Una Mullally: target of a million electric vehicles on our roads lacks cop-on

 

If you already own a car, then why not modify it, instead of chucking it and buying a new one? Photograph: Alexander Becher/EPA

Every time I hear the line that the Government has a target of a million electric vehicles on Irish roads by 2030, I think: stupid idea. Not because we don’t need to get rid of petrol and diesel vehicles – that bit is obvious – but because the implication is this target means new vehicles, and a million of them. What we actually need to be aiming for is fewer private vehicles, and addressing our addiction to consumerism overall. There are better ways to achieve the electrification of vehicles than creating a boom for the car manufacturing industry – which obviously uses an incredible amount of energy and materials in making these vehicles – and essentially throwing away vehicles that are perfectly decent besides what they run on and how they run.

Green capitalism is an oxymoron. Green consumerism is too. Growing the new car market is not a logical approach. We need to use what we have. It’s ridiculous that out of one side of its mouth, the Green Party bangs on about recycling, reusing and upcycling, and out of the other, essentially instructs people to buy new cars.

We could do a deep psychological dive on how colonialism and historical peasantry makes mugs of us all in the shops, but time is running out

One of the greatest Irish attributes is cop-on. Common sense needs to form the backbone of a radical approach to the climate crisis here. Rooting innovations in cop-on would be lauded by those members of the public who don’t make up the vested interests that have a grip on government climate policy. More forestry, a sustainable approach to electric vehicles, a high-speed electric rail network expanded across the country, prioritising city roads for tram use, ending the cruel export industry of live animals, introducing cheaper and more heavily subsidised public transport, affordable insulation solutions for homes and publicly owned wind power (not the current bonkers trend of tech companies buying up wind farms and claiming this is somehow a logical avenue to reach renewable “targets” and not what it actually is – the creation of additional energy in order to divert it towards energy-guzzling data centres), are what’s needed. Encouraging consumerism runs counter to the concept of sustainability.

Slightly guilty

Irish people love new things, even if we still feel slightly guilty about the consumer boom of the Celtic Tiger. One of our national pastimes is ripping out perfectly good kitchens and replacing them with a slick, bling aesthetic more at home in Miami than Monasterevin. We could do a deep psychological dive on how colonialism and historical peasantry makes mugs of us all in the shops, but time is running out. If we want to be nimble, smart and sustainable, then let’s go back to the concept of cop-on.

We don’t need a million new vehicles. Cop on. We need to root everything we do from now on in concepts of sustainability, practicality and not making more new things just so we can throw away the old things. I’m intrigued by New Electric Ireland, a Wicklow company taking learnings from a Dutch company and training mechanics in the craft of electric conversion – removing a car’s engine, gearbox and fuel tank, and replacing that with a new motor and the batteries needed to power it. “Most mechanics we work with can get an engine out of a car in about half an hour,” Kevin Sharpe of New Electric Ireland said in an interview with IrishEVs.com, “and the rest of that process is just bolting in the kit, and you can do that in a couple of hours”. This conversion process costs the owner somewhere in the region of €2,000-€5,000. Makes sense. If you already own a car, then why not modify it, instead of chucking it and buying a new one?

We also need a reality check when it comes to the more profound changes that need to occur to actually initiate a new way of living that doesn’t contribute further to destroying the planet

We need to look at things in that favourite cliche of politicians: “in the round”. We need to see things as connected. A car is not magically sustainable by default of being electric. It has to be manufactured, and its sustainability also depends on how the electricity it uses is generated. This is why the lifetime emissions of an EV vary from country to country, because of how each country generates electricity. In a country where electricity is still generated primarily through fossil fuels, it takes much longer for an EV to ultimately emit less carbon dioxide overall than a petrol or diesel vehicle. A country with cleaner and greener electricity generation, on the whole, is better suited to a massive surge in EVs.

We also need a reality check when it comes to the more profound changes that need to occur to actually initiate a new way of living that doesn’t contribute further to destroying the planet. I hate to break it to you, but successive Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil governments have not been able to solve the housing crisis, the health service, childcare, homelessness, water infrastructure and many more fundamental issues that should make up a functioning and equal society. How on Earth could anyone believe that on the issue of the climate crisis – any contemporary government’s biggest challenge yet – these parties will make a U-turn on their embedded ideologies and somehow ace this challenge?

That’s just not going to happen. Fianna Fáil’s stupid short-termism, Fine Gael’s voracious neoliberalism and the Green Party’s consumer-capitalist strain all run counter to addressing the climate crisis and saving the planet. Unless we unseat those forces, we’re not so much crawling towards climate chaos as joyriding towards it.

Una Mullally: Students fear failure, but the Department of Education has openly embraced it

Irish Times

With Covid-19, McHugh left it to last minute to cram for final exams and created a mess

Minister for Education and Skills Joe McHugh: His department turns with all the speed and nimbleness of an aircraft carrier reversing in a storm. Photograph: Leon Farrell/PA

The Leaving Cert being cancelled may be every teenager in Ireland’s dream manifested, but why have we been left with such a mess? Other government departments had to instigate nothing short of radical change at the outset of the pandemic. How did it take two months for the Department of Education and Skills to figure out an exam?

The disruptions we’ve all faced to protect our society against Covid-19 are severe, but teenagers have borne a disproportionate brunt. The decision of the department, and of its Minister, Joe McHugh’s kinda-cancel-and-mark-but-not-really-and-you-can-also-maybe-sit-the-exam-anyway approach is a potentially unworkable fudge. Hopefully this hames of a non-solution will instigate the widescale reform we actually need for universal access to third-level education to become a reality, but more likely we’ll continue to encounter the kind of obfuscation that typifies our education system and the powers that control it.

McHugh isn’t exactly the most inspiring Minister, but even reformers such as Ruairí Quinn, Jan O’Sullivan and Richard Bruton could get relatively little over the line in their tenures, as they struggled, for example, to instigate the long-overdue secularisation of Irish schools. The paradox at the heart of the Department of Education is that it controls and oversees everything and nothing, that reform is resisted while the department simultaneously defaults to the autonomy of individual schools, the vast majority of which are still under the patronage of religious organisations and the mysterious oversight of boards of management.

If any department embodies the perception of a “permanent government” that turns with all the speed and nimbleness of an aircraft carrier reversing in a storm, it is the Department of Education. In the introduction to the guide to calculated grades for students published by the department, it lays the responsibility at McHugh’s feet: “he is offering a system of calculated grades,” it reads. The “skills” in the department’s title perhaps mostly refers to its own skill of deflection. There often tends to be an undercurrent of delegation-at-all-costs in its decision-making or indeed in its obligations; it’s schools, it’s boards of management, it’s teachers’ unions, it’s students, it’s parents, it’s school management – it’s anyone but the department.

Dirty secret

Two data sets will be used to come up with an exam result: a school-based estimation of an overall percentage mark and ranking to be awarded to a student in a particular subject, and “data available from the State Examinations Commission – this includes data on past performances of students in each school and nationally.” The idea of adjudicating someone’s performance based on the ghosts of Leaving Certs past is, very obviously, unfair, even leaving aside the dirty secret of the Leaving Cert historically being marked to a curve.

After that, a school must give “a class ranking for each student in each subject”. Estimating those marks and rankings then has more layers imposed on it: “school alignment of marks for a subject through a subject alignment group comprising teachers who are teaching the subject to Leaving Cert students this year”.

Everyone knows that students really step up a gear from March onwards in preparation for the Leaving Cert exams. The department’s document instructs, “Where additional work has been completed after schools were closed on March 13th, teachers will be advised to exercise due caution where that work suggests a change in performance.”

The mental gymnastics continue: “When making estimations for language subjects, teachers should base them on the assumption that the oral examination component would have proceeded as usual.” Or how about, “If a student has joined the class from another class in the school, the teacher will consult with the previous teacher and get whatever relevant records they have. If the student has joined the class from another school, and if the length of time is such that the teacher considers he/she does not have enough evidence to make a sound judgment, he/she should consult with school management about acquiring additional information from the student’s previous school.”

Principals and oversight

The school principal then has oversight over the marks and ranking process. I hate to assume the worst of principals in high-performing and/or fee-paying schools, but what principal is not going to want to project a golden image of their school? Especially when the economy is currently collapsing, and with it too the capacity of parents to pay high fees for their child’s State-funded yet private education. 

The common thread is that the burden of responsibility and pressure to sort everything out has been placed on teachers. Like many people who do difficult jobs in society for not much money, teachers are easy targets. They also fall victim to the projection of our own school-time grievances well into adulthood. Teachers are frontline workers, yet are strangely absent from the current public narrative of applause and gratitude.

The whole thing is a mess. I’m not sure what the solution actually is, but it’s not this. There are multiple other issues: how “disadvantaged schools” will be victimised by “ranking”, the obvious prospect of legal challenges from students, and the absence of colleges and universities from the conversation. Students fear failure, so why have the department and the Minister so openly embraced just that?