New government must get us all up to speed

WHOEVER gets in, I hope they give me broadband!

Here in the sticks of West Cork, I have dial-up access. This is so slow that watching the information appear on the screen is like watching moss growing.

I’m sending in this column before the election results so that Irish Examiner staff will be free to busy themselves with election topics.

The natural world is, of course, timeless and does not alter according to voting trends. But hold on there: is it not governments that decide how the natural, as well as the human, environment is managed? The EU repeatedly fined the last government for spectacularly failing to meet its environmental obligations. In dealing with developers, it would bend over backwards. But in protecting our environment, government action, like the water in the Corrib, left a nasty taste in the mouth and smelled to the high heavens.

Whoever gets in, I hope that as well as providing a first world hospital service, they will protect our lovely country and, meanwhile, provide every unfortunate “peripherally-domiciled” individual access to the worldwide web via broadband. The only way of getting broadband here, less than 30 miles from our second city, is by private contract. I have begged the contractor to come to my home again and again to see if new housing developments around us and gaps in the tree-line will allow reception from nearby masts. He is too busy to come. God bless our government! Until such time as it can provide the service itself, it delivers us into the hands of the private sector but installs no mandatory requirement that that sector connects us.

Had we broadband, my son could have been studying for his exams at home this week rather than paying rent in the city. These days students mine information from countless sources on the internet via broadband. How did we manage, with our second-hand-bought, dog-eared texts at all?

Cardinal Newman, whose essay ‘The Idea of A University’, was a set text when I was in school, said that learning isn’t to do with remembering information but remembering where to find it when required. Education, he said, has a much wider remit and requires exposure to a broad range of ideas and issues, and providing the opportunity to freely discuss them. The new government will have to take on the Irish Farmers’ Association on the issue of walking access.

England and Wales recently stole a march in the international walking market by legislation allowing public freedom to roam on land above 600m and on land anywhere which has been designated as rough grazing (where there aren’t crops) by teams that surveyed every acre of land in the two countries. In Scotland, there is a right-to-roam everywhere except in the proximity of homes and private gardens. The British government is seriously considering legislation to allowing walking access along the entire coastline of the Britain.

Meanwhile, in Ireland, the issue of access is still mired in contention. Some farmers have expropriated areas of Ireland and want money to let the public pass. When asked why can’t the public walk on the remote hilly land or bogs, where there is nothing, not even sheep, they fix the interviewer with a smug grin and ask would he or she like people walking across their front garden. Such half-witted distortions and false analogies are the regular response to debate with the IFA on this issue.

It is ironic that, having complained about lack of broadband access early in this article, I had reason to consult the internet to check my facts on the British walking legislation mentioned above. After 20 minutes of trying to access the Ramblers’ Association website in Britain without success, I gave up and telephoned Roger Garland, chairman of Keep Ireland Open, in Dublin. I, thereby, got the information in a couple of minutes.