Blackboard Jungle

Now is the winter of our discontent! The social consensus that carried the Irish economy out of the doldrums is falling apart. They're queuing up to strike and protest. And worse, many of them are in public services, which means the rest of us are used as cannon fodder. That's the way of it.

Trains and planes have been interrupted. A lot of people have been discommoded, many seriously. And now there's the secondary teachers.
A couple of things strike me. The first is that teaching is a very difficult and stressful job.
Yeah yeah yeah, you may say. But wait. An actuary contacted Pat Kenny's radio programme last week. They're the people who work in the insurance industry calculating risks. He said that for insurance risk, a teacher is ranked alongside a frontline soldier or a fireman, and the average survival time for a teacher after retirement is between three and four years.
That is some serious shit.
And what gives it particular strength is that these are dry geezers. They just calculate it from what they find reviewing the statistics and the figures and the payouts on life insurance. And they reckon that teaching is a dangerous occupation.
So, if it's as stressful as they say, they need to be paid well. (Mind you, in the present economic climate, nobody is forcing them to stay either).
The second thing that strikes me is how foolish it is for teachers to claim that they created the Celtic Tiger or that they are responsible for the well-educated workforce on which it was based.
Do they have to take responsibility for the recession ten years ago, for the generations of underachievement and for the persistent problem of early school leaving?
They don't. They blame these things on other factors. Early school leaving is attributed to teacher-pupil ratios, despite the number of studies that clearly show that schools and teachers differ in their effectiveness, even after all other variable factors are allowed for. So, if they claim credit for the good times, they should accept blame for the bad times. They expect everyone else to.
Meanwhile, racists must be scratching their heads at the news that researchers have found that more than 95% of all European males can trace their ancestry back to one of 10 individuals. One of ten?!?
We all have thousands of ancestors, reaching back and criss-crossing each other over the generations. But if each male moved backwards along his family tree, eventually it would come back to no more than 10 founding males.
Strange and scary.
This all emerged in a genetic study of 1007 men across Europe and the Middle East, published in November in Science magazine. The study was carried out by researchers in Italy, the USA, Sweden, Ukraine, Greece, Russia, Croatia and Poland. They used 22 genetic markers all but a few ended up in one of 10 families.
They think the 'founding fathers' arrived in two waves. The first was in the Palaeolithic period, from two million to 13,000 years ago. The second was during the Neolithic period, between 5000 and 9000 years ago.
The researchers suggest that that two lineages appear to have been present in Europe since Palaeolithic times. The remaining lineages entered Europe most likely later during independent migrations from the Middle East and the Urals.
Gas, isn't it? You and Eamon Dunphy. And Robbie Williams. And Tommy Tiernan. And Father Jack. Charles Haughey and Vincent Browne and Kevin Myers. Cousins all. Lovely.

Elsewhere the twists and turns of the American election certainly gave us all a bit of a chuckle, eh? Ah democracy. I'll tell ya, Saddam Hussein doesn't have much to learn from those cowboys.
But the weird centrism of American politics really spooks me. Bush can be lauded as being pro-life while he has another man executed by lethal injection. Ding-dong! Anybody home?
And everything seems geared to professing everything and believing nothing. At least smart gal Billary Clinton got elected. That should provide some fun over the next few years.
That reminds me. You will all remember that two of our smart gals went on the record some months back, complaining about the impact Europe was having on our freedom-loving society and culture.
Mary Harney praised the American frontiers-person spirit and low tax culture and said that Ireland was closer to Boston than Berlin. The Minister for Arts, Culture, Gaeltacht and the Islands (Smle na Gigs anyone?) complained about the impact that Brussels directives were having on our culture. Not half as much as Microsoft, but that's another day's work.
Well, that vision of America and Europe is really old-fashioned and clichid. I mean, Boston? It has its hot spots, but really compared with Berlin, it ain't nothing. Look at the Love Parade, for Chrissake. No contest.
Or look in the Reichstag where traces of cocaine were found that's right, in the German Parliament in toilets used by elected officials and civil servants! Apparently, 22 of 28 toilets tested were 'contaminated with cocaine'. Wuh!
Aha!! Berlin, my Berlin!! Is this why Mary Harney leans towards Boston?!?
The Hog