Fin Keegan

Another interesting revelation from the UNICEF report on Child Well-Being in Rich Countries I wrote about previously is that books are not valued in many wealthy and successful countries.

Below is a chart from that survey showing the Percentage of Children age 15 reporting less than 10 books in the home. It’s hard to generalize (even for me!) based on these figures so I will just confine myself to noting that the paucity of books in over 10% of Irish homes should be a real cause for concern for parents, children, educators, and community leaders here.

Unfortunately, despite Ireland’s literary tradition and love of the English language–whether spoken, written, or sung–our libraries are generally lamentable.

It may surprise you to hear that their equivalents in Las Vegas, where we previously lived, were infinitely superior in every way than their oddly impoverished Irish counterparts. (See comparison figures below).

On top of this, booksellers here are not what they were (vide , for one, the stock-gutting of Waterstones on Dawson Street), we love television, and the public transport system is poor: together all conspire to reduce opportunities for people to read good books. Children, meanwhile, are not read to at night, and when they are taken to bookshops find either “franchise books” (which may or may not be good) and celebrity tie-in pulp, which is generally not.

Quite reasonably they conclude more fun will be had online or playing console games.

So, what are we going to do about it? Read to your kids every bedtime. Let them see you enjoying books. And maybe embarrass your local bookseller into thinking beyond Harry Potter, Madonna, and Enid Blyton

The figures from the two library systems: Las Vegas slightly outspends Ireland on library stock purchased [$5.47 to $5.10 per capita]. But the most telling characteristic, for me, is the non-stock spend: only 11% of the Irish budget is spent on stock. Las Vegas, by contrast, raises their stock-spend to 20%, almost double the Irish rate, while maintaining an ambitious expansion program to meet the needs of a continuing population influx. [Sources: Ireland; Las Vegas; and xe.net for currency rates]

A recent report by UNICEF on child well-being in rich countries seems to vindicate our decision to raise the kids in Ireland.

Across “six dimensions” averaging measures such as “Health and Safety” and “Subjective Well-Being”, the United Nations agency arrives at the conclusion that kids are best off being brought up in either Scandinavia/Switzerland, the Benelux, Spain/Italy, or Ireland.

The US and UK, though scoring high in Education (US) or Health/Safety (UK), manage to come dead last in the 21 OECD nations under analysis.

However, a closer look (click on table image below) reveals that free-market countries tend to fare poorly on these measures. Why? Because the internal wealth disparity is wider than society permits in, say, more socialist-leaning countries such as Sweden or France. And freedom of expression tends to be more valued in the UK and US, leading to lower scores for child “Behaviour and Risks”.

One corollary of this is that if you are wealthy (and thus healthy, safe, and well-educated) in the UK or US, your children’s well-being moves up to par with the countries at the top off the UNICEF table.

(Or it does if your “family and peer relationships” are not fractured: interestingly, the US/UK tradition of self-actualization means that, on that score, the two largest free-traders again trail their wealthy cohorts in Europe.)

Click on images above to enlarge data tables.

Source [PDF]: UNICEF, Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries, Innocenti Report Card 7 (Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2007)

Recent riots in the Dublin suburb of Finglas and a teenage double suicide in my own county underline the responsibility we all have to help our young people grow up to become responsible, productive, and happy citizens. (Meanwhile, in my old home of Las Vegas, the radio station where I worked was hit by bullets following a post-school fracas across the street.)

The kids are not alright. An essay by Paul Graham examines adolescent unhappiness: his thesis, in a nutshell, is that because of the way we organize Western societies now teenagers are denied the experience of real and meaningful work in their teens. Money quote:

If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do.

But the problem is not that we choose to institutionally educate our children: the problem is how we teach them.

The trick is to teach our young their subjects as meaningful tools to live a better life. Literacy, numeracy, history, geography, and creativity can all be taught in a practical and useful way that has (and is perceived by the children themselves to have) direct benefits for themselves and their community.

Would the children of Finglas be so quick to destroy their environment if they had actually worked, through school, to determine it, say by planting trees or contributing to planning decisions? I do not think they would.

Paul Graham: Why Nerds are Unpopular: paulgraham.com, Feb, 2003

Image: ‘Halt’ by New York Observer on Flickr

The “Classical Irish Island”, according to archaeologist Paul Gosling, is “replete with…

• a megalithic tomb
• a hilltop cairn
• a medieval parish church
• the site of a watermill
• a smattering of ringforts or coastal promontory forts, and
• a number of miscellaneous hut and house sites”

He is hardly exaggerating: the average Irish square mile, like the average Irish soul, seems to teem with the workings of a long human history.

Reference: The Mayo News, Oct 9th, 2007

Escapism is a vital aspect of all art, indeed of all entertainment from the Dukes of Hazzard to the Second Viennese School. But Art only endures insofar as the work in question (sometimes accidentally, as in Casablanca) stirs up fresh insights into who we are and what, as human beings, we are capable of.

Similarly with life. Though our recent move to the West of Ireland undeniably involves escape, it will only succeed if fresh challenges are raised, fresh insights attained–and fresh failures endured.

Such is Life…and Art.

Onward!

KNPR called me up for my first week impressions of Ireland, where I recently returned after 14 years away. You can hear or download the interview here.

We are moving back to Ireland, after 14 years away. Perhaps I might be permitted some Torschlusspanik?

In Edouard Roditi’s Dialogues, painter Oskar Kokoschka talks about this curious German word, defined by him as the “panic that breaks out before the closing of a door”

Given its usefully precise meaning, the word has been used in English on occasion: the OED records the following instances:

1963 P. Bracken I Hate to Housekeep Bk. ix. 92: The random housewife is often prone to Torschlusspanik, or fear of being locked in the park at night, after the gates are closed.

1977 Time 8 Aug. 21/3: She was haunted by Torschluss-panik (mid-life crisis).

1980 Times Lit. Suppl. 14 Mar. 287/2: Mme de Staël is perhaps history’s most outstanding case of Torschlusspanik: the panic at the shutting of the door.

and our lexicographer ventures beyond the painter to offer a more metaphorical definition:

Torschlusspanik [Ger., lit. ‘shut door (or gate) panic’] A sense of alarm or anxiety (said to be experienced particularly in middle age) caused by the suspicion that life’s opportunities are passing (or have passed) one by; spec. that manifested in an ageing woman who longs to (re)discover the (sexual) excitement of youth, and who fears being left ‘on the shelf’.

Either way, the door closes in two weeks…

Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams sitting side by side is such an unprecedented image that it sets the mind flicking back through the mental archives for aparallel: Vaclav Havel as President of the State that had but months before assaulted and imprisoned him seems closest.

The saddest aspect of this generally happy day (apart from the fact that moderates have been so sidelined) is that it took almost forty years to get the two sides to share power in a jurisdiction that is so tiny.

In an ideal world Paisley and Adams would be provincial councillors or part-time local politicians. Instead they are known throughout the world, from Tehran to Tulsa, very often for their sectarianism and, betimes, more or less veiled approval of political violence.

Now we may be headed for a situation, once unthinkable, where Ian Paisley is in charge up North and Gerry Adams is President down South. Who’s to say now that such a thing could not happen?

Since 2002, the Six Counties has been mired in the excruciating stasis of Direct Rule from London–which well suits the obstructionist rump of Paisleyite Unionism. Dennis Bradley raises the prospect of a Plan B:

Joint authority has much to recommend it. It incarnates the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement in giving equal expression to both traditions. It neuters all the paramilitary organisations. It draws a clear line between politically motivated actions and criminal actions. It encourages all of our parties to move beyond the suffocating parameters of the Troubles.

Dublin Ministers running key departments would also neatly yank the DUP back into the real world.

Reference: Bradley: Political vacuum is no longer an option Irish News, Feb 3rd, 2006

Listening to Margaret Atwood recently, defining Canada’s identity solely in terms of its heavyweight neighbour, made me fear for the future of smaller, peripheral nations such as Canada and my own native country, Ireland.

With globalisation of culture and commerce rising around us as inexorably as the oceans, our Nation States are showing signs of disintegration: Anglo-Canada’s identity seems to be dwindling down to “NotAmerica.ca”, Ireland’s to “NotTheUK.ie”, and Francophone-Europe to “PasLaFrance.zut”.

Dubliners, when not gossipping into their cellphones or weeping over the tribulations of English celebrities and soccer teams (AKA corporations) , are forever telling us how confident and well-adjusted into Europeanness they are: so well-adjusted that if you describe them as British, which they largely are, they almost suffer a stroke.

But, if there is no positive identity behind the rhetoric, what is the point of carrying on, except out of an atavistic vanity? Dublin now has reverted to the quasi-English city it was when Queen Victoria visited, only with designer icons in place of Union Jacks; all one ever hears from Anglophone Canadians is how frightful it is to be mistaken for Americans.

The fact is that Mother Tongue more than Location or even History, mass trauma aside, defines groups most exactly and the foundational slogans of the New Exceptionalists (Ireland and Canada, e.g.) will quickly wear thin when actual sacrifice is called for (e.g. meeting the true costs of Defense, Counter-Terrorism, or Oil)

Margaret Atwood was speaking on ABC Radio Australia.