Sport

Brendan Crossan: Kids left wondering what the adults are doing as house arrest continues

Ciaran Kearney (left) of the Northern Ireland Sports Forum gave sports their voice earlier this week
Ciaran Kearney (left) of the Northern Ireland Sports Forum gave sports their voice earlier this week Ciaran Kearney (left) of the Northern Ireland Sports Forum gave sports their voice earlier this week

THERE are those in high places who have probably come to loathe the fact that Gabriel Scally is nearly always right in how to best deal with deadly viruses.

Governments on these islands have often resisted his considered pathway out of Covid before they’re dragged kicking and screaming back to the blindingly obvious outlined by one of the world’s leading public health experts.

Of course, there are others who, somewhat morbidly, are comforted by the fact that so many other nations are struggling to contain the spread of the virus and as a consequence our expectations sag and lockdowns become an accepted feature of living.

In an interview with The Irish News before Christmas, Scally lamented school buildings of by-gone days that were built on public health principles.

“I went to St Kevin’s on the Falls Road. The old school was built in 1933 - it’s been knocked down and replaced,” he said.

“It faced south overlooking the bog meadows to the sun. There were huge amounts of glass windows, opening top and bottom, very high ceilings, there were no interior corridors… There is also a fantastic history about outdoor schools.

"Children who were regarded as fragile or sickly, they went to special schools where they were educated mostly outdoors by being well wrapped up. They had classrooms where you could slide the walls away. It was fantastic.”

In the north, lateral thinking from the get-go has been in short supply. As a result, kids are placed under house arrest - apart from another trip to an unsanitised play park.

Lessons from New Zealand and Australia, and the indisputable merit in enforced hotel quarantining of visitors, have had a slow burning effect in this part of the world.

Our politicians here dither and are nearly always in Boris Johnson’s erratic slip stream, while we’re reminded on an hourly basis of just how desperate our Covid numbers and hospital admissions are.

This is designed to get maximum lockdown buy-in even though the overarching strategy of governments here is quite clearly flawed, and has been from the outset.

So school remains off-limits for most of our children.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon does what leaders were born to do: lead.

Scottish children [P1-P3] will return to school before the end of the month.

Here, Stormont’s medical advisers explain on a weekly basis just how awful things are. And they are awful – but they’ll continue to be awful until government policy shifts significantly and accepts that Gabriel Scally is right again.

But, hey, what a Christmas we all had.

The Northern Ireland Sports Forum – an umbrella organisation that helps represent over 70 sports – hosted a couple of media conference calls earlier this week.

Figures from the GAA world, sailing, badminton, netball, bowls, motorsport, boxing, swimming, among others, all articulated how Covid has ravaged their respective sports.

Given that football is one of the highest participating sports in the north, if not the highest, there was no representative from the Irish FA on the two zoom calls to explain the devastating impact the pandemic has had on its thousands and thousands of young players.

The Irish FA, of course, has its own media platforms but the case for even a phased return has been desperately muted. 

Each sport has its own unique challenges and therefore you’ll get many different strands of opinion about how they carve a way forward in difficult times.

You’ve got to feel tremendous sympathy for high contact sports such as boxing, especially when the vast majority of clubs are located in socially and economically deprived areas where they offer so much to young people.

There are other sports, too, that simply feel the time is not right to return because of the numbers in hospitals.

Other sports figures feel the whole point of Covid protocols is to create safe environments. And if they’re safe environments, then they are safe environments and they should be allowed some kind of phased return.

Mark Wilson, chairman of Banbridge Swimming club, gave arguably the most passionate address during one of the NI Sports Forum’s conference calls.

“Let us demonstrate that we can run safely because I believe we can,” said Wilson.

“We’re going to lose a generation. I’m really worried about 14-17 year olds because they may not come back. We need to be allowed to come back.

“We have to live with Covid. I don’t have the answers of how to cure the virus but I have the answers of how to run a club safely and I’m quite happy to be scrutinised by the government. And if I’m doing something wrong, smack me on the wrist, tell me to do it right or close me, but give me the chance.”

There is the overwhelming sense too that sport can’t resume until schools re-open – but this train of thought is selling sport desperately short, as if it's incapable or maybe devoid of the expertise to begin the rehabilitation process of children and young people now rather than some distant date in the future.

Unfortunately, some within the broad church of sport here actually see themselves as part of the problem rather than part of the recovery process from Covid.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, sport is seen here as a bit of an add-on, an extra, subservient to schools and PE – even though PE, while absolutely essential in these times, is rarely the preferred sporting pursuit of a child.

Our starting point should be to listen to children rather than telling them what’s good for them; ask them what they desire to do and make the escape route a more collaborative one.

In general, Irish sport suffers greatly from low self-esteem.

While they riot in Holland over strict curfews and citizens bemoaning the slow roll-out of the vaccine, children and young people up to the age of 19 have been training away with their football clubs.

Dutch primary schools re-open on Monday.

The difference in places such as Holland, Sweden and other mainland European nations is that society attaches a greater importance to sport and its role in minding the physical and mental well-being of its young people.

They don’t wait around for schools to re-open to start a child's rehab, especially in an outdoor environment where transmission rates are negligible.

It was heartening to hear the passion with which former Armagh footballer and MLA Justin McNulty spoke with during Wednesday’s Stormont Education Committee hearing where mental health champion, Professor Siobhan O’Neill, provided members with some disturbing stats regarding the declining mental health of children during the pandemic.

The kids need more voices like McNulty’s.

The kids also need more courageous people like Stephen Atherton of John J McNally Solicitors who was yesterday granted a full legal hearing against the Stormont Executive's continued ban on outdoor sports for children.

In desperate times, our children need to know who is prepared to run over hot coals for them.

All the while, they wait and they wonder what exactly it is the adults are doing…