A very presidential review
November 13th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
The votes have been cast and the ballots counted and we finally have a new president. But before you settle back for seven years of forgetting the job ever existed, it’s time to rake over this news corpse just in case we missed any gold fillings. Despite the role being largely ceremonial and providing no influence over government policy whatsoever, the campaign was awash with impossible promises. Dana promised to use the veto powers she wouldn’t have, Mitchell made the controversial pledge to both understand Ireland’s past and believe in its future, and Davis declared a thousand more years of Mary. Luckily all the soon-to-be incumbent President Michael D Higgins promised was to be “a president for all the people” which is in fact, literally true. It’s that sort of transparent politics that got him the big job.
While some may complain about the ludicrous levels of media coverage for what amounts to a two month interview for an entirely pointless job, one thing the race did provide was an interesting snapshot of changing Irish values. Having an openly gay candidate would be almost unthinkable in many countries, even in relatively liberal western countries such as the United States, but it was not treated as an issue by the Irish press or the majority of the population. For balance we also had Gay Mitchell representing the “why did they have to go and ruin a perfectly good word” portion of the country. At the same time the most ferociously religious anti-abortion candidate did incredibly poorly, although that was possibly due to her most significant contribution to the international stage being on an actual stage. Even the fact that the winner is from the Labour party is quite impressive. The economic crisis has, occupations aside, seen quite a dramatic swing to the right in Europe, where worrying promises of ‘traditional values’ dominate rhetoric and the National Front’s Marianne Le Pen has a chance at the French presidency. As always, Ireland is the Yin to Europe’s Yang and we just yinned all over ourselves. Hopefully this campaign will lead to a re-evaluation of Ireland’s international reputation as a hyper-Catholic backwater nation.
There was no shortage of other controversy throughout the campaign however. Martin McGuinness was particularly problematic given his allegedly checkered past, his candidacy punctuated by widows and children of soldiers confronting him about his time in the IRA. My biggest concern was the fact that he was the only candidate with a real job as Deputy First Minister in Northern Ireland, which he gleefully ignored for two months. Sean “the money was just resting in my account” Gallagher started off as the astute Dragon businessman but things went sour when allegations began to abound of pocketed brown envelopes from smugglers, reviving Fianna Fáil’s legacy in the electorate’s political memory, and destroying his frankly baffling forty per cent support in the final week. He then compounded the controversy by accusing McGuinness of ‘political assassination’ and calling for people to come forward with information about IRA killings, risking both his credibility and kneecaps. Dana topped even that with a myriad of contentious headlines from owning an American passport, to family allegations to accusing people of slashing her tires. Look, it wasn’t a great song but I did manage to get over it. It turned out that nobody had done anything to Dana’s tires but herself, by driving on a flat.
Norris hit the papers early and even pulled out of the race when it emerged that he had written to an Israeli court asking for clemency for a former partner accused of rape, and again when he rejoined the race and it looked like the odd nomination system would exclude him despite his popularity. His last-minute nomination ensured that no one would bother trying to change the system for at least seven years, and after his high of claiming a potential twenty-one per cent of the vote he spent the rest of the campaign whittling it down to just six. Gay Mitchell stayed relatively controversy-free by mainly being too boring for anyone to write about, and the only attention Mary Davis got was for her innovative blurring of the lines between political campaign posters and a Kelloggs advert. Michael D Higgins meanwhile, emerged as the calm and competent ringleader of a circus where someone has accidentally replaced the animal feed with crack.
But finally this weekend it all ended, and we can look forward to seeing some actual news again. Michael D can slink back into the political shadows, albeit now the shadows in a gigantic state-provided White House, and Mary McAleese can go back to her life as… well, I’m sure she’ll find something to do. I look forward to the opening of many primary schools and shopping centres.
To love, honour, and survey
November 13th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
As a recent survey claims that job satisfaction is at a new low, Emer Sugrue examines the motivation behind such statistics
Last week a story hit the presses detailing a worrying new survey about job satisfaction. Conducted between 2010 and 2011, the report states that one in three Irish workers are seriously considering leaving their job, up from a fifth reported in a similar study conducted in 2004. This is even higher among younger workers, with just under half of sixteen to twenty-four year olds and forty-one per cent of those aged between twenty-five and thirty-four considering leaving their jobs. The largest decline in the survey related to how happy Irish workers are with their benefits. Only forty-seven per cent of Irish workers say that their benefits are as good as, or better than, those offered by other organisations in their industry, down from seventy-one per cent in 2004. The greatest concern of employees by far is base pay, the basic salary before overtime or bonuses, but only forty-six per cent say they are satisfied with this pay. Job security is the second most important factor for Irish workers.
While the headline-grabbing result that one in three workers wants to leave their job may have come as a surprise to those feeling that anyone lucky enough to be employed these days should be grateful for what they have, the general downturn in happiness is probably to be expected. Pay cuts and general job insecurity take their toll on people, and often cuts in some areas mean extra work is pushed on those remaining – thirty-six per cent said that the amount of work they are asked in their jobs is unreasonable, with the same number unable to maintain a healthy balance between their work and personal lives.
Is this a significant story however? While these survey results are certainly an interesting reflection of the recent recession, it must be viewed in the light of two major facts that have been somewhat skated over in the news: The survey size was just 1,000 people, and it was conducted by Mercer, the world’s largest human resource consulting firm.
1,000 people is just 0.05 per cent of the Irish workforce and hardly sufficient to give a clear snapshot of the thoughts and feelings of a population. The report doesn’t explain how these workers were found or what industries they work in. There are no such details for the 2004 report either and therefore there is no way of knowing if the groups asked then and now are in any way comparable. We don’t know whether the survey was conducted in person or via email, or whether response was mandatory or voluntary. While thirty-five per cent are reported as seriously considering leaving and forty-two per cent not, twenty-three per cent did not commit to either option. This is used as an indication of worker apathy in the survey but could easily be down to ‘survey apathy’. How many did not reply to the survey at all?
Maybe they were too busy with their fulfilling job. We don’t know. There are any number of biases that could be occurring in this report but there is absolutely no information available on its methods.
What makes this lack of information particularly relevant was that it was not conducted by a university, government agency or even by a media outlet, but a human resource consultancy. So what we have here is in fact less of a study than a PR exercise; a survey of employee dissatisfaction conducted by a company who hires themselves out to businesses to decrease employee dissatisfaction. Well done Mercer, at least someone is satisfied. Statements in Mercer’s report highlight the true purpose of the study, “These scores point to an environment that is ripe for employers to boost communication efforts, helping employees connect the dots to improve overall knowledge and acceptance.” Now, who can we find that offers just this sort of communication training…
This may not invalidate the results, but they were not produced by a disinterested party. This sort of skewed undertaking is so common that it is hardly worth presenting an example. Almost all surveys, studies and ‘scientific formulae’ for the ‘most depressing day of the year’ or ‘how to make the perfect cup of tea’ that are joyfully printed in newspapers every day are actually campaigns to get a product some publicity. They make the funny pages, the science pages, the business pages and even the news pages. Surveys without published methodology should always be taken with a pinch of salt and even more so when their producers are selling the product that is ‘lacking’. Just something to keep in mind before, say, hiring a human resource company to help with employee job satisfaction.
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*I feel some explanation of the headline is necessary… I like to send my editors terrible puns to amuse/annoy them and whether through mischief or production-weekend exhaustion this one got through the filter. Sorry.
Downton Abbey
November 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
While not usually a fan of drama on television, the last seven weeks have seen me develop a severe dependency on Downton Abbey. It’s quite hard to explain why. Objectively, the show is slightly ludicrous. The drama is increasingly over the top, the dialogue is quite clunky in places and historical accuracy is but a far flung dream and yet, I’m utterly obsessed with it.
The story features the titular Downton Abbey as the set for an exploration of Edwardian life. There is the family of the house, Lord Grantham, his wife Lady Grantham and three daughters; Mary, Edith and Sybil. There is also Lady Violet, Lord Gratham’s mother, who is played by the wonderful Maggie Smith. The driving plot of the series is inheritance: Only a man can inherit Downton and unless one of the girls manages to don a convincing moustache that means the estate passes to the closest male relative.
The first episode opens in April 1912 with the death of the heir, Patrick on the Titanic. In steps Matthew Crawley, a third cousin lawyer from Manchester who is… dun dun dun…Middle Class. Basically the rest of the plot and the audiences interest thenceforth revolves around whether Mathew is going to marry Mary and learn to use to fork properly. Mary and Mathew were nearly engaged, then weren’t but were still secretly in love each other. Then Matthew went to war, got engaged to someone else, got paralysed, got better but now feels too guilty to break up with his finance for Mary as she stuck by him when he was injured. Phew.
The other family drama comes in the form of Sybil, the youngest daughter who is currently in the process of running away with the socialist Irish chauffeur, and Edith, the classic middle child who nobody, including the plot, pays attention to unless she’s trying to out-bitch Mary. She never will though, Mary is an ice queen when she’s not shagging people to death. Ah Mr. Pamuk. Lord Grantham keeps trying to feel up one of the maids and Lady Grantham has had so much plastic surgery she looks like her face is going to fall off. That last one may not actually be an in-series drama. Finally there’s Lady Violet who doesn’t create much drama herself but gets all the best lines.
Is that enough drama for one house? Oh you silly innocent little thing, we haven’t even got to the servants yet.
Mr Bates is Lord Grantham’s valet, he joined the house in the first episode, and everyone hated him because he has a limp and fell over a few times. In the second series, the writer seemed to forget about the limp in favour of his horrible ex-wife who keeps showing up threatening to go to the press about the “shagging to death” incident from series one. The wife is now dead, apparently by suicide but Mr. Bates is acting awful shifty about it. He is engaged to Anna, a housemaid, who’s job is to stand around moping over Mr. Bates.
There’s the baddies, Mrs O’Brian and Thomas, lady’s maid and ex-footman respectively, who exist purely to do mean things for no real reason. Example: Mrs O’Brian left soap on the floor for Lady Grantham to slip on, causing a miscarriage. She did it because she thought she was going to be fired. Thomas is generally just a bastard to everyone else in the house but in the last episode spent all his money trying to get into the black market. It didn’t work too well.
There are lots of other characters around, the butler Carson, a few maids, Daisy an assistant cook who had a lot going on earlier in the series with a now-dead footman called William, but the only drama-causer left at the moment is Ethel. When the house was being used as a hospital earlier in the series Ethel got knocked up by one of the recovering officers. The guy refused to acknowledge her after, and promptly died. Now Ethel is trying to convince his parents to help her, and us of why she is still in the show.
You should be up to speed now.
This unfortunately doesn’t even begin to cover the glorious madness of Downton Abbey. The plot twists are bonkers. One episode featured a man claiming to be Patrick, the original heir, with a horribly burned face and a Canadian accent, saying he’d had amnesia for the last 6 years. Matthew had been paralysed, yet he leapt out of his wheelchair to save someone from falling and was dancing by the end of the episode. There is murder, marriage, spying, shagging, parties and paralysis. The writing and acting is so over the top it belongs more to Dallas than Downton and I doubt there is one historical fact correct other than there was indeed a first world war. The whole series revolves around world events for no reason at all. Months pass between each episode yet the plot advances not one bit. Mary has been engaged for about 4 years now, and they barely seem to have had a conversation. It’s the silliest show I’ve ever seen, yet come 9pm on a Sunday I am in a lather of excitement. Will Lady Sybil and Bryson elope? Will Mary and Mathew finally get together? What is going on with Mrs O’Brian’s hair?
I’ll be live-blogging the last episode tonight at 9pm at https://twitter.com/#!/emsug
Freedom
October 29th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
For the first time in weeks, I actually have time to think. I have a couple of essays done, and about 4 more looming but a pleasant distance away (Friday is YEARS away in essay terms). I have nothing that I urgently have to do tonight; no homework, no articles. It’s amazingly peaceful in my brain, I actually don’t have anything to do tonight. I’m not bored exactly, I have a lot of things I could be doing assignment-wise and a busy day tomorrow but I’m starting to remember that boredom is a thing that happens. And I remembered I have this blog. Maybe I should take more time to write things that don’t have to have a point and don’t have to be corrected. It isn’t something I (or any of my teachers) thought would ever happen to me but I have been working quite hard lately. It’s amazing what happens as you get older. I always worried about developing joint pain as I aged but developing a work ethic is far more alarming.
With college work and newspaper work there are a lot of things I’ve been neglecting. My non-newspaper friends tend to fade into the background. It’s a bad state of affairs when merely leaving the library to talk to someone becomes too much effort. My flat has been a bit of a disaster too, I’ve put on 2 loads of washing already today and i need to do a third. When it starts getting tricky to dress yourself it’s probably time for a break. And worst of all, my book and dvd libraries are taunting me with their neglect. I haven’t watched anything apart from Downton Abbey for a month. Really. Now, Downton Abbey is amazing, no question. It’s all you could want in a tv show, where else could you find someone coming back from the dead with amnesia or shagging a diplomat to death presented as highbrow viewing? But the percentage of unwatched and unread items in my collection is approaching 50% and that just wont do. Time to reinstate my new years resolution of old and start watching and reviewing films I think. Where should I start; How to Steal a Million or Coen Brothers boxset?
Lowering the guard
October 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
As the Guardian opens yet another facet of its production to the wider public, Emer Sugrue examines the effect that user-generated content has had on the media
Last week the Guardian embarked on an interesting experiment. Abandoning the protective aura of secrecy that usually surrounds upcoming news stories, they have decided to open up their news feed to contributions from the public. People can now see exactly what stories the Guardian staff are working on, and using the Twitter hashtag #opennews, send on tips and ideas. The Guardian’s aim is to restore the public trust in media in the wake of recent scandals by lifting the veil on the news process, thus hopefully boosting interest in the work they do.
This innovative move plays into the wider trend of democratization in the media. While once content was decided by shadowy figures behind closed doors and public opinion was limited to the vaguely mocking readouts in Points of View, the views of the many are now impossible to ignore. The opportunities to contribute to media output has exploded in the last ten years with the rise of the internet; every broadcast, newspaper, magazine and website begs you to ‘send them your views’. Call them, text them, email them, tweet them because your views are so important and deserve airtime.
The communication revolution of the last decade has also led to a decline in traditional media. To try and stem the huge financial losses caused by falling circulation and advertising revenue, job cuts have become common. Earlier this month the New York Times, RTÉ and the BBC announced job cuts, with the latter eliminating nearly 2,000 positions, and several papers in Paris failed to print over a number of days last week due to strikes over planned redundancies. Barely one round of lay-offs has finished before another is announced. However, these cuts don’t come with a decrease in output. On the contrary, they scrabble for new and innovative forms of communication. It’s now standard for a newspaper not only to have a website, but videos, podcasts, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and live-feeds, all of which need to be maintained. Twenty-four hour coverage is no longer the preserve of television.
The workload for the remaining workers has gone through the roof. Whereas a staff writer might once have had to turn in two or three articles in a work day, allowing time to follow up leads, make calls and research their stories, they are now expected to submit up to ten. It’s no wonder that the practise of reprinting press releases has become endemic. Research by Cardiff University discovered that fifty-four per cent of news articles use PR-created stories or text, while much else is bought in from news agencies such as Associated Press and Reuters. The remaining gaps are plugged by the public.
While it’s of course not the fault of unpaid public contributors that so many journalists are being laid off, it is part of a vicious cycle which helps make these cuts feasible when demand for content is so high. There simply isn’t the time or resources to research and write enough to fill all the necessary spaces, whether in print or broadcast. Turn on Sky News and see how they spend time counting down the top ten YouTube videos, or what percentage of radio shows are just DJs reading out text messages. Have a look at how much of a news site is taken up with polls, comments and forums. As free content is made available, it allows space to be filled more easily and cheaply. When space-filling is cheap and writers are expensive, it’s not hard to see why cut-backs are made where they are. The Guardian’s move plays into this; if it’s successful and the tweets flood in with stories, it may start to look quite tempting to budget-conscious bosses to cut loose those researchers whose work loads are now lightened. Perhaps next they will start asking for full articles for free; just so as to express the public’s view of course.
While newspapers may want to demystify the news process, this actually increases mistrust of the media by positioning trained media professionals as ‘others’. They are seen as elitist, the non-public who don’t care about you and tell you what to think rather than ordinary people working in an office, writing reports on events rather than reports on clients. The third millennium has been marked by an obsession with the man on the street, where scripted television been tossed aside for the far cheaper reality TV, and where the public sing and cry and humiliate themselves for our amusement. Everything is becoming like Wikipedia: user generated. We are not terribly far away from ‘reality news’.
As more and more jobs are cut and journalists are stretched to breaking point, the work becomes rushed, shoddy, poorly researched and largely plagiarised. People stop reading, circulation falls further and more jobs are cut. With just the bare bones – a skeleton staff of overwhelmed, overworked and undervalued writers – how can things go on? Send us your views.
Otwo’s Guide to Bratislava
October 19th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Take a trip to a post-communist wonderland with Emer Sugrue’s guide to Bratislava.
Slovakia is often overlooked as a tourist destination in favour of it’s former other half, the Czech Republic, but it has a lot to offer, especially if you are on a budget. And why would you be reading this if you weren’t?
I knew nothing about the city when I arrived, not even what currency they used so I was delighted to find that it is in the Eurozone. The most notable thing about Bratislava is how astoundingly cheap everything is. Drinks cost about one Euro, two if you really go upmarket and so unfortunately is a popular stag night destination. It guarantees a good turn out every night of the week but may be a little intimidating if you are travelling alone. It’s popularity is understandable, it is a great place to party. There are a huge variety of pubs and clubs for every possible musical or atmospheric taste and they stay open all night. It was much more difficult to find food after 3am then it was to find dancing.
The best hostel in Bratislava is the Hostel Blues. It’s not the cheapest you’ll find, around €17 a night but it’s right in the centre and the atmosphere is unbeatable. With the exception of the roving hoards of Liverpudlian stag nights the people are astoundingly friendly and interesting. The staff were always recommending restaurants and attractions, lending us books and just generally chatting to us while we sipped our ridiculously cheap beer. There are traditional restaurants nearby which offer a range of local dishes such as goulash, Lokše, a type of potato pancake, Rezeň, breaded pork, and Bryndzové halušky, potato dumplings with sheep’s cheese and bacon (which is a lot nicer than it sounds). With a starter and desert, a meal out will still set you back less than a tenner.
The city has plenty to offer in between drinking binges too. The city is a mishmash of ancient castles and communist concrete drudgery but there are area of incredible beauty. Bratislava’s Old Town dates from the middle ages and houses museums, churches and various ancient civic buildings interspersed with market places. The museums are interesting but mostly unremarkable, there are far better natural history museums to be seen elsewhere but one that is worth a look is the clock museum. You have to really like looking at old clocks though, it’s a long cog filled day. One old church is dedicated to an early Christian martyr and after a short walk around it I discovered that they still had the man’s corpse. If you want to get a real feel for the city, there are free walking tours offered every day covering various parts of Bratislavan history.
On your tour of the Old Town keep an eye out for Bratislava’s collection of statues. These are dotted around the city and by all accounts, make no sense. One shows a fat old man crawling out of a man-hole, another is a soldier carver out of huge block of stone resembling a bit too closely Han Solo encased in carbonite. The other must-see is the Slavín, a World War II memorial dedicated to the soviet soldiers who died liberating the city in 1945. The monument sit o n top of a huge hill overlooking the city. It’s a very steep hill and tough going in the summer’s heat after all those €1 beers but the view is incredible. The monument and graveyard is beautifully sad and it’s a lovely place to wander around and relax for a day. Another steep walk away is Bratislava Castle While the original castle dates back to the 10th century, it was destroyed by fire and rebuilt in the 1950s.
Bratislava is a small city, but it has a little bit of everything. If you want night life, culture and the experience of a lifetime, it’s just an Easy Jet flight away.
Sexual Politics
October 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Following the release of new statistics regarding female representation in world governments, Emer Sugrue looks at the way female politicians are portrayed in parliament and in the media
In a recent report by the Inter-Parliamentary Union on the representation of women in government, it was revealed that Ireland ranks at eightieth in the world when it comes to female presence in parliament. Women make up just 14.5 per cent of the Dáil. This puts us below Iraq at 25.2 per cent, and Afghanistan at 27.7 per cent. Rwanda, the highest ranked country for female representatives, has 56.3 per cent. As a western, supposedly developed nation, this is pretty appalling. We were one of the first places in the world to have female members of parliament and cabinet ministers yet we have scarcely progressed since the 1920′s. Why is this? All the mechanisms are in place to have women in government and yet the numbers are massively skewed. Sexism in rife is politics in a way that would not be acceptable for any other minority and all sides are complicit.
One source is definitely the men in power. Female politicians find themselves harangued on all sides, excluded from the ‘boys club’ of parliament. In April the UK Prime Minister David Cameron, when faced with questioning from the shadow Treasury Secretary Angela Eagle in parliament, told her to “calm down, dear”. More recently when receiving questions from another female member he declared, “I know the honourable lady is extremely frustrated” to jeers and laughter from the backbench. The female MP then stormed out of the house. Only two years ago it was found that conservative backbenchers had a policy of shouting offensive comments every time a woman got up to speak. It’s very hard to be taken seriously when old men are shouting “boobies” and “melons” over a parliamentary question. That really happened, I wish I was joking.
Powerful women are judged on their sexual appeal in a way men never are. Political sexism is most pervasive not in the parliaments, but in the media. The way various female figures are written and spoken about gives the clearest view of the problem; women are judged more commonly on their appearance then by their proposals or actions. When Obama visited the UK, there was a borderline psychotic amount of coverage about what Michelle Obama was going to be wearing. Sky News had live twenty-four hour coverage of the visit and barely mentioned what was to be discussed in the meetings; it was all about the clothes. What colour suit would she wear? What about her hair? Here is a fitness expert who is going to spend two hours explaining Mrs. Obama’s arms. Even the Secretary of State Hilary Clinton isn’t immune, with a storm of controversy beleaguering the American media last year about the political appropriateness of Clinton wearing a hair clip to a meeting. And then there’s Sarah Palin.
Female public figures tend to be placed into a sexualised framework of one of two categories: A: the desexualised, masculine, ball breaking, power hungry bitch or B: the coquettish, family orientated ‘lady’. Category A is the more traditional stereotype and classically includes Margaret Thatcher, famous for having “bigger balls than her cabinet”. She reportedly even had voice coaching lessons to lower her pitch so she could be taken more seriously and be heard over the raucous noise in the British parliament. Hilary Clinton, hair clip aside, is also portrayed this way. Ambition and competence are seen as masculine traits, and these women must surrender all femininity to have a hope of playing with the big boys. Thatcher is still viewed as somehow not being a ‘real woman’.
Category B women play up their femininity, a tactic which is becoming increasingly common. Sarah Palin is the epitome of this role, which boils down mostly to attractiveness. Palin is an ex-beauty pageant winner, mother of innumerable strangely named children. She is a PILF and the media lapped it up. There is a new wave of women in American politics who are simultaneously an object of sexual desire and an ultra-traditional wife and mother, with Christine “not a witch” O’Donnell and Michelle Bachman following in Palin’s footsteps. It seems to be slowly creeping across the pond too and it’s no wonder; if you are going to be judged for your attractiveness anyway, why not use it to your advantage?
The effect this pigeonholing has on female representation is to reduce women from potential leaders and equals to two-dimensional characters in a poorly written drama, just like the chick flicks in which the lead is inevitably saved from herself by finding a man to take care of her. They are women first, leaders second.
Many women, I’m sure, do not conform to these roles, but they don’t get media coverage. Even from student journalism I know that you need to look for an angle, the story, the interest. And a woman quietly and competently doing her job is not a story. But maybe it should be. As backwards as it seems, newspapers do not report the people’s view, they create it. We create the framework through which women in politics are viewed. Our 14.5 per cent representation reveals that after eighty years of supposed equality, women are struggling to compete. Legislation isn’t enough; we need a complete overhaul of attitude.
Final Year
September 23rd, 2011 § Leave a Comment
It’s Friday night on week two of the college year and I’m in the library. Yes, you read right; Friday. Week 2. Library.
I actually have better plans so this isn’t even an attempt to make good on my unpopularity. A friend just rang me there inviting me out to some Culture Night stuff. I’d said I’d come out later but I really not sure I’ll be able to. On my to-do list is:
- Write an essay about St. Patrick
- Do 2 learning journals (due Monday)
- Write a travel article (due Sunday)
- Write an article about sexism in politics (due Sunday)
- Write a blog for The University Observer website (due… soon)
- Read about four hundred thousand pages of notes
- Eat dinner
The educational arms race
September 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
As we head into another year of hard work and hand over €2000 for our free education, Emer Sugrue asks, is building up huge debts while living off beans and vodka for four years really worth it?
What is a degree worth? I know that it is worth at least €2,333 to you this year. It’s probably worth a whole lot more. How high would the fees have to go before you would refuse to pay them? We may find out next year.
But giros aside, what is it really worth? You know what you are putting in; money, work and several years of your life, so you should know what you are hoping to get back for it. If you were to think like a banker and evaluate your investment (ok, well, not one of our bankers obviously, but a good banker, a banker who is good at his job and shouldn’t be in prison), you should be able to figure out what your returns will be.
The answer may depress you.
The number of people going on to third level education has risen steadily throughout your lifetime. Third level student numbers increased by 105 per cent between 1990 and 2004, reaching 55 per cent of school leavers by 2005, and rising an average 1 per cent per year since. The number of young adults aged 25 to 34 (the age at which there is most competition in launching a career) who have degrees is 41.6 per cent, far ahead of the EU average of 29.1 per cent. The Irish workforce has never been more educated.
The problem is that while education for it’s own sake is a wonderful thing, it doesn’t actually benefit you, apart from on a sort of intangible spiritual level. Getting a degree has never been more costly while providing fewer advantages. Once, any degree pushed you ahead of the crowd; now it just brings you up to average. Each extra degree there is in the country makes yours less valuable. We are more educated but there aren’t more jobs. This is educational inflation at its worst. Degrees, like everything in the world, have their value measured by rarity. Gold isn’t valuable because it’s useful, it’s because there’s not much of it about.
Now that third level education, at 60 per cent of the young population, has become the norm, the de facto minimum school-leaving age has been pushed forward into our mid-twenties. Twenty years ago a young person could finish their free education, Leaving Cert results in hand, and get a decent starter job in an office. Sure, it wouldn’t be glamorous, and they’d spend the first couple of years filing and getting coffee, but they had a wage and independence and they worked their way up.
Now a school leaver must first shell out thousands of Euro to spend three wage-less years getting a completely irrelevant degree to get the same job, probably having spent three summers working in offices for free to build up their CV. Followed by a few of years of filing, getting coffee and working their way up. An Arts degree is becoming something you do on the side while building up your portfolio. A hobby, a crèche for young adults.
These days a degree is worth precisely sod all (I calculated) in terms of job advantages, but this isn’t to say it’s not worth getting; in fact it’s the opposite. You need it now more then ever. You need it just to keep up. It may not be an advantage to have one, but it is most certainly a disadvantage not to. The jobs available to school leavers are scarce, and need impossible amounts of work experience. They’ll find themselves under-qualified for dish washing and shelf stacking, but don’t worry, I hear they offer unpaid internships for that.
A rising tide raises all boats, and it has left us in the same position but drowning in debt. Educational inflation is nothing new; once upon a time the majority left education at fifteen to start work, and the change has been nothing but positive. The big difference is, secondary education is free. There are expenses such as books and uniforms of course, but nothing like the fees we are obliged to pay for college. Ireland has ended up in the worst of both worlds, we have fees while pretending we don’t.
The only option for someone to compete in the jobs market is to get even more degrees. More than ever before there are students going on to do Masters degrees, unemployed people going back to college to retrain, managers using their work experience as prior learning to get fast-tracked into business, management or even science degrees. When everyone else has a degree, what can you do?
The educational arms race is in full swing.
Trial and error
September 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Amidst a wave of public misunderstanding of scientific method and the rise of alternative therapies, Emer Sugrue examines how scientific research and clinical trials operate
The human brain is an amazing thing, but it is easily fooled. We are conditioned to search for patterns in life but we often see patterns where they don’t exist. Things can look like they are related when they are not. An intervention can look effective while being useless, or worse, causing harm.
The way we can tell whether things really work or whether it’s our minds tricking us is to have a controlled trial. This writer can feel science students rolling their eyes from here, but it’s something that is poorly understood, and not just by those of us who frequent the Newman building. Measurable outcomes are frequently dismissed by those promoting alternative therapies claiming that “science doesn’t have all the answers”. The media bizarrely portrays scientists as unelected authority figures, dictating conflicting decrees on how we must live our lives. The only science news most people see is the Daily Mail’s campaign to report every substance known to man as either a cause or cure for cancer. Scientific research is not a proclamation from on high, and science certainly does not have all the answers; but with patience, it can ask the right questions.
To help me understand more about the role of clinical research and how it works in Ireland, I spoke to Dr Peter Doran, Scientific Director for the UCD Clinical Research Centre and Professor Pat Murray, Professor of Clinical Pharmacology.
Clinical research centres are a fairly new institution in this county, with the very first opening in the Royal College of Surgeons in 2001, and the UCD CRC opening in 2007. Dr Doran explains the role of the CRC in the scientific community.
“The objective was really to create a core infrastructure to allow any patient-orientated research to happen. So whereas before that might have been done in outpatient departments and the hospital, the idea was to create a proper infrastructure.
“Since the CRC opened we’ve had about 20,000 research patient visits. Our investigators have leveraged about €12 million in funding so it’s made a significant impression on the research landscape. Very importantly, what it’s allowed us to do is make sure that new treatments, new interventions and cutting edge programs are there so Irish patients can benefit from them. Ultimately that’s been the major objective, how Irish patients can get access to the best emerging care.”
Most clinical research that involves the testing of a new drug progresses in an orderly series of steps, known as phases. This allows researchers to gain reliable information about the intervention and protects the patients. A new intervention starts off as a hypothesis for a how a particular drug might work. If it seems promising in theory, you try it on animals to see if it kills them. It probably will, and it’s probably back to the drawing board at this point. But should Fievel survive, then it’s time to test it on people.
Phase I trials are the first studies done in small groups of healthy humans to evaluate how a new drug should be given, how often, and what dose is safe, how quickly it is excreted from the body and so on, and to see if it kills them, of course. In Phase II the treatment is given to a larger group of a few hundred people with the relevant ailment, to see if it is effective and to further evaluate its safety. Phase III trials test the new treatment on hundreds or even thousands of people, comparing the new treatment to the existing standard or a placebo.
Bringing a treatment to trial is a lengthy and costly process. It costs around $500 million to bring a new drug to market, and even getting as far as initial trials is a huge endeavour for a research scientist.
“Assuming you have a completed protocol, and that’s a big assumption,” laughs Dr Doran, “the Irish Medicines Board approval is a maximum of 90 days, and that’s assuming that at your 45 day review you’ve to go back with a lot of information so that’s the maximum. Then the ethics committee turnaround is probably 60-90 days as well for most protocols. I mean, that’s assuming that the protocol is appropriate, because you may have a situation where somebody writes a protocol and it’s rejected and then they have to go back and do a large amount of work to bring it up to the standard that is required.” Altogether it takes at least a year, if not several, to bring a hypothesis to trial.
The reason trials take so long to get approved is a rigorous adherence to ethics. A proposal will have to go through several medical boards and ethics boards before patients are even approached. Ethics in science has advanced dramatically in the past few decades. Horrifying stories emerge every so often about patients purposely infected with diseases or left without treatment, but such events would be impossible today. Ethical science today doesn’t just take into account the basic health and rights of the subjects but the design of the experiment in regards to how useful the research is.
Professor Murray explains that “the one thing that everyone agrees on, and the ethics committees make a big point of this, they’ll look at not only the risks to patients and any potential benefits when deciding whether the trial is ethical, they’ll also look at if the trial design is adequate and are you studying the right number of the right kind of patients to actually get an answer. If they think your design is a mess they’ll reject it and say that’s not an adequate trial, you’ll end up wasting several hundred people’s time and spend a lot of money and you won’t actually answer the question.
“The scientific integrity is just as important in many ways as the ethics and the protection of subjects, because if you do any one of them wrong you’re not doing valid clinical research.”
However, various aspects of clinical trials have been criticised. There are frequent claims that pharmaceutical or industry-funded trials are biased. In 2003, a systematic review scrutinized thirty separate studies regarding whether funding affected findings and overall, studies funded by the drug company were four times as likely to give results that were positive and favourable to the company than independent studies. The UCD CRC itself is partly funded through the industry, but Dr. Doran does not believe that this is an issue:
“Industry protocols are all approved by what’s known as the competent authority; in Ireland the competent authority is the Irish Medicines Board so the protocol is very clear in terms of what’s being done. Before we get involved in them at the CRC they have to be approved by the ethics committee so there’s a very clear line in terms of what the protocol is.
“Everything in the Clinical Research Centre is done in accordance with a set of standards called ICH GCP, the International Committee for Harmonisation Good Clinical Practise guidelines. They’re a global set of guidelines which tell us how to do clinical research and everything is done with GCP in mind, regardless of how it’s funded or where it originates from.”
There are also allegations of publication bias, particularly associated with industry-funded research. Publication bias refers to the practise of positive trials being much more likely to be published than negative ones. In an anonymous survey published by the scientific journal Nature in 2005, 6% of scientists admitted failing to present data that contradicted their previous work. Another paper, published in the New England Journal of Medicine went through all known trials on SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors, a class of drugs used widely as antidepressants) registered with the Food and Drug Administration and attempted to explore possible correlations between published results and industry interests. There were 37 studies which were assessed by the FDA as positive and, with a single exception, every one of those positive trials was published in full. There were also 33 studies which had negative or unclear results; 22 of those were not published at all while the remaining 11 were written in a way that showed them as having a positive outcome. Professor Murray assures me however, that safeguards are in place to prevent this sort of misinformation.
“There’s now a need for clinical trials to be registered on a international electronic database so that even if your trial is negative and you don’t like the result, you still have to post the results on to that resource so people will know. They’ll know not only about the one that works, which is what you want them to hear about, but they’ll hear about the other nine that didn’t work and they can make an informed decision about whether that represents how the literature should be.
“Whether the answer is what you would like it to be or whether is isn’t, it doesn’t differ between industry and academics. Industry may want it to turn out a certain way because there are financial implications, academics may want it to turn out a certain way because of academic implications, but in both cases you actually have this very rigorous design so you end up publishing the truth, whatever it turns out to be.”
It is the ideal of truth that is so fascinating. In the arts anyone’s opinion is as good as another and entire careers are made from revisionism, post-revisionism and post-modern revisionism where you just deconstruct your own life choices. The UCD CRC and all other research centres attempt to reduce human error in scientific research and despite the complexity of ethics, money, reports and dead mice it all comes back to one basic question; does it work?
