The return to school is less than a month away – but as Galway journalist and mother TESS FINCH-LEES reveals, the rules on minimising the risk of Covid have all but vanished from the agenda. So here she outlines her own radical solution.
“God loves a trier”, as my Dad used to say – and God knows I’ve tried to persuade Norma Foley to make schools Covid safe. They’re not, but I won’t stop trying.
In the meantime, schools re-open in three weeks against a backdrop of a data blackout, a more contagious variant incoming, waning and pummelled immunity from repeated infections, with no protections in place. And monkeypox.
School staff have, yet again, been put in an invidious position.
Since Micheál Martin unilaterally downgraded Covid to flu and devolved public health to “personal responsibility”, it’s up to parents to risk-assess now.
But, if we’re not allowed to know if the unmasked kid sitting next to ours who was off sick for a few days has Covid and is potentially still infectious, how can we? Nits we need to be informed of, but a highly infectious neurotropic disease that can cause organ damage, disability and death?
That’s an ecumenical matter.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and WHO measures to prevent the spread of infection in schools include reducing community transmission, vaccination, distancing, masks, improved ventilation, testing, sequencing, contact tracing and isolation. Ireland has either stalled or rolled back on these.
I spoke to one of the country’s leading children’s rights lawyers, Gareth Noble, who said: “I’m concerned we’re creating a culture of conditioning us to think Covid infections and outbreaks in schools are inevitable.
We significantly reduce risk for our children if we follow basic public health advice such as mask-wearing, contact tracing, air filtration and other measures. Any expert advice from the WHO needs to be considered and actioned. Ignoring it would be negligent.”
I’ve worked in child protection where “negligent” is synonymous with child harm. That’s not something I can ignore. Unless parents are prepared to say, “we don’t consent to exposing our children to Covid infection at school”, our consent will be presumed tacit.
I wrote my first article about Covid safe schools two years ago. There have been many more since. Each time, teachers, parents and children contact me sharing their concerns. Many are either clinically vulnerable (CV) or have a family member who is CV. Some – previously healthy children and teachers – have developed Long-Covid and now have “underlying conditions”.
In the absence of any plan forthcoming, concerned parents are agonising about what to do come September.
In order to attend school, immunocompromised Galway mother (Joan) has to send her twelve-year-old (Brian) to live with her sister – a 30-minute drive away. Without mitigations, bringing the virus home from school could kill Joan. Parting with her son was her only choice.
I anticipate the next year being quite perilous. No public health protections, new – more transmissible – vaccine-escaping variants emerging more frequently, so expect serial (re)infections, which the WHO’s Dr Mike Ryan warns, increases the risk of long-Covid, even in “mild” acute cases. The sterilising vaccines that prevent transmission and infections, are unlikely to emerge within the next twelve months. It’s time for plan b.
Home-schooling works for some, but not my son, who’d rather have his eyeballs poked by pigeons than have me as his teacher.
So, I scoured the internet to see if any school anywhere had managed to prevent Covid outbreaks. I found one – Abrome, in Texas. How did it do it? By ignoring politicians and following the science.
Acknowledging Covid is airborne, mitigations included daily testing, mandatory FFP2/3 masks (unless medically exempt) indoors and outdoors in close contact during surges, distancing, remote learning when cases were extremely high, outdoor learning options, and Hepa filtration in every classroom. If CO2 readings exceeded 800, rooms were evacuated and classes continued in sheltered outdoor spaces, also used for eating. Everyone is vaccinated.
Although I don’t intend to set up a school, the Abrome project inspired me to think out of the box. Using their Covid safe template, why not try to re-create something similar, albeit on a much smaller scale (four to six third year students) somewhere close to home – Galway?
I visualise it as a kind of community bubble with children of the same age meeting up to learn, play and breathe clean air in a Covid safe space. As large or small a gathering as demand and logistics permit.
Having read about Abrome in my recent Irish Independent article, a mother in Dublin messaged me to say it prompted a conversation among friends about whether they could do something similar. I like that. Starting a conversation. Putting an idea and a dollop of hope out into the world and see what comes back.
If this column was an advert it would read:
WANTED: 14-year-olds – and a teacher – who don’t want to be (re)infected with a neurotropic, vascular, SARS-CoV-2 virus at school this year. No excuse required.
I don’t know if anything will come of this, but I do know it’s better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all.
To start the conversation, email: tflees26@gmail.com
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Increased spending among teenagers was the only upward curve in July as overall debit and credit card spending fell marginally last month, according to Bank of Ireland.
Their analysis of debit and credit card spending in July recorded a one per cent total monthly fall, as a mixed picture emerged across business sectors.
While other age groups mainly decreased their July spending, teenagers are clearly enjoying their summer holidays with a major spending increase of 17 per cent for the month – a trend which was also reflected in June.
There was a two per cent uptick in social spending throughout July, whilst spending in pubs (+4%), restaurants (+3%) and in fast-food outlets (+1%) all recorded positive figures – having all posted negative spending stats in June.
The improved July weather also saw a spending hike in cinemas of just five per cent, a stark drop from June’s cinema spending rise of 25 per cent.
Overall spending in the retail sector was down three per cent in total, with outlay on clothing (-10%) and groceries (-1%) both dropping, but spending on petrol rose by five per cent as forecourt fuel prices levelled off somewhat nationwide.
Consumers were also evidently not keen to forego their sweet treats in July, with spending in bakeries also rising by five per cent.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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From about the age of ten I began cycling to school every day, from Glenard into Sea Road – not alone in and out in the morning and afternoon, but also home and back at lunch-time – because everybody had dinner in the middle of the day in the 1980s.
The concept of separate facilities for cycling back then were as alien as having parking for spaceships. Traffic was much lighter though; only a third, maybe a quarter, of the cars on the road today.
I can remember accidents involving bikes – fatal and serious ones – during my youth. I’d say up to half the pupils in my school cycled every day.
That picture has changed over the years. The Galway Transport Strategy quotes a figure from the 2011 Census which says that five per cent of people cycle to work, school or college.
The city is compact and relatively small. The strategy recommends “high quality facilities for walking and cycling” to encourage more people to walk and cycle to school, to work, to the shops, or for leisure.
So what’s happened in the 30 years since I left Galway?
Traffic volumes have increased and the number of people using bikes for the daily commute has decreased. There are some bicycle lanes in the city but the percentage is very small compared to other Irish cities.
I spent a few hours cycling around Galway last week and wrote a piece on it for The Irish Times. I might have cycled in and out to school when I was a kid but I would not put my eleven-year-old daughter on a bike in Galway. It’s just not safe enough.
I put in a number of queries to Galway City Council last week and they told me there was a total of 20.45 kilometres in the city – that excludes off-road and park cycle tracks such as NUIG.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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Lifestyle – An unusual photo of Michael Collins, taken at a wedding during the War of Independence has strong Galway links. He’s looking straight at the camera, something he rarely did at a time when the British had a price on his head. However, it was his own people who killed Collins, 100 years ago this month, as historian WILLIAM HENRY recalls.
A photo of Michael Collins, found 90 years after he was killed in an ambush at Béal na Bláth during the Irish Civil War, has family links with Galway.
It’s the wedding photograph of Paddy O’Donohue and Violet Gore who were married in June 1919, with the reception held in the Shelbourne Hotel. Collins was the best man and Mary Healy was bridesmaid.
The young man sitting on the ground second from the right is Jack Buckley. He and Mary Healy were cousins of the Whelan family from Shanaglish, who have had pub in south Galway for generations. Well-known city chemist Michael Whelan and PP of St Patrick’s Church in Galway City, Fr Pat Whelan, are members of that family and Fr Whelan was given a copy of the photo by a descendent of Jack Buckley.
The original photo was discovered by writer and broadcaster Dave Kenny in the attic of his Dublin home; it had been gifted to his grandparents by the newly-married couple, who were friends and fellow nationalists.
Violet Gore, a singer, had helped raise funds for the Irish cause through concerts in Ireland and England while Paddy O’Donohue, had been a leading IRA activist in Manchester and was a key figure in Collins’ network. The photograph is unusual because Collins is looking directly at the camera. That’s something he avoided doing during the War of Independence, as he was a marked man with a bounty on his head.
According to Fr Whelan, the photograph was hung on a wall in the family home after the wedding and although house was raided, the Black and Tans didn’t realise that Ireland’s most wanted man was watching them.
Just a couple of years later, on August 22, 1922, during the Irish Civil War, Michael Collins was killed by his own countrymen in an ambush at Béal na Bláth, County Cork, the county in which he had been born on October 16,1890. He was 31 years old when he died.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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