Greenway or the highway?

I’ve just spent 2 days walking the Waterford Greenway. This links Waterford and Dungarvan and is about 46 km long. When rail services closed in 1982, Irish Rail allowed the line deteriorate rather than develop alternative traffic on it. As a consequence it became an eyesore.

A number of years ago Waterford County Council  The route has been preserved and brings walkers and cyclists on a meandering route through rural Waterford as you snake you way to Waterford.

decided to get their hands on the line so as to develop it as a piece of tourist infrastructure. I’ve got to admit that they’re on a winner.

So this week end  just gone we stretched our legs on 2 sections, one close to Dugarvan and another near Kilmacthomas.  So here’s the low down. The project connects 2 large population centres with critical mass to sustain the route. There was no end of bikes and walkers in the vicinity of Dungarvan or Ballyvoile where motorists can park. Elsewhere along the route at Kilmacthomas it was quieter. Many people, especially with

children seem to use the route for a mile or two close to where you can park the car. Accessibility to the route is key. The attractive countryside is a huge plus. The tunnel at Ballyvoile is a magnet for kids, decked out as it is Halloween with all sorts of things that go bump in the night.

However it needs better management to separate pedestrians from cyclists in the tunnel where cyclists dismount and after a few yards often remount and off they go. The tunnel had over 100 people inside it, many with young kids attracted in by spooky Halloween images.  In the dark it can be more than scary with the risk of you going bump in the night off a bike.  Build and they will come but manage and they’ll come back

We stopped off after walking 9km for a cuppa at Durrow in a bar that was doing a roaring trade. The owner tells me that their customers come from everywhere you can think off. His bar has morphed into a cafe, bicycle hire business as well as providing a wee stop for the small ones. The car park was overflowing on the bright Autumnal morning that we were there.

As we rambled back towards town we met up with teenagers doing their Gaisce award. As I stopped to turn to look at a field filled with rare curlew a cyclist shot by at about 15MPH missing me by a foot at best. Cyclists on this greenway can put some pedestrians at risk.  The greenway is a strip of tarmac about 2 meters wide and no more. The mix of different types of users can at busy times be a bit off putting.

Are there lessons for Wexford? The county council proposes to build a greenway beside the Rosslare Waterford line. I’m not so sure that the line is as scenic neither is the critical mass and tourist or attractions and infrastructure of accommodation and pubs along the route. It is not just a case of build the greenway and people arrive. The bar I mentioned earlier had put in place railing to stop kids running out on the road and spent on the public area to facilitate customers. Unless tourists can rely that their expectations can be met, they won’t come. Moreover the most attractive part of the route which runs along the Suir estuary will be retained as a railway to Wateford Port.

 Will walkers and cyclists accept the loss of that amenity? The Barrow Bridge will pose management issues as it remains a working bridge which swings open to allow shipping move up to New Ross.

Any decision to upgrade Rosslare to Tier 1port will require consideration of access for rail and that possibility exists.  Any such decision would exclude under railway safety the sharing of the line with cyclists or pedestrians. Before a bob is invested it would be worth prioritising how we visualise Rosslare into the future.

What works in Waterford may not work in Wexford, How many cyclists would turn up on a windy day in November to cycle from Duncormick to Ballycullane? That remains to be seen.

Michael D rockin in the park for us!

It is rare that a Labour candidate wins on the first count. So congrats Michael D on winning another 7 years in the Arás. His values are my values, I believe Ireland will be a better place with Michael D as our president. He ran a positive campaign despite the questionable election and the personalised campain. Winning on the first count as a result is a victory. His visit to the south end of Wexford paid dividends in the end. He won 69% of the vote in The Faythe/Maudlintown.

But let’s look elsewhere for what else the polls tell  us. Gallagher was foolish to run again, Duffy was never at the races while Freeman has come in at a similar level to other candidate with a background in charity work in Presidential elections past.

But that leaves us with 2 other candidates whose level of support may raise eyebrows. Liadh Ni Riada is well down on what Martin McGuinness got as a first time SF candidate. Sinn Fein has built its credibility on strong campaigns where the members got out and worked hard for the candidate regardless, Ms Ní Riada had sunk a lot of money in terms of office and her interest in fisheries into Wexford. For all the Cork woman’s work, few members in Wexford lifted a finger in the last month on her behalf.  I never ran into any Sinn Fein canvassers, her name never came up on the doorstep. Doubtless when the European elections come round in 6 months Sinn Fein in Wexford will come out of their safe houses to press the flesh. Something tells me that this may be too late.

Most interesting is the huge vote for Peter Casey. If Casey lived in Ireland all his life, you’d understand it.  But he isn’t even tax resident here. His campaign was going from pillar to post until he had a pop at Travellers. I’d imagine that Casey has never met a traveller dividing as he does his life between Ireland, Australia and Atlanta. However he played to his understanding of prejudice, regardless of his ignorance.  Casey believed that he couldn’t be racist because in his view travellers couldn’t be a race.  And middle class people lapped this up.  More to the point when he attacked those on social welfare, it turned out that he didn’t know how much a person on jobseekers allowance received. However and as I pointed out to a SF tallyman today, if you add what the 3 dragons got today, it is equal to what Gallaher polled in 2011. Plus ca change, c’est la meme chose!

Figures suggest that turn-out was better in middle class areas than working class districts. Interesting that working class areas have been traditionally to the forefront in expressing anger at the ballot box. Is this a turning point? Are middle class people now taking to the ballot box to endorse Casey as a vector for their anger? What might this mean for Fine Gael and Dr Varadkar whose support for Michael D was luke warm at best?

What is interesting is that turn out figures in rural areas where travellers mostly live were much lower than urban areas where most travellers don’t live. So in essence we’ve seen an urban vote on a rural issue based on what?

Casey raised 2 issues about travellers. He said that they are living on other peoples land and that’s not true. Most travellers when surveyed say they want to live in a house. Casey also said that travellers are not tax compliant. There’s no evidence that travellers are any more or less tax compliant than your average settled person.

Casey didn’t run a ground campaign but used the media very cleverly to put himself in the frame. Where he goes from here politically is anyone’s guess.  What his success proves is that there is cohort that are prepared to ignore the political ignorance of a candidate if they pander to prejudice. The stratification that has occurred on the left looks set to be repeated on the political right in Ireland. Fine Gael and Fianna Fail need to sit up and take notice. So long as populism was seen to be on political left, it could be toyed with.  Now that it has infected the right, there is a clear threat and the parties that feel they have a right to govern need to address that, if only, from their perspective to avoid having to deal with SF after another inconclusive general election. I’m not so convinced that they are up to that challenge

You won't get me I'm part of the union.

One of my favourite clips on youtube is produced by the Australian Trade Union movement. It parodies the Life of Brian. It asks what did the trade unions ever do for us? I was reminded of that video last Friday in County Hall.  Wexford Council of Trade Unions organised a seminar where Patricia King President of ICTU met about 100 students and spoke to open an exhibition where unions met teenagers to explain what trade unions do. Ireland Rugby International Katie Fitzhenry also spoke to the gathering.

I’ve been a trade union member since I became a teacher.  Nobody told me I had to join a union.  I simply considered it important because I knew I’d spend most of my working life in a classroom. In fact I was a student member when studying.  A trade union joins people with a common interest. It’s a modern community based on a workplace. It’s a myth that you have to have an employer to be a union member. Anyone can join a union whenever and wherever they like. You don’t have to have a workplace to join.

Most people see a trade union only through an industrial relations dispute or talks. This is only the half of it. Union members can get reductions on contributions to health insurance, holidays in unionised hotels, pension advice, advice on issues in workplace among other things, I’ve benefitted because professional negotiators were able to get a better deal form my employer than I could ever have got by going in on my own. Sure, in that time we’ve gone on strike on a range of issues. Strikes mean you’ll lose your pay on a point of principle. But eventually all disputes get resolved.

However union membership is significantly lower than it used to be. That’s for a wide number of reasons. The economy has moved from a productive base with large number of workers in a factory to one of services with less employees with the emphasis on flexibility.  Long before the economic slump, workers viewed union membership differently. I recall listening to a radio vox pop about 15 years where young workers said they didn’t need to be a member and that you get all your rights from the government anyway.

Union membership is still strong in the state sector but in private industry? Well that may be another story. .  For young people the workplace is a fundamentally different place to what I entered over 35 years ago. The arrival of internships puts permanent workers under threat. Internships are unpaid work. When I graduated from college I believed I had a right to a paid job. Nowadays, you need a masters and an internship and then you might be lucky to get paid something decent by the age of 25. Workers now are cannon fodder to a different set of workplace relationship, relationships that works just one way only.

Add to that the reality that the aspirations to borrow to own a home is now harder to achieve than in my day against a backdrop of greater brand awareness among you people and rampant consumerism. Never has there been greater expectations within our young, yet less ability to meet those expectations in our society than ever before. As the bar for young people goes higher and higher more young people see themselves as failing. Is it any wonder that well being and mental health are being emphasised like never before in the new Junior Cycle?

So we have smaller workplaces, greater flexibility, more isolation and greater expectation and pressure. Unions have to address what is going on out there in the lives of young workers if they hope to remain relevant. Friday’s exercise was part of that change in direction on the part of ICTU. I welcome it, it was worthwhile, a first step for many young people and one that will in time lead to more.

That bit of halibut was good enough for Jehovah!

You’d almost forget it was happening. However running alongside our presidential election we have a referendum on the subject of blasphemy. Why in the name of God with Brexit on the horizon are we talking about blasphemy?

It goes back to 1937. When the constitution was enacted a provision was made to ban blasphemy. Blasphemy is the deliberate act of causing outrage by insulting God. In Saudi Arabia it is punishable by death, as are most other offences in Saudi Arabia. For over 70 years the provision was not backed up by legislation until Dermot Ahern as Minister for Justice thought with the economy about to tank, banning blasphemy legally for the first time in Ireland was the way to go. Ireland had the dubious record of being cited by some countries with shocking human rights records in their defence of their laws on blasphemy as a result. 

Before I go any further let me say I’ll vote to remove the reference to blasphemy from the constitution.  I say that as a churchgoer that any faith which feels it needs the legal protection of the state to its view of its God is built on quicksand. After 2,000 years of Christianity and 1500 years of Islam, why is there the need to protect a view of God or to enforce that true civil law? If a comedian or a writer can cause enough outrage that thousands of years of faith are undermined, then sooner or later that faith will wither anyway.  And I don’t believe any faith is about to disappear.  The original blasphemer was executed on Good Friday 2,000 years ago because of the outrage he caused to the High Priests and Pharisees at the time.

To be fair, the Christian churches were well and truly shattered by the time,years of parody by Monty Python and the Life of Brian.  What religious fundamentalists could have gone with blasphemy if the section in the constitutional provision is retained , well your guess is as good as mine. Blasphemy legislation is a deliberate come on for anyone seeking notoriety. Should the state by its laws facilitate someone bent on seeking publicity? I don’t think so.

but not because of  Dermot Ahearn arrived on the scene with this legislation. When a law is implemented, it’d be nice to know where it leads. Religious fundamentalism cannot be legislated for either.

I doubt if Dev ever considered that in the 21^st century his constitution might have provided the grounds for fundamentalists to seek protection in Irish law for someone who questions Islam on facebook which operates out of Ireland, perhaps in Arabic? Because that is what our current law can allow. Dev might likely have raised an eyebrow if he could visualise as happened in Indonesia that a muslim running for election who called on people of other faiths to vote for him was prosecuted under blasphemy law for that speech.

Blasphemy is a Pandora’s box. I do not want to see faiths from Kinnegad to Trinidad turn our judicial system into a debating chamber where competing arguments try to out outrage one another. Once it is opened who knows where it may lead. Best to use the ballot box to keep Pandora’s box shut