'Phone pouches and fancy bike sheds... what a waste of cash'

I’m only in my mid-sixties and I could hardly describe my childhood as deprived, but as kids we had to make do with lots of things and we didn’t mind because we didn’t know any different.

In many ways, I think we were better off.

People had a lot more common-sense then too. They were practical and could be inventive when they needed to be. If they had a problem, they found a solution. If they couldn’t buy the part they needed, they made it, and if the proper materials weren’t available, they improvised.

Many years ago, a few of us were out of town in a Morris Minor and on the way home, it broke down as it did regularly.

When we opened the bonnet, the problem was obvious, and it needed to be because none of us had a clue about engines. The fan-belt had disappeared, so the car was over-heating.

We walked into town and one of the lads took a pair of his gran’s nylons. We returned to the car and used them as a temporary fan-belt just to get the car home, and it worked fine. For non-mechanically minded people, we were delighted with ourselves.

These days, when something starts to give trouble, the first thought that comes to mind is to throw it away and get a new one. Money can buy anything.

You simply need to go online, find out where in the world a replacement can be found, you enter your credit card details, then sit back and wait for a man in a van to drop it at your door.

The idea of trying to find a practical common-sense solution to a problem doesn’t enter the equation.

A perfect example of this is the recent government decision to allocate €9 million in the Budget for equipment to store students’ phones during school hours.

The government planned to fund schools to buy pouches and lockers, so kids wouldn’t have access to their mobiles during the day.

Telling them to leave them at home or not to be playing with them during class is way too complicated and might just stress the little Johnnies out.

Better to buy ‘pouches’ with special locks or electronic lockers. Once the phone is put into the pouch or other storage system, it is sealed and can only be opened by the school, which will be done at the end of the school day.

The idea is that students can still have the phone on their person so that parents can contact them on their way to and from school, but that the student is prevented from using the phone during school hours.

Dealing with modern challenges 

The Teachers’ Union of Ireland said schools are in a worse position to tackle “the challenges posed by mobile phones” now than they would have been years ago, adding that “pastoral supports must be enhanced” to help students deal with challenges.

I think it’s the adults who need help dealing with modern challenges.

We didn’t have mobile phones in my school days, but if we did and one of us attempted to use it, we would have been punished, and been reluctant to use it a second time.

If phone usage in class became an issue, here’s what would have happened.

One of the teachers would have arrived in the class with a cardboard box. He would have collected the phones and put them in the box. The box would have gone into the principal’s office and would have remained there until after school.

That would have cost nothing and would have been just as effective.

In my time, if a parent needed to contact a student for any reason, they phoned the secretary’s office and little Johnny would be summoned to the office to answer the call.

If little Johnny wasn’t feeling well, he went to the office and rang home.

Calls like that were rare though because kids were taught to go to school and get on with it. You would want to be close to death to disturb the class, or your parents, during school time!

Parents were too busy trying to make ends meet to be worrying about little Johnny feeling stressed.

'It wasn't rocket science'

Cycling to school was very popular in the 1960s too. We cycled in the hail, rain and shine and it didn’t cost us a thought.

Nearly every kid had a bike, and we had a bicycle shed too which was pretty full most of the time.

As far as I can remember, the one in our school consisted of a corrugated iron roof which was supported by a few metal poles in front and secured to a stone wall at the rear. When it rained, the bikes stayed dry - it wasn’t rocket science.

I doubt if the Dáil’s infamously expensive bicycle shed will perform any better than our old-school version, but that seems to be the way of things now.

When dealing with public money, just pick a number, add your first thoughts to it, then double it, and hey presto, you have a price.

This applies to security huts too, it seems.

In my early days in An Garda Síochána, I did many tours of duty in security huts that were of dubious construction. They weren’t designed to be comfortable or even warm, but they did what they were supposed to do and kept the rain out. Well, most of the time anyway.

So how is it that these basic items are now costing millions?

Have we lost the ability to appreciate value for money or have we all just become accustomed to waste?

And don’t even get me started on the new National Children’s Hospital.