Letters to the Editor: Today's the day to start equipping young people with skills for life
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Today is World Youth Skills Day.
The theme for World Youth Skills Day 2023, is ‘Skilling teachers, trainers and youth for a transformative future’. There are many opportunities and challenges that young people face, particularly in employment, and although there is a strategic importance of equipping young people with skills for employment, it is equally important that we equip them with skills for life.
Skills such as problem-solving, communication skills, social skills, are essential not only in the workplace, but in everyday life. We need to equip our young people with skills which they can not only carry with them into employment, but that help them actively engage in their local communities and beyond.
At YMCA Dublin, we are passionate about encouraging our youth to do their best in life, and supporting them to obtain the necessary skills to do so. In recent years, we have developed Réidh, a skills-acquisition and employment programme, which helps 18-30 year olds in seeking guidance and skills growth for their career path.
Our YMCA Youth Work team support young people from the age of 10 in engaging in activities which encourage personal growth and developing life skills, with different programmes for leadership, personal and skills development through outdoor activities and clubs.
As CEO of YMCA Dublin, I have seen firsthand the impact that these positive influences and encouragement can have on our young people’s confidence and skill sets.
This World Youth Skills Day, I urge everyone to support and encourage our young people in learning and developing new, lifelong skills. Young people are catalysts for change, and together, we can empower our youth. Together, we can support and encourage them to be part of a positive change for a transformative future.
“Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together,” said Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels.
When the Second World War ended, the great USA started rolling out money to improve the world. And naturally enough, we got some, but it seems now that we weren’t all that sure what to do with it. Almost like today really. However, our ministers for finance knew the misery and grief of thousands of small farmers with their bogs flooded every year, their hay sailing down the river — even their dwellings and their sheds inundated. So, money was spent, and their major rivers were widened and deepened — the Moy, the Inny, the Brosna, the Boyne, etc.
The minister for agriculture knew about the Netherlands and what was achieved between Roma and Napoli, in the pontine marshes in Italy. Long before the flood of money from America, hundreds of thousands of hectares were “de-watered” by our progressive fellow Europeans. And so, our minister for agriculture set up the Land Project in 1949 and staffed it with Board of Works people, Irish Land Commission people, and Compulsory Tillage people, as well as direct recruits. Of course, there were failures along the way by officials, by contractors and by farmers. But 99% of jobs were a success, no disputes and no court cases and no bribery or corruption.
The business of land drainage was mainly to lower the water table in the wetlands, the swamps, the moors, the cutaway bogs, the ‘bottoms’ to a level of five feet or 1.5m below ground level or deeper if the water bearing stratum was further down.
The impact of a watercourse at these depths was spectacular. The ground would “dry out” and be tillable 100m away, or even more if there was a slope on the land.
Draining the land increased the usable and profitable land for the farmer by maybe 50%. But all this land drainage work did not just increase the value of the farmers estate — it made for high quality water in the receiving stream or river, with the impact of all this naturally filtered water felt by fish and aquatic life generally. As if this was an insufficient bonus, it also got rid of the liver fluke, (whose habitat is wetlands) and of course, red water — a deadly disease in cattle.
The politicians who are promoting the rewetting programme are idiots, who appear totally ignorant of this history and of how life is sustained in rural Ireland. They imperil our presence and our future on the land.
But worst of all, they are being funded and supported by us to execute this madcap, regressive plan against us. They are a tiny minority, and yet, they have invaded and infiltrated every nook and cranny with an innocent throwaway line of doublespeak Orwellian horse manure.
Last I checked, it was illegal for anyone to stop and restrict the outflow of groundwater from the land of his neighbour. It’s called a servitude, which means that the land at the lower level is obliged to receive the water issued from the land at the higher level.
Is this the price that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have to pay to stay in power? Is there a single voice among them who will stand up and say no?
And how can Mick Wallace and Grace O’Sullivan, in a crucial vote in the European Parliament representing Ireland vote the way they did? Will they vote the same way next time on behalf of Ireland and Europe?
No doubt we are supposed to believe that Holland will rewet all that was wet there, way back when, and the Italians will flood the pontines with their apple trees and orchards and restore the swamps with the mosquitoes and malaria … and they will embrace the liver fluke besieging their ovinas.
Indeed they might. But I doubt it.
It saddens me to see the Irish government speak the rhetoric of the US, UK, and most of the Nato nations about adhering to a rules-based international order (RBIO) to hypocritically condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine while they ignore their own deeds as the biggest violators of a RBIO who today and in the past have brutally invaded and subjugated countless sovereign nations with their own military might. I believe the Irish people see through this duplicity and that is why we embrace Irish neutrality and condemn all invaders equally.
This tripartite government in Dublin will proudly defend the Ukrainian regime’s right to fight for its sovereignty but has never challenged them on their unjust treatment of their fellow Russian speaking citizens and at the same time they can accept that a foreign country (England) with its military might had the right to subjugate the will of the Irish people and our sovereignty with their brutal partition of our country.
The Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in March 2023 implied that appeasement of Russia had failed to stop the war in Ukraine and said: “We know from our history from what happened in the 1930s and 1940s, what happens when you continue with an appeasement policy that’s failing.” His selective history lesson leading to the Second World War with the Axis and Allied powers is plain to see and we in Ireland remember how appeasement to the threats of war from the British empire in the 1920s still has our people divided. Go talk to the people of India and see how appeasement to the Imperial British Raj left their great country partitioned under sectarian grounds from 1947 and is still sadly locked in conflict.
Maybe the Taoiseach should reflect on the formation of the Blueshirts who — inspired by the values of European fascists and under General O’Duffy (a leader of Fine Gael) — went on to lead an Irish Brigade in Spain against the democratic government in support of the brutal dictator General Franco.
It is also ironic that the ultra-nationalists in Ukraine disgracefully honour to this day their involvement with Nazi Germany and at the same time President Zelenskyy claims Ukraine is fighting for Europe’s freedom and values. There must be no drift in our beliefs that Ireland will always supports peace and reconciliation among nations over war and domination.
The recent poisoning of two white-tailed eagles in Co Antrim is an act of environmental terrorism. It behoves the statutory investigating authorities to purse this matter to a judicial conviction for the perpetrator(s) of this avian murder.
Should it come to pass that a person or persons convicted turns out to be a member of a national farming organisation, can we expect that they will be drummed out of the organisation and banned for life.
It was always going to be a struggle to bring conservation measures to fruition in the Irish countryside. There is an inherent animosity towards wildlife by elements of the farming community supported by Ireland’s abusive live hunting community.
Ditch thick when it comes to understanding the role of wildlife in the countryside elements of the farming community respond by using weapons of the weak: Gun, snare, hunting dog, slurry, fire, and poison.
On their shoulder is the grip of the local hunting community exploiting the situation in their pursuit of obtaining hunting permission.
It is clear that our wildlife and the countryside it lives in are under attack by a rural Taliban drawn from the farming and hunting communities.
The sooner our government recognise this the sooner a war on rural environmental terrorism is put in motion.
President Michael D Higgins attended the recent ICTU biennial conference in Kilkenny.
One comment he made was that he hoped we do not have to wait too long to hear a statement from the European Union on what is happening in the refugee camp in Jenin.
The care system is a disgrace, I have two children with needs and literally everything is a fight it’s exhausting both physically and mentally, and the government need to do better, these kids are forgotten about and there is no help or support for carers.