific, unconscionable and unnecessary suffering associated with this disease.

The media have the power – they also have a responsibility to these invisible people. Will they rise to the challenge?

6,300 people will die today from AIDS. In how many media quarters will this get a mention?

Mary Donohoe

Chairperson, Rose Project, AIDS in Africa, 2 Merlyn Rd, Dublin 4

Given the worsening situation in the health service, the following should be forwarded as an emergency motion to the annual general meetings (AGMs) and annual delegate conferences (ADCs) of the unions, most of which are happening around this time.

This is so that we, the workers, who do have the clout, can really up the ante on this Government to properly fund our health service, instead of wasting money on such things as exclusive golf courses and increased military spending! Where are our priorities?

"Given the worsening crisis in our health service, this ADC/AGM, in unison with other unions and concerned groups, such as patients' groups, actively campaigns for:

• Free primary health care for all. The GP service is the cornerstone of every effective health care system. GP visits, along with basic dental and eye-care visits, must be free to all citizens.

• An end to hospital charges. Hospital charges are a tax on illness. Hospital charges mean that poorer families postpone essential GP and hospital visits until an emergency. This has a massively detrimental effect on the health of those families and in the long run is actually more costly on the health system.

• No more private consultant beds in public hospitals.

Private consultant beds in public hospitals are a subsidy from the taxpayer to the private patient. They also totally distort hospital admissions and impinge on the availability of beds for emergency public patients, as well as effectively allowing lucrative double-jobbing by some consultants.

"And we campaign, by whatever means necessary (ie. strikes, marches, lobbying TDs/ministers, letter writing, etc.), to ensure equal access for everyone to the health service. If necessary a ballot should be held on this."

Paul Kinsella

Dublin 9

The inability of two senior heritage officials, the Director of the National Museum and the Chief State Archaeologist, to attend and give evidence to the Oireachtas Environment Committee hearing on the proposed M3 motorway is of serious concern on two levels.

Firstly, the evidence of the Director of the National Museum and of the Chief State Archaeologist is of crucial importance to the Environment Committee's efforts to help resolve this controversy, which is of major concern both to our national heritage and also to the long-suffering commuters of Co Meath (and indeed Co Cavan).

The controversy relates to the core problem with the M3 – the archaeological significance (or otherwise) of the Tara archaeological landscape, through the heart of which one section of this motorway is routed.

The importance of this "intact archaeological landscape" was emphatically stressed from the very beginning, not only by acknowledged experts on Tara's archaeology and history but also by the archaeological consultants employed by Meath County Council at the route selection and environmental impact assessment stages.

So, no matter what one's view on the merits of the decision to route the motorway here, one would imagine that the importance of the landscape would not be in question. However, since An Bord Pleanála's approval in August 2003, the National Roads Authority, in numerous public statements and interviews including a submission to the Environment Committee hearing on 1 June, has consistently downplayed both the significance of the landscape and the number of archaeological monuments that will be destroyed.

This downplaying has now been taken up by representatives of business interests (IBEC and the Meath Chamber of Commerce) who dismissed the archaeological significance of both the landscape and the sites discovered in their recent presentations to the Oireachtas Transport Committee (1 February). The resolution of this controversy is of utmost importance to the resolution of the dispute over the M3 – ignoring or dismissing it will only exacerbate the situation.

Secondly, if the non-attendance of these experts is due in any way to their being "gagged", then the trust of the people in a much-valued democratic institution will be seriously affected. The determined work of various Oireachtas committees in recent years has done much to restore faith in the democratic and political system – a faith badly damaged by numerous political scandals. Any attempt to interfere or obstruct the work of these committees must be challenged seriously: if overly legalistic reasons are allowed to prevent these committees from hearing crucial evidence, then their deliberations and recommendations will be rendered practically worthless.

Julitta Clancy

Parsonstown, Batterstown, Co Meath

We had a notable Englishman visit our shores in recent times, and glad to say, he got some recognition in the media here. Reading of former coal miners' leader, Arthur Scargill, it was good to learn he still feels the same now as he did when Margaret Thatcher set out to destroy the already limited power enjoyed by trade unions at that time.

Mr Scargill, a fiery and noble advocate for the labouring class, has not been lessened by the passage of time or the perceived "victory" of those who set out to close all the mines and crush those hard working communities who so depended on the industry.

He has earned the name of greatness for being a man who would not compromise his principles or be bought off by greedy bosses and politicians. A number of his contemporaries were fearful and succumbed during that scary period of conservative rule in Britain, but they won't be remembered with honour in 50 years' time, when future school children will wish to learn more of him when he is referred to during their history lesson.

It was common 20 years ago (in Ireland also), for even working class people to be critical of the miners and their strike. Such was the capitalist onslaught of the time. Not much has changed. The threat of economic hardship is a tool always used to undermine the efforts of those who seek to better the lot of the manual worker. Has the closing of the mines benefitted those people who lost their jobs? How could it? But there will always be a Scargill who every now and then will stand up to be counted – and eventually respected.

Robert O'Sullivan,

Hospital Road, Bantry, Co Cork

The Competition Authority, and its various manifestations, seems to know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The entire thrust of their work, the extent of their philosophy, seems to be orientated towards the achievement of the lowest price. This intention is again shown by the recent report in favour of below cost selling and the removal of the cap on store size.

The argument is that, by removing all restriction, you get unhindered competition and this competition makes things cheaper – cheaper is fairer and therefore greater competition and fairness go hand in hand. But do they?

Both these moves may give a lower price in the short run, however cheap is not necessarily fair. For instance you can produce cheaply if you use slave labour but that obviously isn't just. In fact the favouring of unrestricted competition is inherently anti competitive. It favours economy of scale over true variety and choice. While in stories David occasionally beats Goliath, in commerce this almost never happens. The result is less choice as the giant businesses routinely flex their muscles eliminating, as their scale allows, all competition – the result is that the small shops, the family businesses, and the communities that exist around them, perish.

Then, as is the case in many European countries, the village becomes a thing of the past and in the bigger towns there is this homogeneity, where one street is the same as the next.

This favouring of the big also means that more and more profit is concentrated in the hands of a few enormous companies who become political, cultural and social bullies.

Retail operators are not altruistic, they will maintain their margins; now, in an environment where they have unlimited power, they achieve lower prices by controlling and distorting the supply chain. Recently we had our first indigenous case of vCJD, a product of corner cutting forced on producers trying to make profit in face of the demand for impossibly low and unfair prices.

The eventual result is the social distortion of a small and pampered elite on the one hand and a nation of employees on the other. Think of the eight billion euro in tax relief to the very rich highlighted in your magazine recently. Mary McAleese, in her inaugur-ation address, has set her objective to promote the value of community. She should begin with the Competition Authority, which, in the name of some mythical zombie consumer who lives to consume, constantly sells her heritage to the lowest bidder. At least Yeats' Paudeen fumbled in his own greasy till!

Jerry Cowley

County Wicklow

The university heads' responses to Enda McDonagh's piece highlighted the drab uniformity that is invading the management of Irish universities. Each of the heads, from DCU, Queens, UL and UCC, stressed that reform, strategic planning and restructuring were their priorities. Eerily, for those running academic institutions, their language chimed in the same corporate, "mission statement" tunes.

For example, Professor Peter Gregson from Queen's Belfast states universities are "people organisations" and should set themselves the challenge of "being competitive with the best in the world". Roger Downer declared that at the University of Limerick "reform is a constant" and that "change is essential if we are to achieve our mission and provide the world-class research and teaching". Like the recent OECD report, their statements reflect the assumption that management structures and management styles are all that is needed to redress the problems of our universities. No wonder that this Orwellian business-speak makes many seriously doubt where our universities are going. The obsession with restructuring has also triggered open opposition from academics in both Trinity and UCD.

The identikit commercial culture that is invading our universities needs to be challenged. In reality, the market place and business corporations are not suitable templates for higher education. Education is a service in the sense that it should be a social provision available to all, but not in the sense that it can be reduced to a provider and a consumer. The teaching and learning experience is a good deal more complex than the exchange of a product and if the student is a customer then he or she has hurdles – like exams. assessment, commitment, reflection – that other consumers simply do not. As Enda McDonagh rightly said in the previous issue of Village, universities should be society's core intellectual institutions whose object should be to inspire a truthful and truth seeking society – something which the market place analogy does not address. These once accepted views of education – why many entered higher education in the first place – seldom get a look in within today's corporate-style university.

Prevailing ideologies never come from nowhere and of course behind all this business-speak is the stark reality that the Irish Government is not going to put up the necessary funds. As the OECD report makes abundantly clear, a competitive edge and "the global contest" is the best way of attracting funds and fill the vacuum that the Government refuses to.

Why the heads of Irish universities accept this logic is baffling. First the percentage of GNP (gross national product) that Ireland spends on tertiary education (1.3 per cent) is below the OECD average. And in terms of expenditure per student Ireland ranks only 14 out of 26 OECD countries. In a country whose economy is booming, whose educated people are deemed to have contributed 10 per cent to GNP over the past decade and whose funding in real terms declined by 10 per cent in 2004 alone, it is beyond belief that those who are running our universities simply accept this serious handicap and refuse to challenge the Government on this.

Some of the heads go along with the OECD recommendation that part of this shortfall can be filled by reintroducing student fees. Apart from this being another barrier within an already inequitable system, students fees amount to shooting universities in the foot. Higher participation rates into tertiary education in Ireland have taken place in the context of no tuition fees for undergraduates. There are heavy registration fees – and their stealth growth is a scandal – but these are still below what tuition fees were in the past. To introduce fees again will inevitably restrict student intake – and it is astonishing that those who apparently advocate a market philosophy, and more recently "social inclusion", do not see that.

Others are looking to make the funding deficit fall back on the academics. Professor Daniel O'Hare former president of DCU, has suggested that permanency should be replaced by short-term contracts US-style. The suggestion completely ignores that our academics and their contractual position have rights which are laid out in legislation and cannot simply be brushed away. Our union, SIPTU, has recently secured contracts of indefinite duration for some of our many temporary academics under the Fixed Term Workers Act of 2003 and we shall be seeking more.

It is also being muted that academic pay scales should give way to individualised contracts so that very well paid high-profile academics can be squeezed in. For all the present talk of universities needing to be accountable, one area in which they most certainly are is the transparent public sector pay scales where the tax payer can see what they are getting. Doing away with these would be a public loss as well as a doubtful way of attracting students.

Finally, more funds are to be extracted from our overseas students – hence the recent trip to China where the total value of the education agreements involving eleven Irish higher education institutions will be worth €38 million to the Irish economy. Leaving aside whether we should be doing business with a regime which has such an appalling record on human rights, do we really want to see our higher education institutions turned into private fee paying colleges for those not lucky enough to be EU citizens?

The fees that Chinese students pay can be anywhere around €9,000 which means that for all our talk of multiracial inclusion we are discriminating against Non-EU students and in process hoping they will fill the cash vacuum left by our own government. Incidentally, lest anyone is under the illusion that these Chinese students are well able to pay these fees, go into a Dublin pub, kitchen, or hotel and you will see the evidence of night working at low rates for these tired overworked, often insulted, students. Is this the educational experience we want to give them?

For many of us who work in the universities there is no getting away from the fact that Government funds is what we need to see more of. The glossy packaging of market-speak fails to convince us otherwise and achieves little else than reducing the educational experience to "world-class" consumerism.

Marnie Holborow

President, Education Branch, SIPTU and Lecturer in School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies, Dublin City University

I welcome the debate that Village has opened about the direction of university management in Ireland.

However, for many people this debate within the National University of Ireland (NUI) and higher education (HE) generally is not, as we are being encouraged to think, about how to modernise. While some contributors are clearly genuine, for others it is apparently more about disguising the activities taking place in their institutions behind a fog of seemingly benign, if woolly, philosophising and management speak.

Anyone within the NUI/HE system who protests publicly about apparent wrong-doing or mismanagement is most often branded in the press as being "old-fashioned" or unable to understand the necessary conditions for running a modern HE institution.

Are we being asked to accept that mismanagement and incompetence equate to modernisation? This response to the genuine concerns of experienced and progressive academics has so far fooled many national media journalists – who infuriatingly persist in viewing events at University College Cork and other HE institutions as a "traditionalist versus moderniser" argument, and in reporting these events in such inaccurate terms.

There is also an extraordinary naivety apparent in some of the media commentary, which makes the unquestioning assumption that those who come to this issue from an extreme business perspective are both efficient and altruistic. Let's put this idea to rest once and for all: there is at least as much incompetence and mismanagement in the commercial sector as there is in the academic world. The mere fact of being business-orientated proves nothing at all and academics should stop allowing themselves to be patronised by these self-professed saviours of academia – many of whom have nothing more to offer than an eye for the main chance.

No case has been made to support the idea that by handing over increased amounts of taxpayers' money to the business buccaneers, while at the same time significantly reducing accountability for what they are doing with that money, we have found the solution to our higher education worries.

Concerns have variously been raised around the country about, for example, funding claims for lecturers who don't exist, inappropriate funding claims for EU schemes and corrupt examination and assessment practices. Then there is the widespread practice of keeping staff indefinitely on temporary or part-time contracts until they compromise or prove themselves unlikely to rock the boat. This intimidating system has created an academic workforce that is cowed and fearful. Bullying is endemic and persistent failures of reasonable management result in a constant stream of court cases – all paid for out of taxpayers' money.

At UCC, Professor Gerry Wrixon is, in the opinion of many people, seriously undermining the principle of accountability to the public administration for universities. He has, modestly, forced through a change in the university's constitution to try to ensure that he, uniquely among university heads, will be able to continue in office for an additional term. The Public Accounts Committee and the Health and Safety Authority will be able to verify the difficulties they have had in accessing information from UCC that should have been readily available to them.

Why is the Government doing so little about this situation? UCC does not even have a Visitor as it is supposed to do. Why not? This has all repeatedly been pointed out at the highest level of Government and yet nothing is done. Exactly whose interests are being protected here? Where is the openness and transparency that Aine Hyland, for example, is talking about ("University heads respond", Village, 29 January)? Can she really be satisfied that UCC's track record in recent years would stand up to the statements of grand principle that she has made in your pages? Perhaps she could explain why, when I recently tried to search the UCC website for a list of its governors, I was told that mine was on a list of IP addresses which were forbidden access to this information?

Consider also the experience of an ex-employee with a court case currently outstanding against UCC who put a trace on a confidential and personal email that he sent to the Human Resources office at UCC. He discovered that it was forwarded to no fewer than 30 email addresses at institutions and organisations all around the country. Blacklisting?

Are the interests of private university funders too powerful in Ireland for any questioning of what is happening within NUI to be allowed? Do we know to what extent UCC and other higher education institutions are indebted to these interests?

Enda McDonagh alluded to the pharmaceutical, genetic modification and defence industries in his essay ("Make or break time for Irish universitites", 22 January) and argued, in soothing words, that nothing wrong was taking place. Ireland is being substantially colonised by interests like these. There is an urgent need to understand the full extent and nature of the role the NUI is playing in this regard.

The Irish Times recently reported that attempts were being made to expel Professor Des Clarke from UCC simply for asking questions. I wonder how Enda McDonagh feels about that? What does he have to say about the so-called "Ethics Committee" that has been established to consider Professor Clarke's case? Can McDonagh guarantee that there will be proper scrutiny of the decisions that are made in respect of Professor Clarke's proposed expulsion?

Professor Clarke is comparatively lucky, however, that he is a professor. Aside from the constitutional safeguards that he is entitled to, he also has some friends within the closed shop that is the NUI so he may have some chance of surviving. There are many lesser mortals who have been left to twist in the wind (minus their jobs) by pathetically frightened colleagues for doing the same thing – i.e. raising legitimate questions about legitimate concerns.

What is most worrying about all this is that we are being encouraged to believe that our universities are still innocent citadels of intellectual endeavour – safe places to send our children – where the highest principles of human welfare and advancement are actually worried about and safeguarded. No doubt there really are some people left within higher education who try to uphold these ideals but, under the current regime, their career prospects must be pretty bleak. There is another debate about the state of higher education that urgently needs to begin.

Miriam Cotton