End schools’ strangle-hold on holidays and save us all the hassle

THE gardaí may have built up a mountain of overtime hours ensuring that we all stay safe on the roads this weekend, but who’s protecting us in the airports, I ask you?

A hazard has recently emerged there. Among the millions jetting off to their second homes in Torremolinos, Malaga, Nerja, Cannes and Bratislava are a few thousand toddlers, each equipped with a lethal neon-pink wheelie case. The combination of the low height of the toddler and the long dark handle of the wheelie creates a kind of moving trip-wire.

I saw one woman at the airport come a cropper over one of these toddler plus wheelie combinations this weekend and it was good and spectacular, involving sunspecs (off the hair) passports and flight details (out of her hand) and a mobile phone which, as mobile phones do, disassembled into its constituent parts when it hit the floor.

While other travellers fell over her own fallen case, she was hauled to her feet by the man with her and favoured with a filthy look by the mother of the kid who had caused the accident. The fallen female thanked the people handing her back her property.

“This airport,” she said. “Isn’t it a disgrace?”

Everybody nodded. It’s a particularly Irish skill, this capacity to come to a warmly shared consensus on a palpably daft proposition, as long as it puts us in Innocent Victim position. A bit like the way we all agree it’s the roads and the Government that make our journey home in the evening so onerous. Nothing to do with us insisting on driving one of the millions of cars slowing each other down. Similarly, it never strikes us that if we all suddenly take simultaneously to the air, this might stretch the airport facilities a bit.

It may not be fair on the airport authorities, but the mobbing of their facilities this weekend was a good thing for the rest of us. Permanent emigration may have scarred this nation’s race memory, but temporary emigration is your only man. Suddenly traffic moves smoothly and a driver can listen to music because one of the great under-researched scientific truths is that hard news tends to emigrate at holiday times too.

You can pull in on impulse to a coffee shop, park close by, and have your cappuccino undisturbed by your mobile phone, because all the people who’d normally be ringing you are in the air, going somewhere else. The people in the coffee shop behave differently, too. Like survivors of a disaster, they experience disinhibition, joyfully exchanging small talk and sharing space in a much more positive way.

At the Easter weekend 10 years ago, it was difficult to get a table in a hotel restaurant, because every family in the country had made the move from eating at home to bringing Granny, Grandad and the kids out for the celebratory meal. Within just a decade, even that has changed. So many families do the temporary emigration trip that hotel restaurants, this weekend, were filled but not stuffed.

It’s so obvious that — as a nation — we have missed it. We need to do national flexi-time.

INSTEAD of the half-hearted systems currently in play, where the flexi-timer can come in very early and go home just as early, as long as they’re in the workplace during the “core” hours, we should radically recalibrate the way we work, so that people can take a larger number of shorter holidays than at present.

Instead of whingeing about the infrastructure — like the woman in the airport — this would remove some of the people that so stretch the infrastructure at the same predictable times of the day and of the year.

We’re locked into a mental calendar which is largely constructed around school holidays. The children (and the teachers) have to get three months’ holidays in the summer. That’s a given. Why? It may have made sense when the overwhelming majority of the population went to seaside resorts for their break, because those months were the only time when halfway decent weather could be hoped for and there was nothing to do, anyway, except dart in and out of the sea or build a sandcastle.

The proliferation of leisure pursuits has changed all that. At this stage, it’s a nostalgic surprise to encounter a child on a beach with a bucket and spade.

From about six onward, children feel cheated if they’re not careering down a bright red plastic chute into a chlorinated pool or having their overhead lob coached.

Almost all of the leisure activities children on holiday demand, expect and enjoy are available under the shelter of a roof.

Even those requiring commitment to the great outdoors can be undertaken in all weathers. I watched a man in a wetsuit surfing — or trying to — for three hours on Saturday evening in a sleety gale. I kept wanting to ring the coastguard to come and kick sense in to him, but he seemed happy enough.

Then there are the huge numbers of families who regard meeting Mickey Mouse in the Magic Kingdom as a sort of rite of passage necessary to ensure safe transition into the teen years. Disney, SeaWorld and all the other theme parks, operate year-round and would welcome more customers during the winter months.

If we planned it right, we could have as much as a fifth of the population on holiday at any one time, with immediate and tangible benefits to traffic congestion and time taken to commute to work. Nor would the benefits stop there. A&Es would be under less pressure. Travellers wouldn’t be forced to pay vastly increased fares.

All we have to do is stop being led and said by school holidays.

Teachers would hate it, of course. Understandably. They hate it right now, when the more affluent parents of their students remove those students for one or two weeks, outside of mid-term break or official holiday times, in order to have them taught how to ski down an alp.

Alp-intimacy tends to disrupt the continuity of a classroom, but what is the continuity of a classroom compared with emptier, safer roads, less stressed people and a more coherent use of all national facilities? The solution to an interruption in continuity would be to extend the grind concept.

Originally designed to bring a student up to or ahead of their classmates on a particular subject, the grind could be adapted, with a grind teacher spending a few days each week with the students who have returned from holiday and need to be brought up to date on what their class covered in their absence.

Parents could plan holidays at a time that suits the entire family, rather than having holiday times thrust upon them by the fact that their children attend school.

Just as employees have holiday entitlements, so should schoolgoers.

Applicable at whatever time of the year suits them and their families.