Irish Examiner view: Play a long game for the right answer
Tthe Chetwynd Viaduct, which the proposed Cork to Kinsale Greenway project seeks to refurbish.
That old advice that you should never ask a question unless you already know the answer is not solely the province of lawyers exercising their skills in cross examination.
It is equally useful for anyone who has ever tried to run a meeting with dissenting voices and, indeed, politicians a-plenty.
One of the most telling examples of recent years was the effort of Leo Varadkar and his government to apply some modern gloss to the Constitution by rewriting references to marriage, mothers, and family life and placing those forward in a referendum.
The public ended this particular escapade by sending our leaders, to borrow a phrase from the unofficial national anthem of Scotland, “homeward tae think again”.
Unlike our votes on the Treaty of Lisbon in 2008 and 2009, where we were asked the question until we gave the right answer, the modern trend is not to return to the well unless the ground is well and truly prepared.
And that can mean delays because of the impact of that pesky thing called democracy.
On issues large and small the requirement now is to over-compensate on communication and consultation.
Even well-meaning plans have scant chance of leaving the drawing board without an excess of zeal in efficiently taking the proposition before the people affected and incorporating their feedback.
On the face of it you might imagine there could be little principled objection to the establishment of a rural greenway between Cork and Kinsale, a project which seeks to provide safe walking and cycling infrastructure in a beautiful part of Ireland.
A gentle contribution to active living; something for visitors and locals alike; a separation between cars and bikes. What’s not to like?
Quite a lot it seems with councillors and their staff on the receiving end of “considerable abuse” from opponents of the proposed routes.
A former mayor of Co Cork, Fianna Fáil councillor Gillian Coughlan, said the current plan “has no chance of getting over the line now".
Feelings are running high and some farms could be sundered by the greenway.
Other councillors are demanding that consultation is revisited and claim that some of the correspondence to the 1,700 property owners affected has been sent to the wrong addresses.
Pressure is growing for a phased introduction of sections of the corridor and while this would dilute the synergies of a “big bang” launch it may be inevitable given the plan’s scope.
Special “wow” features for cyclists and walkers include the 175-year-old Chetwynd Viaduct, part of the former Great Southern and Western Railway, to be brought up to modern safety standards and the re-opening of a 820m-long curved tunnel at Goggins Hill.
Consultation is due to be completed by the end of 2025 and the feedback will influence scope and timescale.
And it’s not as if that’s the end of significant questions being asked of Cork and its citizens.
The major BusConnects proposal for the provision of 11 sustainable transport corridors and the preferred route for Luas Cork, running from Ballincollig to Mahon Point are reaching the point of decision for Government.
If they are given the nod they will enter the planning process.
Substantial central funding is required and there will be some apprehension ahead of next week’s Budget 2026 as to whether previous commitments to infrastructure will be protected from contending spending claims.
Even if they are, there is still plenty of talking to be done.
An advertisement carried in the and other national newspapers this week proclaimed that 83% of young Irish consumers believe “that real investigative reporting is valuable”, based on a quantitative survey of 2,000 people between May and July.
Some of those enthusiasts might have noticed this week that one of its greatest exponents, Morton Mintz, the man who exposed the damaging consequences of prescription medical products such as thalidomide and the Dalkon Shield intrauterine birth control device, died at his home in Washington, aged 103.
Mintz, the son of Jewish migrants from Lithuania, was an investigative reporter for for three decades and wrote 10 books on the subjects of corporate corruption and government negligence.
On Mintz’s 100th birthday in 2022, the campaigner and activist Ralph Nader said: “More than any other reporter, Mintz broke open the walls surrounding the media’s non-coverage of serious consumer, environmental, and worker harms and rights.”
It was Mintz’s articles in 1962 which drew widespread attention to the fact that the mothers of several thousand children in Europe, who were born with deformities, had taken the drug thalidomide for morning sickness during the first trimester of their pregnancies.
In July this year, there was a debate in the Dáil, initiated by the Fine Gael TD Barry Ward, concerning a Government acknowledgement of the position of the 40 or so Irish survivors and the glacial pace of progress in recognising the State’s liabilities.
Mintz said that the thalidomide story “dealt a lasting blow to the then widely-held notion that science and technology always or nearly always produce benign results”.
Those scales have certainly dropped from our eyes in the past six decades.
Back in March, as we marked five years since the outbreak of covid and the beginning of the pandemic, there were a series of reports commenting on the impact of school closures on children and young people.
In the dry language of the CSO, 71% of parents felt that the social development of at least one of their children had been negatively impacted by the periodic closures of early childcare and education facilities.
A similar proportion, some 68%, said the same about education and learning.
Meanwhile, the ESRI concluded that the pandemic dramatically worsened student attendance, wellbeing, and engagement.
Our excruciatingly slow has just opened its consultation for children and young people, so it may be useful to heed the evidence emerging from the British inquiry, which, for now, serves as a proxy for our experience in Ireland.
Parents may be able to determine how much better matters were in the Republic and hope that they were not the same — or worse — as the tribulations borne by our nearest neighbours.
In a grim account based on 18,000 submitted stories and 400 targeted interviews, Clair Dobbin, a leading counsel for the inquiry, said that school closures damaged “the very fabric of childhood” and left some children exposed to pornography and suffering “grievous” harm without the protection of being in their classrooms.
She warned that some of the evidence to be heard during the four weeks dedicated to this module in London would “be hard to listen to”.
The barrister described the curtailment of play, the loss of all the normal rites of passage — birthdays, parties, exams, shared school activities — and the impact on young people’s mental health and their ability to make and sustain friendships.
She spoke of the damage caused by lives moving online so rapidly.
While some youngsters watched violent pornography, many struggled to access lessons and spent many hours gaming rather than learning.
One child told of playing the video game “for, like, six months”, while another said they played Roblox online for up to 19 hours a day.
This nightmarish insight was preceded by an impact film, voiced by adults to protect identities, which provided testimonies from young people.
One child said her friend had died; another lost 12kg while suffering from covid, and a third had to be put on a ventilator.
Britain’s department of education undertook zero contingency planning for school closures before lockdown was declared in March 2020.
In written evidence, Gavin Williamson, the then education secretary, said there had been a “discombobulating, 24-hour sea change from keeping schools open on March 16, to discussions about closing schools on March 17”.
On March 18, schools were ordered to close — six days later than in Ireland.
Dr Mike Ryan, who retired from his post as deputy director general of the World Health Organization a fortnight ago, said in Dublin recently that school closures had a hugely detrimental effect.
“The benefit of that... has not been clearly demonstrated,” he added.
Let us hope that all the issues around this important dimension to our collective lockdown experience are fully ventilated when our own experts get around to reporting upon it.
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