Kathriona Devereux: Let’s put teens’ idle hands to work for good of Cork community!

ANY plans for the summer?

It’s a question you’ll encounter everywhere at this time of year - at the school gates, in taxis, the hairdressers...

People talk about their holiday destinations, or dusting off their mobile homes, or the Instagram- worthy destinations visiting Yanks want to be brought to visit.

Not many talk about the balancing act of bridging nine weeks of school holidays with two weeks of annual leave. Or the 13 weeks of child monitoring needed if you’re the proud owner of a teenager who finished secondary school for the next few months.

Not many parents have a beachside remote office from which to observe their darlings frolicking in the surf, or a safe, child-friendly neighbourhood for their smallies to wander around.

There are only so many summer camps a child can do (or a parent can afford) and a stint in the Gaeltacht only soaks up a few weeks.

What are families doing to occupy their kids in summer, 2023? For many families, the summer months are not a languid, relaxed hazy few weeks, they are a time when the struggle to juggle really ramps up. (Apart from those exceptionally clever and forward-thinking people who procreated with a teacher. Or the genius double teacher couples who are both off for the summer months! Such foresight, to fall in love and raise a family with someone who also has two to three months off in the summer. I’m not jealous in the least!)

I think kids should have plenty of time away from the rigours of academia and sitting on chairs staring at whiteboards, but nine weeks of freewheeling is a lot.

I’ve come up with a radical idea to harness some of the youth and energy that is lolling about untapped this time of year. My ideas may be extreme and in breach of current labour laws, but hear me out!

Instead of trying to find things to occupy children, let’s give them legitimate jobs that the nation needs doing. With encouragement and scaffolding, they would be well able to make a massive contribution.

Tree Camp

Last week, I wrote about “determined diggers” at the beach - focussed children intent on digging the biggest, deepest holes possible.

It chimed with lots of readers because there is a large cohort of children in Ireland brimming with energy and enthusiasm for digging.

Let’s harness that desire to dig.

Ireland has an ambitious target to plant 22 million trees a year (a target we’re desperately failing to achieve), so should we consider engaging an army of young fellas not shy of hard digging to help make a sizable contribution to our afforestation aspirations?

With the right kind of entertaining supervision and planning, kids could have a week of fun at Tree Camp, helping to bring more trees to the neighbourhoods of Ireland.

Admittedly, summer is not the ideal time for tree-planting, but maybe we could run Tree Camp into Watering Camp for the rest of the summer, when kids could roam the streets with watering cans making sure recently planted trees stay hydrated.

I know a good few five-year-olds who would happily brandish a watering can all summer long!

Beach Camp

Collecting seashells is a wonderful meditative exercise that children spend hours doing. The same gimlet vision required for spotting a cowry seashell is very useful for spotting fragments of frayed plastic ropes, degraded bottle tops or disintegrated fish boxes at the beach.

If a child enjoys shell-picking, they should theoretically enjoy beach cleaning. Instead of the satisfaction at amassing piles of nature’s beautiful dainty constructions, they can collect piles of humanity’s stupid plastic detritus.

At the end of the week, they get a trip to a plastic recycling facility to watch all the waste they’ve collected be extruded into a plastic bucket they can use to collect seashells for the rest of the year!

No-Graffiti Camp

Somebody finally, thankfully, painted the tatty facade of the public toilets on the Grand Parade.

Up until recently, the very spot where the open top sightseeing bus welcomed passengers (aka tourists) on board was the site of a dilapidated, graffiti-tagged, cuboid public toilet.

A lick of paint has transformed it into a giant, grey non-functioning public toilet, but at least it’s not as unsightly.

I have a list as long as my arm of corners of Cork that could do with a lick of paint, and I think it would be the perfect summer project for teams of teenagers to move through the city, removing graffiti and brightening neglected corners.

Get a street artist to mentor them to do micro pieces of art and we’ve created a much more desirable tourist attraction. We might even discover our very own Banksy of the Lee.

Each local authority could have a Summer Camp department - a child signs up for whatever task interests them, gets paired with a suitable camp, and hey presto, lots of public work is being done, kids are having fun, and parents don’t have to worry.

There are trifling details to be worked out - how many adults would be required to supervise them, insurance and health and safety considerations, etc - but what do you think?

Would your kids be interested in Tree Camp? Would you load them onto a bus in the morning to go to Beach Camp?

If my kids are having fun and being supervised and helping make the world a better place, I’d be delighted to sign them up.