Newton Emerson seems dismissive when he writes: “The trade union-backed campaign to keep the pass (over-60s free travel document) should be seen in this light – unions want to protect jobs.” (August 26). This seems short-sighted and perhaps even grudging.
Several reasons why I feel this:
It is physically and mentally good for older people to be out and about and visiting friends and family and the SmartPass makes it easier, and for people on very low incomes it keeps it from being unaffordable. Making a short-term saving by stopping the SmartPass will be cancelled out by increased needs for NHS care.
It is also healthy for communities and neighbourhoods to have senior citizens moving about the streets and byways. Sometimes we can even be helpful, comforting, vigilant and able to help people a bit with their loneliness. The SmartPass promotes this.
It is good for air quality, and for traffic flow, and for road safety, to limit the number of car journeys people make. At least at peak times, one bus may carry several dozen people, many of whom would otherwise be in cars. The climate benefit of reducing ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions from transportation would by itself justify making free public transport a right for all, not the elderly. The more transport services there are, the more convenient they are for everyone, not just the over-60s. Take £40 million away from Translink and there will be fewer buses and trains, making public transport a much less flexible option, frustrating residents and hampering visitors and tourism.
Despite what often seems to be the view of the UK Conservative government, protecting jobs, both in terms of numbers and in respect of pay and conditions, is a legitimate activity for unions. When any group of working people are taking steps to try to keep their families safe from poverty and insecurity we need to make a judgement on what level of hardship we would regard as excessive for those people. Should they be able to afford decent housing, school uniforms for their children, access to dentistry, to be able to get by without visits to food banks, and so on? Many in my generation owe an acceptable quality of life to the fact of trade unions having been relatively strong during our early working lives.
An MLA – with whose party’s policies on nearly everything I would firmly disagree – when I said that I thought there should be a means test for the SmartPass, very sensibly replied: “Well, just because you have one, you don’t have to use it…” He was right. We have the choice. Means-testing would make that choice for us, but at 60-plus we are old enough to decide whether we actually need to make that saving which our SmartPass offers. Lots of us choosing to go on paying for our tickets, now, could stave off a price rise for hard-up working families.
JAMES BARBOUR
Belfast BT9
Educational system failing too many
Congratulations to all our young people who once again have achieved outstanding GCSE results in the aftermath of a pandemic and ever-decreasing educational budgets. The results are a testimony to the hard work of all these amazing young people, their hard-working and dedicated teachers and supportive parents. Once again Northern Ireland students outperformed their GB counterparts by a wide margin. These are the headline figures and they deserve to be celebrated – but sadly the price we pay for this success in human wastage is huge. At 30.5 per cent, Northern Ireland has by far the largest population share with basic or no qualifications. At the upper end of the spectrum Northern Ireland has the lowest share of individuals holding post-secondary qualifications and only the north-east of England has a lower share of graduates. The National Education Union in its initial submission to the Independent Review Of Education highlighted that: “Of interest in our socially segregated post-primaries is that our ‘high-fliers’, the gifted and talented, do poorly by international comparison.” As educationalist Sir Robert Salisbury has rightly pointed out, the view that Northern Ireland has the best education system in Europe is an ‘enduring myth’.
The economist Professor John Fitzgerald (Trinity College, Dublin) has described the education system here as “the worst education system” in the UK, which he estimates it would take up to 30 years to fix.
The proportion of young people in Northern Ireland who are classified as Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEETS) far outstrips that in Britain. According to the Department for the Economy there are an estimated 24,000 people aged 16 to 24 who either did not work or receive any form of teaching or vocational training between April - June 2021.
It’s only right that we celebrate the academic success of our young people but we need as well to acknowledge that we have an educational system that fails too many of our most vulnerable and under-resourced students.
JIM CURRAN
Downpatrick, Co Down
Stormont reforms
A new report published by the Institute for Government and the Bennett Institute for Public Policy sheds light on the current democratic deficit and provides hope for a solution to Stormont’s collapse. The paper, Constitutional change in Northern Ireland, includes a series of ‘modest measures’ to improve stability. The first would be to change the ‘cross-community’ voting to a system of weighted or parallel majority voting to address the growth of the third, or ‘neither’, designation, as opposed to the current nationalist and unionist arrangement. Also, to reform the nomination process for first and deputy first ministers to reinstate something close to the original 1998 system, and transfer more powers from Stormont to councils.
But it’s the proposal to improve civic society participation that is key. The final line in the report is key and highlights the importance of ensuring that the ‘UK’s most exceptional constitutional case is given due consideration and accommodation in any efforts to reform the fundamental arrangements of the state’.
This could be interpreted as a request to Chris Heaton-Harris and Micheál Martin to acknowledge our exceptional case and, if agreement can’t be reached, then let the people have a say through a newly-created civic forum.
BRIAN POPE
Co Down
Only in Ireland
Nowhere else in the civilised world has or would a stone be erected to celebrate the centenary of the brutal partitioning of a very old country against the wishes of its people.
JOHN DOYLE
Clontarf, Dublin 3
