Irish Examiner view: State should apply level of urgency to rebuild trust
The OPW has been renting the 180,000sq ft Distillers Building in Smithfield, Dublin, at a cost of €8m a year since April of this year, something that will be galling to everybody and doesn't instill trust in the Government.
We trust our fellow citizens more than any apparatus of State, according to the OECD. That’s both unsurprising and sobering.
According to the survey, reported here on Wednesday, 83% of Irish people have a high or moderately high rate of trust in most fellow citizens — compared to 66% reporting trust in the civil service, 47% in national Government, and a dismal 26% in political parties.
Some level of distrust of Government is certainly healthier than blind obedience. However, it’s hard to earn the trust of the people when the people see, or perceive, a scattergun mix of urgency, seeming financial waste, and grand promises that never seem to go anywhere.
Learning, as we did this week, that the OPW will spend €12m in rent on a building before it is even occupied by the State agency that needs it will be galling to everybody — even if the OPW can hardly be at fault for the delays in actually creating that agency, Tailte Éireann.
It can, however, face questions as to how it got into the contract and how it established that €8m rent a year is value for money — much as questions can be asked around why it took so long to set up Tailte Éireann, which seems to be just another example of it taking far too long to get things done in this country.
Having to re-tender for the Cork Event Centre, seemingly 1,000 years since the sod was turned on the site, is frustrating enough (even if the reasons for needing it are sound).
But hearing the Government say it could be underway 12 to 18 months after the tendering process, given how long the project has been going already, is enough to make the city’s eyes roll collectively.
And yet, as a country, we can move when we want to. For example, five new special schools will be created in time for next September — a desperately welcome move. These will, likely, be housed in prefabs or refurbished older buildings rather than being built from scratch. For the children who will finally get suitable school places closer to home, it is an undoubted win.
If that level of urgency could be applied to other parts of the education system, or indeed other projects that need the intervention of the State, maybe the people would be a little more trusting of their Government.
New Chapter in Stoker story
The discovery of a long-forgotten text in the depths of a library archive is the stuff of many a Gothic or horror story, so it was only fitting that it happen with the recent discovery of a long-lost and unknown piece by Dracula creator Bram Stoker.
The story, Gibbet Hill, published in 1890 and unearthed in the National Library archives by Brian Cleary, finally sees a wide release on Saturday. Sales of the classic hardback edition will go toward raising money for the Rotunda Foundation.
It comes at a time when, in the wake of the covid pandemic, there has been an explosion of interest in horror and the genres it is commonly associated with, science fiction and fantasy. A vast cohort of specialist publishers — led in this country by Temple Dark Books, run by SF author Ronald A Geobey — have allowed the articulation of every niche available.
In many ways, it is a golden age for speculative fiction, though that makes it all the sweeter to find a forgotten classic given this country’s role in the origins of what is modern horror fiction, through both Stoker and Joseph Sheridan le Fanu, the ghost story writer whose novella Carmilla beat Stoker to the vampire punch by 25 years.
The cathartic nature of a horror story allows us to confront our own demons and, if the will is there, to vanquish them. And it’s fair to say we could all do with a touch of catharsis these days.
Violence against women: Men must do better
For all our advances as a species, we seem unable to exorcise a darkness in our own hearts: namely, violence toward and the abuse of women.
Our columnist Sarah Harte has, on these pages, written extensively on the matter. In this edition alone, we report on Gisèle Pelicot, who was allegedly drugged and raped by her husband Dominique and allegedly raped by nearly 50 other men; the abuse of women with disabilities by their partners; and a woman who had to wait a month for a protection order to be enforced.
Ms Pelicot is quite right to say: “When you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them.” Donald Trump’s resorting to racism and misogyny to try and tear down his opponent Kamala Harris is just symptomatic of a wider, deeper chasm that exists within humanity.
More than 200 years ago, the feminist writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (whose daughter would later write Frankenstein) wrote that: “Men who are inferior to their fellow men are always most anxious to establish their superiority over women”. It is grim to reflect on the fact that the passage is as pertinent in 2024 as it was in the 1790s.
All the more important, then, to call out such lowlife behaviour and remind the perpetrators that they can, should, and will face justice.
Men of Ireland, do better.
