Lifeless vegetables, rushed lunch breaks, lack of oversight: How to improve hot school meals

 source: The Irish Times

While widely seen as a positive move, the scheme has had its teething problems. Ahead of its national rollout, we asked experts how to improve it

Following a pilot, hot school meals will be rolled out to every primary school from September. It is hoped that it will reduce hunger, improve attention and lift a burden from families. The scheme has largely worked well, but it’s not been without teething problems. So what has worked well, what hasn’t and where is there room for improvement? We asked four key stakeholders.

The parent: Paula White

‘It has been a disappointment’

I was delighted when I heard my son’s school would provide a hot lunch every day. We always have fresh, healthy meals at home, he’s not a fussy eater and he likes vegetables. But it has been a disappointment.

With this provider, the children bring their waste home, so I see what is and is not eaten. The vegetables are uniformly cut, lifeless, highly processed, cooked within an inch of their life and very unappetising. My son says that the potatoes are okay but the carrots, peas and other vegetables are slimy and soft. It would turn a child against vegetables. And the vegetarian options are mostly pasta-based.

[ ‘It’s kind of become our daughter’s cheat meal’: The view on new hot school meals programmeOpens in new window ]

I’ve seen the children get two breasts of chicken, more than is necessary, and I question how they can afford to put so much meat in it at such a low price point. I’d like more emphasis on vegetables and, ideally, someone who could chop them on the premises every day.

Children can choose from an online menu, but I would prefer less food of better quality, as there is huge waste involved.

I still gave him fruit and a snack to take in. It feels like it’s all about the cheapest option, not the best option, and I’d question who is overseeing the nutritional standards, as the food strikes me as relatively unhealthy.

The principal: Elma Young

‘I’d like to see more variation in portion sizes’

We started the free lunch programme in 2019 and introduced hot lunches in 2023.

We originally looked at lots of providers, inviting them to the school with samples of their food. Pupil voice is really important here, so the students had a chance to try them and vote on their favourite.

Providing hot meals on site means there must be ovens to heat the food. We’re not kitted out for that, so the provider came to inspect our site for a suitable heating area. They converted a storage area to hold the ovens and brought it up to catering standards.

Our provider provides the personnel, who heat and distribute the food to the classes, before collecting any waste at the end of the day. This ensures there is no additional work or stress for school staff.

We’re a Deis band-one school, and our experience has been very positive

Parents and children alike have been very complimentary about the variety provided by our provider, Glanmore. The children get to try foods that they may not normally get at home, such as cottage pie, Mexican burritos and tuna cheese melts. Children who might be picky eaters are more likely to try new foods when they see their peers eating it. Allergies and vegetarian options are catered for. Children also get a small morning snack, such as a rice cake, cereal bar or fruit.

There is quite a variety between providers, even in terms of how they kit out the space needed. My advice is that principals visit schools that already have this in place and see how it works. Food has an odour, so it’s best for the heating facilities to be near an open space or outdoor area. Some providers look after the waste, while others send it home with the children; the plus is the parents know what is eaten, but the minus is the risk of spillage in the bag.

I’d like to see more variation in portion sizes, as older children will often want to eat more than the younger ones. I’d also like if there was an option for a cold lunch in the warmer months of May and June.

We’re a Deis (Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools) band-one school, and our experience has been very positive. For parents it is convenient and reassuring to know their child gets a hot meal, and it frees them up to spend more time with the child instead of working all day and then coming home to cook and clean.

Elma Young, principal at Holy Spirit Primary School, Greenhills, Dublin 12

The provider: Ray Nangle

‘All suppliers vetted by a panel of qualified nutritionists’

Most of the school meals market is really good. But principals, who are not nutritionists or dietitians, are being asked to do the job of one in choosing a supplier.

Instead we should have all suppliers vetted by a panel of qualified nutritionists, removing that burden from the principal and ensuring that ultra-processed foods are off the menu.

We need to ensure children have time to eat these meals

At the moment, it is monitored by staff from the Department of Social Protection, who administer the scheme. They are there to check that the money went to the right place, but they’re not nutritionists or dietitians.

And this means that one supplier can provide a sample to a school that tastes delicious because it’s full of additives, salt, sugar and preservatives, and they may be picked over a healthier supplier.

We also need to ensure children have time to eat these. Without extending the school day or reducing break time, this is an opportunity for them to learn about food and nutrition as they eat, which would support the social, personal and health education curriculum.

Ray Nangle runs Fresh Today and Lunchbox, two of the largest school meals suppliers

The dietitian: Sandra Wilkinson

‘Locally produced, seasonal food should be included’

The roll-out of hot school meals across the country presents a real opportunity to improve the health of children if implemented effectively. We know from food consumption surveys that children in Ireland have nutritional deficits, and that these are more common in children from disadvantaged backgrounds. We also know that proper nutrition can improve children’s ability to concentrate and encourages attendance.

It’s not just the short-term benefits. We have seen in Japan how free school meals, accompanied by education, can help bring about a lifelong positive change by helping children to understand, from a young age, how to make healthier food choices. It can also expose children to different flavours and increase acceptance of healthy, locally sourced foods.

While providers are obliged to meet nutritional standards, there isn’t a robust system to oversee this, nor sufficient resources in place to support providers in challenging areas, such as catering for specific dietary needs. Ideally providers would work with a qualified nutrition professional, preferably a registered dietitian, to ensure that meals are as healthy as possible; some already are.

School meals should be low in saturated fat, salt and sugar. They should be broadly in line with the food pyramid, with a focus on vegetables and fruits, wholegrain cereals, potatoes or rice, followed by dairy, then lean meats and protein alternatives, such as beans and legumes. Portion sizes should be age-appropriate and increase for older children. Meals should be suitable for all children attending school. Locally produced, seasonal food should be included.

Successful implementation requires dedicated resources and a cross-departmental approach, so that the Department of Health and the Department of Education are involved too. The benefits will be society-wide.

Sandra Wilkinson, registered dietitian and communications manager with the Irish Nutrition and Dietetic Institute (INDI)

Irish food firms adding tech to the menu in restaurant kitchens worldwide

 

Food technology business Nory, which has raised €23.75m to date, has shown other Irish companies the potential for innovation in the sector

 

from the Irish Times 

 

How we eat is getting smarter. From processing orders to working out what our bodies don’t agree with, Irish companies are at the forefront of how technology is influencing the digital shift in food.

The speed with which we get served is where the biggest shift is being felt. While fine dining is at no risk of turning into fast food, businesses such as Nory are improving efficiency behind the scenes.

The Dublin-based company, which has raised $25.7 million (€23.75 million) in funding to date, has developed a platform aimed at giving greater visibility of the entire restaurant process to staff, helping them to better manage orders.

“It’s a single operating system for restaurant groups, particularly places with multiple restaurants,” says Conor Sheridan, founder of Nory. “It does everything from sales to supply chain, through cost of goods sold to people management.

“It’s one command centre for everything in the business. We plug in algorithms to learn all about the business. This shows how many people are expected to come through the door, how many people will be needed in the kitchen, and [it] makes running a restaurant more intelligent and data driven.”

Nory has traded on its use of artificial intelligence (AI) from when it started in 2021. That was slightly before the hype around AI truly got going. Sheridan has noticed a shift in how he discusses the platform with customers as a result.

It’s been like a 180 [degree turn] in terms of reaction to it. Previously, the reactions to AI were that people felt it wasn’t needed. Ever since the launch of ChatGPT and the like, everyone wants to know how they can use AI in their business,” says Sheridan.

“A lot of our inbound approaches are from people who want to know how they can use AI to make their business more profitable. It also means that it’s harder to differentiate because so many companies are pushing AI now.”

[ AI promises a future that is ‘exhilarating and terrifying’Opens in new window ]

The idea for the business grew out of issues he had encountered with his other business, Mad Egg. Sheridan, who cofounded the restaurant with Stephen O’Reilly, recognised issues with efficiency and decided to develop a solution that would make it easier to run Mad Egg.

“I had previously worked in finance where everything was based around predictive algorithms. When I went into the restaurant business, it was different and everything just sort of happened. That made me uncomfortable and I wanted to see if there were tools out there to help people use data in their decisions,” he says.

“There wasn’t really. It’s an industry that’s slow to incorporate technology traditionally. I decided to build my own technology initially and it snowballed from there.”

There are now thousands of restaurants using Nory’s platform across Ireland, Britain, the US and the Middle East.

The speed at which Nory has spread is among the reasons so many Irish businesses are examining the food tech sector. Like Nory, RocketBox is an AI business focused on improving efficiency but it is targeted at the delivery sector.

“We focus on kitchens that deal with high volumes of orders. The traditional first-come, first-served approach doesn’t work with massive volume. We prioritise order management through geolocation,” says Sadiq Daniel, head of operations at RocketBox.

“It works out which order to prioritise first. It cuts down wait time. One of the biggest complaints is food being cold. The main factor is down to delivery driver availability and working out which order comes first.”

The platform prioritises essentially based on three factors – the location of the customer, the time it takes to make an order, and whether a delivery driver has been assigned. That last part is crucial: if a driver isn’t assigned then the food shouldn’t be made.

“If it gets made too early, it gets cold and left on a counter. Then someone else might come in to collect and their order isn’t ready yet because the chef hasn’t even started making the food yet,” says Daniel.

“If drivers don’t get the food on time, they’ll just cancel the run. Eventually customers will get annoyed too. It’s not down to the restaurant, it’s down to operational approaches.”

The business was cofounded by spouses Ross and Mel Cronin. The idea grew out of issues Ross Cronin’s Uno Pizza restaurant had dealing with bottlenecks in deliveries and the couple set about creating a solution.

“By addressing the bottlenecks, we’re also boosting staff retention at restaurants. When staff get stressed, especially chefs, they are more likely to leave. If a problem is ongoing and there’s no sign of a solution, they leave out of frustration,” says Daniel.

The business is still in its beta phase and is working with Deliveroo as part of that. RocketBox is also targeting the Middle East, where it has already had some discussions with delivery companies Snoonu and Talabat.

Getting food to customers faster is nice but there’s still the issue of customers finding that their meal disagrees with them. FoodMarble, another Dublin-based company, is addressing that issue. The business has developed a device aimed at finding intolerances and related issues in what we eat.

[ FoodMarble targets new growth as it plans US expansionOpens in new window ]

“We have a breath analysis device that helps you understand how you’re digesting food and where you’re not digesting certain foods or identify certain issues in your digestive system,” says Aonghus Shortt, co-founder of FoodMarble.

“The user breathes into the device and it measures certain molecules that are produced when [they are] not digesting food fully. These are produced by the microbes in your guts.

Like Nory and RocketBox, the inspiration for the company came close to home.

“My now wife, Grace, and I moved in together. I knew she had some digestive issues but I didn’t really appreciate how much of an impact they had on her life. I come from an engineering background and I dug into the research available to help her,” says Shortt.

“I found out about breath testing and made a prototype device. I figured out what was being measured and she found it helpful. We’d cook up one particular food at a time, she’d eat it, and she’d breathe into the device while digesting.”

Even with that basic prototype, Shortt was able to find usable results including what foods seemed problematic but were not actually the source of the problem.

“If you eat something from a restaurant or a takeaway and blow into the device, the device will show you. It will often be just one element. The carbohydrates in onions or garlic might be the problem for some people, while for others is could be the lactose in a cream-based sauce,” says Shortt.

“The staggering thing is that it’s hard to judge just based on when someone feels bad. Symptoms might happen later and you just blame what you ate most recently. Digestion happens over a long time.”

The business has grown into a multichannel company, after raising €8 million in funding. Having begun as a direct to consumer business, FoodMarble has now expanded to deliver a medical device used by doctors.

“Some of the customers we have in the US are large health systems or groups of clinical practices. There’s a big need because so many people have these issues,” says Shortt.

“We’re in the process of launching some generative AI features. This will interpret the data for the customer and give more feedback to them.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fintan O’Toole on his career: ‘You had to learn to live with the fact that some people despised you’

From the Irish Times

The Irish Times columnist has made a new documentary about his life for RTÉ. Here he looks back on a career that he began as the Michelangelo of Tipp-Ex

Sometimes, if I was having a bad day at The Irish Times, I would look out of the window of the offices on Tara Street and gaze for a while at the ugliest building in Ireland. Hawkins House, a grey 12-storey pile that embodied the vandalism inflicted on Dublin in the 1960s, has since gone to its grave unmourned. But it was for me a kind of memento mori. If I was tempted by the lure of self-pity, I would remember the many evenings I had spent cleaning the toilets in Hawkins House. I would tell myself again that, whatever the occasional frustrations of journalism, it sure beats working.

As it happened, our family’s main connection to the world of newspapers was through my mother’s job as an office cleaner at the Irish Press, just down by the Liffey at Burgh Quay. She would get up at 5am and cycle in there to empty the overflowing ashtrays and hoover the floors and, I presume, clean the toilets. She would usually be gone before the reporters arrived for the early shift. Though she did sometimes have to wake the great sports writer Con Houlihan when he slept under his desk after a hard night. She had made the mistake on her first morning in the job of calling the security man to say that a tramp had broken in, but Con – a gentle, shy, dishevelled bear of a man – perfectly understood the reasons for her confusion and was not in the least offended.

As well as contributing to our daily bread, the Irish Press, Fianna Fáil’s semi-official journal, was our daily newspaper. My grandfather, who lived with us, was a de Valera man, so it was the Press and its sister papers, the Evening Press and the Sunday Press, that informed us of the happenings of the world. They were read from cover to cover with an intense interest that did not waver between the death notices, the hurling reports and the epic events of global history. In memory, I seem to have moved seamlessly from the children’s page in the Evening Press to David Marcus’s New Irish Writing page on Saturdays, which is where I first read contemporary Irish poetry and short stories.

It was natural, I suppose, for my mother to hope that I might get a job on the Press. No one in my family had gone to university – my parents did not even go to secondary school – so the world of the white-collar professions was very distant. But the newspaper was familiar territory, and it seemed like an obvious possibility for a son who was patently useless at almost everything.

I edited a newspaper at school. I wrote reports for the Irish Union of School Students. (My first publication was a survey we did on the use of corporal punishment.) I got a small prize for an essay submitted for a Council of Europe competition. At University College Dublin I edited the student newspaper imaginatively titled Student. I was obviously on some kind of trajectory, but I had no idea how all of this could become a career or a way of life.

My only real thought was that I would somehow make a living from writing, and, as I didn’t write fiction, this must have meant some kind of journalism. My mother mentioned my proclivities to Vincent Jennings, who edited the Sunday Press, and he offered to see me. He was very nice, and, as my mother and I sat across from him in what I remember as a rather dingy office, he asked me some questions about what I wrote. I babbled something. He looked at my mother sadly and said, “I’m afraid it’s too late. He’ll be too old by the time he leaves UCD.” I should, he said, have gone instead to the College of Commerce in Rathmines to learn shorthand and typing.

It was obvious that he thought I had already acquired too many notions to ever be any use on a newspaper. I remember he used the word “wordsmith”, which I had never heard before, to suggest what he thought I thought I was. I could tell he did not mean it as a compliment. He stood up and shook my hand and wished me luck in the future.

He was quite right too. I never learned shorthand, and I still practise the hunt-and-peck method of typing. Back then I wrote everything out in an appalling scrawl before transferring it, slowly and laboriously, to the page on the huge old second-hand typewriter my parents had bought me for my 18th birthday. My best friend was the little bottle of a white liquid called Tipp-Ex that you brushed on to the page to blot out your mistakes. I was the Michelangelo of Tipp-Ex.

And the truth was that, although my poor mother was very disappointed that I was not good enough for the Press, I would have been much more worried if the editor had told me that, as soon as I got my BA from UCD, there was a job waiting for me as a reporter for de Valera’s papers. Beneath my diffidence and shyness I was an arrogant young pup. I had no clear idea of what a life in journalism could look like for me, but I had a pretty clear idea that it wasn’t that.

The problem really was the journalism that me and my friends were now reading. It was mostly American – Joan Didion’s The White Album, Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic. But it was also Irish: Nell McCafferty and Maeve Binchy, for example, were writing journalism in The Irish Times that was something other than news reporting, that had the voice and the sensibility and the individuality of good fiction. Vincent Browne had established Magill magazine and Gene Kerrigan was writing riveting long-form pieces that fused scrupulously detailed reportage (usually of stories the newspapers did not cover) with the wit and rhythm of hard-boiled detective novels – Philip Marlowe on the mean streets of Dublin.

Artistic Dublin is a small town, and I could not avoid the people I had to write about, sometimes harshly

I was far from such levels of accomplishment, but I was lucky in that I did have a calling card: drama criticism. I had been going to plays since I was 13 or 14, and I liked to write about them, initially just as a way to define my tastes for myself. It was an endeavour where reporting (this is what I saw) could meet opinion (this is what I felt about it). I felt at home on that crossroads because I could never really write anything that did not have a point of view. Words always arrived from an emotional hinterland of deep feelings about life, especially Irish life in all its absurdities and hypocrisies.

I was fortunate, too, that there was a place where these impulses could be pursued in print. John S Doyle and David McKenna were turning In Dublin from a basic listings bulletin into a current-affairs and cultural magazine. I wormed my way in as drama critic and also wrote longer features about social changes, not least the great surge in religious reaction in the 1980s. The money was terrible, but it was a great place to be. The stable of critics – myself, Aidan Dunne, Michael Dervan, Michael Dwyer – would eventually migrate en masse to The Irish Times. The regular writers included Mary Raftery, arguably the most consequential Irish journalist of her generation, and Colm Tóibín. It was a better school in which to learn the ropes than the College of Commerce – at least for the kind of vessel I was interested in sailing.

Theatre criticism also toughened me up. It was actually harder than writing about politics. Artistic Dublin is a small town, and I could not avoid the people I had to write about, sometimes harshly. Some of them – Hugh Leonard, for example – had much more widely read newspaper columns of their own from which to launch furious counterattacks. In the late 1990s I spent three years as drama critic of the Daily News in New York, where the stakes on Broadway were ostensibly higher. But the job was infinitely softer than it was in Dublin, where WB Yeats’s “great hatred, little room” retained its salience and you had to learn to live with the fact that some people despised you. That is an essential part of the education of any serious journalist.

[ From the archive: Fintan O’Toole on Mary Raftery – The woman who opened our eyesOpens in new window ]

For a few years, at least, it was possible to make a kind of living as a journalist in Dublin without writing for the newspapers at all. Magill and In Dublin were thriving – as indeed were Hibernia and Hot Press. Nobody was making a fortune, but Ireland did have a genuinely independent and alternative media. Browne in particular was full of missionary zeal and vibrant mischief, and he was willing to give space to anyone who seemed interesting to him, regardless of age. When he relaunched the Sunday Tribune he gave me my first permanent job. At 25 I was simultaneously arts editor, literary editor, feature writer and drama critic. It was as exciting as it was insane.

The excitement was not just professional. It was also generated by the strange state of Ireland. On the one hand, it was stultifying – Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael had more than 80 per cent of the vote between them, and the Catholic Church still had a lock on all legislation concerning sexuality, education and healthcare. On the other, things were patently falling apart under the pressure of the Troubles, an imploding economy and mass emigration and unemployment. It was not a great place to live, but it was – with its endless ambiguities and contradictions, the gaping distance between official rhetorics and daily realities – a great place to write about.

[ Fintan O’Toole: My personal history of modern IrelandOpens in new window ]

By 1988, when I was 30 and had a spouse, a child and a mortgage, I was ready to become semi-official myself. I had written a pamphlet called The Southern Question for Dermot Bolger’s Raven Arts Press, a most disobliging piece of work about Charles Haughey and the hollowness of faux patriotism that had been read with a certain relish by Dick Walsh, The Irish Times’ redoubtable political editor. He recommended that I be brought in as a columnist, critic and feature writer, and Conor Brady, the paper’s editor, took a chance on me.

There’s also something about Ireland that, I hope, keeps you honest. It’s intimate. Readers are neighbours, acquaintances, fellow citizens

This too was lucky. It meant that I have enjoyed the enormous privilege of never having to work for a media mogul, an egomaniacal tycoon or a political propagandist. Over 36 years I have never had a column spiked or seriously altered for any reason other than the rulings of libel lawyers. A lot of things I’ve written have undoubtedly seemed wrong-headed to editors, but the right to be wrong-headed is part of the paper’s unwritten constitution. Exasperation has never led to threats of expulsion.

This security has also meant that when I’ve written for publications outside Ireland I’ve had the luxury of not working for those I despise. It has been very easy for me to have principles. Bertolt Brecht’s dictum – “food first, then morality” – is the brutal truth. But I haven’t had to choose between feeding my family and writing what I believe.

 

There’s also something about Ireland that, I hope, keeps you honest. It’s intimate. Readers are neighbours, acquaintances, fellow citizens. Until the mobile phone killed the habit, it was not unusual for me to find myself sitting on a bus behind someone reading one of my columns and commenting on what rubbish it was to the companion beside them. Or, occasionally, meeting people for whom something I had written meant a great deal because it gave voice to feelings they had long held but had not felt free to express.

That intimacy mattered because Ireland was shifting, not just on the large scale of economics and identities and national narratives but in the nature of the conversations we were having with ourselves. What could be seen and said and acknowledged and recognised was changing. Reality itself – the specific gravity of our lived and local truths – was being redefined. It was possible to imagine as a journalist that you were taking part in that conversation, even if it was only by making people so cross at you that they had to articulate for themselves what they were so cross about.

I often wonder whether anyone will again have such freedom, such privilege. Newspapers are under such pressure now, in terms both of money and of the nonstop demand for immediacy, of time, that their capacity to indulge arrogant wordsmiths is increasingly limited. But there will always be those of us for whom journalism beats working.

Fintan O’Toole: A Life in Our Times, which draws on his book We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958, is on RTÉ One on Wednesday, December 11th, at 9.35pm

 

 

 

 

 

 

An open letter to a Greek minister from tourist-unfriendly Ireland

 from the Irish Times

Greece should not be overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge. It is possible to drive away tourists, as we have shown: start by making it hard for them to get there

 

An imaginary letter from Minister for Tourism Catherine Martin to her Greek counterpart Olga Kefalogianni:

Dear Olga,

I hope you are well. I read with interest a piece in the Financial Times the other day about your problems with over-tourism and the measures you are contemplating to tackle it. I hope you don’t think it presumptuous, but I thought I would share with you a few of the policies we have successfully implemented in Ireland over the years that have helped us avoid the scourge of over-tourism.

The first thing you need to do is make it hard for tourists to get to Greece. I would suggest you take a look at the model we have adopted around the regulation of Dublin Airport. What you do is make the number of passengers who can transit the airport a matter for the local planning authority to decide based on local concerns. Then you make the number of planes that can land at the airport something the aviation regulator decides on a national basis. In the middle, you put in a company to run the airport with a brief to maximise revenues. It has worked very well for us and this year we hope to turn back several million potential tourists because the airport is not allowed breach the cap set by the local authority.

The next thing you want to do is make it hard for tourists to find somewhere to stay once they get here. We have something of a multipronged strategy in this regard.

We started by manufacturing a housing crisis. It’s easily done and I can fill you in on how to do this separately if you are interested.

A housing crisis has several benefits when it comes to preventing over-tourism — primarily a lack of affordable accommodation in the private rental sector near big tourist centres.

This helps in several ways. First, it makes it very hard for tourist businesses to find staff, particularly the low-wage casual staff on which they depend. Any staff who can find accommodation will have to pay handsomely for it. They will need higher wages and this puts pressure on hospitality prices, which helps drive away the tourists.

But what about Airbnbs and other short-term tourist lets, I hear you say? Well, you can clamp down on that via registration and taxation. Again the old housing crisis gives you some cover here. There is an opportunity for a double whammy if you are smart because if you frame the regulation correctly, you can take out most of the bed-and-breakfasts in your prime tourist areas, as we have done along the Wild Atlantic Way.

Access and accommodation are the sweet spots in the battle against over-tourism but there are plenty of other smaller initiatives that can help. One thing we have trialled with some success is to create a climate of fear in your inner cities. This is best done by getting your parliamentary backbenchers to make statements about violent incidents in the centre of your capital city rather than focusing on the actual crime figures which show it to be safe. The media is usually happy to help in the national struggle to discourage tourists from visiting.

There is also taxation. Having first engineered a situation in which many hospitality businesses are struggling to stay afloat, it’s very important that you don’t throw any of them a lifeline by reducing VAT or something equally daft.

Finally, there is the business of how you maximise revenue from your assets. We are charging €125 a pop for getting on to Skellig Michael (which you probably know as the Star Wars Island) by boat. If I can get that out of a rock in the Atlantic with some stone huts surely you can do better than €15 a head for that large rock in the middle of Athens with the ruined temples? Nothing like ridiculous prices to drive away tourists.

Anyway, I hope you found this helpful. Don’t be overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge. It is possible to drive away tourists. Only today I heard the encouraging news from Fáilte Ireland, our tourist board, that there were declines in all parts of the market. Great job.

Believe me when I say that if you follow these simple steps you will soon have a tourist product that only rich Americans can afford. The good news for you is that there are only three million of them who claim Greek heritage. We have to deal with 36 million who say they are Irish. It’s a bit of a headache, to be honest, but we working hard on driving them away too.

Yours,

Catherine Martin

 

 

 

 

 

Ancient food wisdom for modern food security

 

What did the patron saints of Ireland eat? From what we can tell, Patrick, Columba, Brigid and their peers could have chowed down on a variety of locally-grown foods, including rye, peas, barley, oats and different wheat varieties.

And while it’s fun to imagine it, there’s a pressing reason to know the details. Researchers believe that getting a better understanding of ancient foods could help protect our food security into the future

 

the rest of the article is here.

Irish superfoods

 from the Irish Times 20.1.2024

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Forget pricey supplements and expensive imports – these Irish superfoods have been seeing us right for centuries

 

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Every January, we’re pedalled pricey “superfoods” and supplements offering all sorts of promises, often flown in from faraway places. But what about more sustainable local, home-grown treasures for healthier eating?

“We have some of the best food producers here in Ireland, but people still want to buy protein bars with 30 ingredients with no thought to their gut health, our grand central station to our health,” says Heather Maguire, a nutritional health coach who focuses on the connection between lifestyle, quality food and gut health with her clients.

Her main aim, which sounds like what most of want in the new year, is to add “powerful foods into your diet that leave you feeling energised, dropping the brain food and lifting the mood”. Yes, please.

Maguire is not a fan of “new year superfoods”, citing it as one of her main bugbears for people looking to make changes. One of the first things she does with clients is take them around the supermarket, pointing out how the “good stuff” is often not located in the so-called “healthy food” aisle. She says we overlook the power of simple foods that are full of goodness, like plain yoghurt and berries, and urges people to look past trends and fads. “I am on a mission to bring awareness, prevention, change, and, to be honest, some much-needed common sense back to the table and our lives,” she says.

Looking beyond the trends and back into the past, Ireland has a long history of thinking about food functionally. A recently published Irish book, Cures of Ireland: A Treasury of Irish Folk Remedies by Cecily Gilligan explores Irish folk cures and remedies, many of which are culinary and herbal. Some of the cures noted included “nettle soup in the springtime for blood pressure, eating young dandelion leaves for gallstones and drinking honey in warm milk at bedtime for a good night’s sleep”. Remedies for arthritis included “dandelion tea made from the leaves in spring and sweetened with honey, or simmer wild garlic leaves in milk, strain and drink, or eat parsley, or apples, or take a seaweed bath”. For asthma you might “drink goat’s milk, or take carraigín (seaweed) in boiled water”. We treated coughs with “rosehip syrup (rich in vitamin C), dilute with hot water and drink”, and for gout, we would “eat parsley, or nettle soup, or apply honey”.

Gilligan admits she does not know the “medicinal value” of the “cures” she has gathered, but the fact they are part of the folkloric tradition and that they’ve been around for hundreds of years passed down from generation to generation says a lot, she believes. There are still many used day to day, such as honey for sore throats and colds. A traditional cure that saw a resurgence over the past few years was making a drink with carraigín to treat coughs – an ancient remedy praised to this day for its anti-inflammatory and expectorant properties.

In her authoritative book on Irish food history, Land of Milk and Honey: The Story of Traditional Irish Food and Drink, Bríd Mahon also mentions many “cures”, including buttermilk, which was “considered a certain cure for a hangover and was much in demand after weddings, wakes and festivals when some were in the habit of imbibing not wisely if too well”. She writes about whey being used as a cure for kidney ailments, upset stomachs and fevers, and how goat’s milk was said to cure anaemic complaints. “Our ancestors brought common sense to everything they did, including what they ate and drank.” Here are some of the Irish superfoods that have been seeing us right for centuries.

Oats

Oats have long been a staple of the Irish diet. “Since medieval times, porridge and gruel were valued for their nutritional and sustaining properties, and were regularly recommended for the young, the sick and those ailing,” writes food historian Regina Sexton in her book A Little History of Irish Food. She even notes that the monks recognised the positive values of porridge, calling for its inclusion in the diet of menstruating nuns.Oats are still recommended to women in particular today, thanks to the B vitamins and magnesium. “They are full of soluble fibre, which can help with lowering cholesterol,” Heather Maguire adds. She recommends steel cut or pinhead oats, even though they take a bit longer to cook. “They have a lower GI (glycaemic index), which means they are digested more slowly and help with managing blood sugars.”

Pimp your porridge to add flavour and even more nutrition. Maguire recommends nuts, seeds and berries. “Our gut thrives on the diversity of our food, [we should be] aiming for 30 plants a week.” Another great home-grown hero food to add is a big spoon of yoghurt, making sure it’s plain, “non-sweetened with the only ingredients being the milk and the cultures. You’re adding now healthy fats and your fermented food.”

Beetroot

We’ve come a long way from vinegary crinkly jarred beetroot ubiquitous on Irish “salad plates”. Beetroot has had a well- deserved glow-up over the past decade or so, with good reason. “They are a nutritional powerhouse,” says Maguire. “They are high in B6 which your body can’t make, so you need to eat it or supplement it or both. B6 is so important for many things such as brain health, nervous system, and immunity.” They are a great source of fibre too. “People will always associate fibre with digestion, but it plays such a big role in our health. Feeds the good bacteria in our gut, helps manage blood sugars, lowers cholesterol and reduces inflammation.”Beetroot also has plenty of folate, “important for red blood cell formation and healthy cell growth and function”, and nitrates that “when converted to nitrate oxide, signal the blood vessels to relax and can lower blood pressure and enhance circulation, improving workout performance and recovery”.

Sometimes the preparation can put us off – the boiling, the staining, the peeling. Cutting beetroots into wedges and oven-roasting or air-frying them is an easy way to cook them, and it concentrates their delicious, sweet flavour. A young beetroot will cook in boiling water in 15-20 minutes, and when they are done, the skin rubs off easily. Buy with the leaves still on for more health benefits. The leaves are similar to chard, with a “higher iron count than spinach, and contain way more antioxidants than the beet itself”, says Maguire.

Mushrooms

When it comes to foods with big health claims, mushrooms are having a moment. Take a glance at any health food shop you’ll find a wide selection of mushroom supplements and powders with names such as lion’s mane, turkey tail, chaga and reishi. Mushroom tablets, teas and coffees are pitched as functional, with price tags to match the size of their claims. Mushrooms have been thought of as medicinal for millennia and are an important part of traditional Chinese medicine. But what about everyday mushrooms?

Your supermarket mushrooms are already packing quite a punch – low in calories, high in fibre and protein, and a source of potassium, selenium, riboflavin, niacin, folate and biotin. You can buy mushrooms enriched with vitamin D, which Irish diets often lack. You can do this at home yourself, by leaving them in sunlight for an hour. “They are also prebiotic,” says Maguire. “They encourage the growth of good bacteria in your gut.”

It’s easy to add more mushrooms into your diet – with eggs for a protein-packed breakfast, as a nutrient boost for salads, simply cooked and served on toast, or as a meat substitute. These days there are plenty of Irish-grown exotic varieties such as shiitake, oyster, maitake, nameko and white beech. Wild mushrooms are growing in popularity, too, offering even more of a nutritional punch, but pickers beware: always forage with someone who knows what they are doing until you know enough yourself. Look up Courtney Tyler or Bill O’Dea for expertise on wild mushroom foraging in Ireland.

Honey

Honey has been a prized food throughout history. In Ireland there was a special section in Brehon Laws on beekeeping and honey bees. Historian Bríd Mahon’s book on the story of traditional Irish food and drink, Land of Milk and Honey, is so-called because of its role in Irish cures and remedies up to the present day.

According to a collaborative research project from teams at Trinity College Dublin and Dublin City University in 2018, Irish honey is a worthy alternative to imported manuka honey. The researchers found that Irish heather honey has a similar level of powerful antioxidants called phenolic compounds, which help to prevent damage occurring in the cells of the body. Honey can be a source of enzymes, vitamins and minerals, but buyer beware – not all honey is as it seems. “Not every product labelled as honey is 100 per cent pure honey,” says Maguire.

“Some are filled with artificial sweeteners, high fructose, and brown rice syrup and additives. We have some exceptional honey producers in Ireland; I would recommend knowing your supplier and your source and reading your labels.”

Look out too for raw Irish honey, which is less processed, and buy local to help to support native bees. Due to its high sugar content, honey should be eaten in moderation, however – and may not offer much health benefit in such small quantities.

Oysters and mussels

Oysters have also been gaining attention lately for their potent qualities, with several Irish “oyster extract” supplements now on the market. It’s no wonder; they are little parcels of goodness, rich in vitamin D, copper, zinc, manganese, selenium and protein. They are often touted as aphrodisiacs too, most likely because the combination of nutrients they provide is great for energy levels. Rather than reaching for the supplement jar, go for the real thing. Fresh Irish oysters are local, delicious and, as an island nation, we should be eating more of them.The same can be said of mussels, a food we love to eat on holidays in Europe but often forget about at home. Mussels are some of the most affordable, nutritious and delicious things we can eat. “Oysters and mussels are rich in omega-3 fatty acids (healthy fats) which play an enormous role in our overall health,” says Maguire. “Healthy fats are essential building blocks for our brain, memory, mood and learning and they are anti-inflammatory. The body can’t make them; we need to get them from our food.”

Seaweed

Seaweed is considered one of the most nutritionally dense forms of vegetation on the planet. It’s jam-packed with vitamins and minerals, with vitamins A, B, C, and E, 56 minerals and trace elements. It’s a source of calcium, vitamin B12, and antioxidants. There are claims that seaweed can help you live longer, fight disease, lose weight, and make your hair shiny. In Ireland, the nutritional powers of seaweed – particularly carraigín moss – have long been known, but it’s not the easiest thing to work into your diet. So where to start?

There are easier ways to get hold of seaweed than at the shoreline – look for dried Irish seaweed in shops and supermarkets to add a nutrient punch and deep umami flavour to salads, soups, stews, and stir-fries. Irish seaweed pestos are delicious stirred through eggs, on potatoes and on pasta. If you do fancy getting your hands salty and foraging for yourself, look out for food writer Sally McKenna’s brilliant book Extreme Greens, or look up Silgo-based Prannie Rhatigan for seaweed guide books, walks, talks and workshops.*

Ali Dunworth

One of the main reasons start-ups fail is because they have a solution in search of a problem rather than the other way around

 

Over the past 13 years, more than 650 would-be entrepreneurs have shared their aspirations for their new businesses in the New Innovators column. What’s encouraging about this is that even though 90 per cent of start-ups fail, people keep trying. Their ideas may have changed to reflect opportunities in emerging areas such as sustainability and artificial intelligence (AI) but what continues to unite them is the belief that their product or service has the power to change the world.

One such product is ViperClip, a non-conductive plastic staple that secures electric cables five times faster than existing fixing systems. The product is the brainchild of Northern Ireland-based electrician Davy Gray, who had the clip idea running around in his head for years. In 2015, Gray and his wife, Julie, decided to see if the idea had legs: eight years and a lot of money and heartache later, ViperClip is ready to hit the shelves.

The Grays tapped into the technical expertise of Queen’s University Belfast for help with the development of the plastic compound for the staples and Julie Gray estimates investment to date at close to €1.2 million between private backing and support from Invest Northern Ireland. Like many start-ups in search of cash, the Grays tried their hand in the UK’s Dragons’ Den, but although their appearance generated big interest in the product, there was no investment as they decided to go with local funding instead.

 

the rest of the article is here.

Thousands of young Irish are leaving but it’s not ‘for the craic’

 from the Irish Times

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Laura Kennedy: More than 21,000 of Ireland’s young people received working holiday visas between July 2022 and June 2023. Apparently, this the highest recorded figure in 16 years

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There are so many things Ireland is good at. Humour. Masterful literature. Beards – Irish men really are fantastic at growing them. The popularity of fulsome, seaworthy beards makes Ireland the envy of other, less hirsute, nations.

Persistence – we’re fierce good at that. The Irish are champion trudgers. We’ll trudge through whatever is thrown at us, from colonisation by the British, to the famine, to the narrative that Dublin is a major global city and yet you can’t get a train to the country’s main airport or tap on to a bus with your bank card.

A bus that may arrive when stipulated, but probably won’t.

What I just did there is particularly Irish. I began this column by generating an idea that I swear I’d intended to blossom into an actual point of some sort. Instead, it devolved into a complaint about our absolutely terrible buses and trains. Because (usually) affable complaining is in our national skeleton. We bond through relating to one another’s struggle, even petty struggles like a late bus.

[ My nine-year-old daughter has opportunities in Luxembourg she wouldn’t have in Ireland ]

Colleagues at the office kettle exchange evidence of the countless ways the company is being run into the ground by dullards and how Gary the manager (chief among them) clearly suffered a loss at his weekly ultimate frisbee game and we’re all in for it now.

And is it just me or are the mini Twixes in the staff kitchen “minier” than they used to be? At which point Mary from HR rushes in, crimson and panting from her sprint from down the hall upon hearing the conversation, to interject that she remembers a time when there were only pink wafers in the kitchen and isn’t it well for you with your marginally small Twix?

We are competitive moaners. Moaning that the 15a bus will only arrive if you burn sage, take off your shoes in the middle of South Great George’s Street and mutter an incantation to the Pagan Gods who kept things tipping away before the Catholic Church and Dublin Bus got the run of the place. Moaning that our politicians are a shower of ding dongs in ill-fitting suits who can organise nothing beyond tax exemptions for US tech firms.

It might be time to cease looking outward for explanations and question what we are creating for emigrants to return to

There’s always something to complain about.

We complain with an eloquence and good humour that endears us to one another and sometimes the rest of the world. We punch up, mostly. We get away with it. It’s the teacher. It’s the manager. It’s the Government.

We’re also great at making the best of things (there’s that trudging instinct). Historically, when things get dodgy at home, we’ll emigrate, establish community and prosper across the world. No keeping us down or some such. However, it’s worth questioning whether we should still have to be quite so good at this. We might aim some of the blame at the aforementioned politicians (and we do, with significant flourish and energy) but everything gets a bit squiffy when we consider the fact that we voted for them and their predecessors, and that Ireland looks the way it does with our collective, active participation and endorsement. Our leaders reflect our values and if they don’t, the inertia that led to their election reflects our values. We forget that bit sometimes.

The Australian department of home affairs reported that more than 21,000 of Ireland’s young people received working holiday visas between July 2022 and June 2023. Apparently, this the highest recorded figure in 16 years. That number is double the number granted the year before. For the last 15 years or so, we’ve had a strange tendency to consider “young people” as anyone under 40 – it makes the fact that Irish people delay parenthood into their 30s and the egregious disparity in home ownership between generations seem slightly less indicative of major issues – but I don’t qualify as a “young person”.

[ A snapshot of house prices in five cities around the world and how they compare to Ireland ]

I’m 35. I emigrated to Australia from the UK last August, and I can see why actual young people are doing the same – because the cost of living here is manageable, rental properties are plentiful and affordable (compared with Dublin and London, anyway), and those who want to live alone or with a partner, rather than six friends, or to eventually start a family if they want to, might feasibly be able to afford to do that.

Online commentary I’ve seen around the news of this gigantic jump in figures – which is, of course, in part fuelled by the surging Australian appetite for both skilled and unskilled labour – has been depressing. Social media is rife with a lot of “they are choosing to leave for the craic”, or “this is what young people do – they travel” comments. The problem is that nobody emigrates unless leaving is better than what they have at home. Australia offers many pull factors but they only look attractive to Irish people when they consider the push factors at home.

We have a history of emigration, which makes us feel that more than 21,000 young Irish people going through the prohibitively complex process of obtaining and paying for an Australian visa tells us more about those individual young people than it tells us about the home they are yearning to leave in droves.

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The reality is that we are not creating space for them in Ireland, and they are living in conditions that make a country 15,500km away seem distinctly more enticing.

Irish people have always emigrated, we think.

Most come back, we think.

It might be time to cease looking outward for explanations and question what we are creating for emigrants to return to.

 

 

 

 

 

Drumshanbo: ‘The gin took off beyond our wildest dreams’

 

Pat Rigney of the Shed Distillery in Drumshanbo enjoys a whiff from the first cask of whiskey distilled in Connacht for over 100 years, which was briefly opened for tasting on the winter solstice, It was then put back into hibernation for a few more years. Photograph: Brian Farrell ; from Irish Times

 

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Thirty years ago the closures of three big employers inflicted huge trauma on the Leitrim town. But now it is thriving again and, driven by a vibrant food and drink sector, plans are in place for even further growth 

 

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Drumshanbo man Noel McPartland was reminded of a trip he made to Saudi Arabia almost 50 years ago when Pat Rigney recently announced a further €10 million investment in the Shed Distillery. The distillery’s flagship brand, Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish Gin, is sold in more than 80 countries around the world, but long before it became a fashionable tipple McPartland was selling another product made in Drumshanbo to far-flung markets.

His success as sales manager with Lairds Jam, notably in the Middle East, meant that the company had to build a bigger factory which is now home to the Food Hub, where the Shed Distillery and another half dozen businesses are located.

“I covered the Middle East, the US and the Far East, selling jam,” says the 87-year-old who also remembers being part of an Irish trade mission to Libya in the 1970s, which involved sitting in a tent in the desert for an hour with Col Gadafy (“a very peculiar man”) promoting Bo Peep jam from Drumshanbo.

“We hit the jackpot in Saudi Arabia in 1977 when we got a contract for over a million jars of jam. That was the reason the new factory had to be built as we outgrew the old factory on Church Street,” says the Leitrim man. He recalls a time when many of the labels leaving the Drumshanbo factory were in Arabic.

McPartland was one of the founder members of Drumshanbo Community Council (DCC) set up in response to the closures of the Arigna coal mines, the Arigna power station and Lairds, which all happened over a relatively short period in the 1990s. The closures meant the loss of around 500 wage packets locally, a huge trauma for the town.

The DCC secured a 99-year lease on the jam factory building where the Food Hub was established in 2004, in time attracting established players in the food and drinks sector such as McNiff’s Boxty, Chef in a Box and, in 2013, the Shed Distillery.

It’s not lost on McPartland that the distillery now employs 100 people – almost as many as Lairds when it closed its doors after 60 years in the town.

Fergal McPartland, son of Noel and manager of the Food Hub, points out that there are now 180 jobs in the seven businesses located there, and with a second food hub, to be known as the Leitrim Food Enterprise Zone, planned for the town, there is an air of optimism around.

The second hub will open its doors next April when Chef in a Box, providers of ready-made meals, and currently with a workforce of 50, moves to the former shoe factory on the Dowra road, having outgrown its present base.

Fergal and Enda McGloin, chairman of the DCC and also a Fine Gael county councillor, were among those who met Rigney on what he described as that “fateful day in 2013″ when he came to talk to the community about the possibility of locating a distillery in the town.

McGloin says they were lucky they succeeded in attracting such a “gold-plated company” and believes the presence of the Food Hub was an attraction as it meant the company did not have to start from scratch on a greenfield site. “The gin took off beyond our wildest dreams,” says the DCC chairman.

Rigney recalls initial concerns but he was impressed by the community spirit and the sense of “everyone pulling together” when he first visited Drumshanbo.

“The facilities, to be honest, were not in great shape at the time. There was a lot of unemployment, they did not have the best wifi connections. They were down on their luck a little bit. We started with one job, and then two and then three.” He says that for the first five years he held down a number of other jobs himself, as he had children at school and college.

Ten years and a dizzying array of accolades on, the €10 million investment announcement has buoyed locals who see it as a further commitment to the town by the Dubliner whose parents Mary and Seamus met in Drumshanbo in the 1950s. She was a book-keeper in the nearby Arigna Mines and he came to audit the books there and boarded in the town.

But Rigney doesn’t allow himself to become too misty-eyed when it comes to business. He is conscious of “headwinds in the industry” and says he doesn’t want get into trouble by “going too far too fast”.

“I am very aware that we have a huge sense of responsibility to the community and to everybody who works there so we will be very very prudent in how we expand.”

Part of the investment is earmarked for laying down more whiskey and expanding the ‘Visitor Experience’, with tours attracting 30,000 annually.

The workforce, which includes 15 people from the local Ukrainian community, will remain at around 100 for the foreseeable future.

“We also have seven amazing young people on a graduate development programme and one of them is Ukrainian,” says Rigney. “She is a young lady who left Kherson in a car, under fire, with her mother and a cat, an unbelievable story. And she is only 24.”

The connection to the Laird family continues as the Shed Distillery is set to fund the refurbishment of the local Methodist church, including a historic organ once played for Queen Victoria when she visited Dublin.

Caleb Laird, who founded the jam factory in 1934 – and who started to generate electricity in the town in 1905, 50 years before the rural electrification scheme reached there – was a stalwart of the local Methodist church. When he bought the organ for the church, the roof had to be taken off to install it.

Rigney attended the final service there on December 3rd.

He has also established links with another Drumshanbo religious institution that has literally put a roof over his head. When he heard that that the Poor Clares, a local enclosed order of nuns, had re-roofed the convent, he bought the slates and used them for the roof of the Visitor Experience centre, which was officially opened in 2021.

“Noel had me enrolled with the Sisters, which I understand means they pray for me on a regular basis – which I need,” he says.

Whatever about prayers, McGloin and Fergal McPartland know the town needs investment to ensure that it continues to grow and both have been successful over the years in accessing various funding sources such as the International Fund for Ireland, Enterprise Ireland and the Rural Regeneration Development Fund.

Fergal McPartland says close to €4 million will be spent on the first phase of the new hub while a second phase, incorporating a food innovation and education centre with links to Atlantic Technological University Sligo, formerly IT Sligo, will involve a further €3 million investment. “All this in an old IDA advance factory which was idle for the best part of 40 years,” he says.

[ In a Word ... Drumshanbo ]

He points out that food grade infrastructure is expensive to provide and after choosing to specialise in that area, Drumshanbo has a reputation within the sector. “Obviously there was a tradition of food from Lairds time. We didn’t just pluck it out of the air.”

Karol Scollan, who runs the Gala supermarket in the town, says Drumshanbo now feels quite upbeat, something which would have been hard to envisage when Lairds and the coal mines closed.

The town lost its two banks and its filling station and the number of pubs is down from 17, when the Arigna mines were open, to six.

But Scollan says anything that creates more jobs in the Food Hub “is great for my business and a lot of other businesses”.

 

 Pat Rigney and head distiller Brian Taff, head distiller celebrate the inaugural Drumshanbo whiskey. Photograph: Brian Farrell 

 

Meanwhile, the closure of the Bank of Ireland (in a main street premises built by Caleb Laird) two years ago has presented another challenge for DCC. In a joint venture with Leitrim County Council, it hopes to establish a remote working hub there alongside a number of artisan shops, a riverside walk and a town square.

“We have acquired the bank and the building next door. All we need now is planning and the funding,” says McGloin. “The planning notice has gone up on the site.”