OCCASIONALLY I get asked to go into schools to chat to children about the joyous profession of journalism. To pull this off with any merit, you need to pack a coat-hangar smile and a few soft-focus stories about your globe-trotting trips.
Rightly or wrongly, you make yourself sound more windswept and interesting than you actually are.
Schoolchildren can be tough audiences.
I remember Gearoid Adams asked me to speak at his school. I thought it would be just one class. When I turned up it was the entire school assembly.
Gearoid had also invited Antrim footballer Tomás McCann to the end of year prize-giving. Despite my best efforts in encouraging him to get up and say a few words, Tomás insisted his remit was clear and non-negotiable.
“I’m here to give out the prizes. That’s it,” he said.
Contrary to what I actually tell the kids, my rule of thumb is for me to aim for mediocrity in these addresses. That way it keeps demand for my inspirational talks exceptionally low.
A few months ago I was kindly asked to speak to schoolchildren for whom the transfer test would soon be on their horizon.
You didn’t have to go far from the school gates to find the desperate extent of social deprivation.
The kids had a good laugh at me grappling with the trendy whiteboard. In my day, it was blackboards, dusters and leather straps.
Rather than focus on my job, I focused on them.
What was their dream job? 'A doctor'. 'A hairdresser'. 'A vet'. 'To own my own café,' came the cries.
Their wide eyes would melt your heart and keep you young for a thousand years.
Right then, I realised what a privilege it must be to be a schoolteacher; to be assigned the weighty but brilliant responsibility of affecting the lives of children.
I then asked them to mark their chances of realising their dream job out of 10. The kids got busy writing.
Some gave themselves 10-out-of-10, others five and six and seven.
The uncomplicated moral of the story was, with the right environment, hard work and dedication can conquer quite a bit in life; aim high and see where you land.
I observed one child put down zero and wrote ‘I don’t know’.
I’ve often thought of how that kid will do during and after the pandemic. How will their life chances be impacted?
There’s nothing worse than this blasé notion that the kids will be grand. Don’t sweat it, they say. Many of the kids weren’t grand before the pandemic hit.
Every time there has been a spike in the virus of any kind, the volume seems to be turned up on social media that propagates the view kids are 'super-spreaders' despite the absence of compelling data to back this up, particularly among primary schoolchildren.
It’s also worth investigating the infinitesimal amount of positive Covid cases in the children’s regional hospital here since the start of the pandemic, one of the few relied-upon Covid-testing environments.
For the length of time schools remained open before Christmas you could be forgiven in thinking the sector would collapse under the weight. But it didn’t.
Sure, there were outbreaks and classes pulled out to self-isolate, but generally the school sector performed its duties quite brilliantly.
On December 23, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said ‘Children appear to be less susceptible to infection, and when infected, less often lead to onward transmission…’ and that they "did not appear to be the driving force in the upsurge of cases in October".
Of course, with new variants of the virus emerging on these islands, and with data still being digested, a stricter lockdown was necessary.
While every economic sector – bar wet pubs – enjoyed periods of relaxation of the restrictions at various times over the last 10 months, children have suffered greatly.
But you won’t hear from them on the airwaves arguing their case to play outdoor sports with their friends and wagging their finger at the 'super-spreading' adults among them.
Kids aren’t great lobbyists at the end of the day.
The truth of the matter is the Executive, civic and sporting society here didn’t do enough to protect a child’s space in the pandemic.
They were unnecessarily deprived aspects of their childhood that they’ll never be able to retrieve.
The Children’s Commissioner here would argue their office had bigger battles, and it does in terms of child poverty, but it downplayed the importance of kids playing sport in the great outdoors and believed PE in schools was a fair trade-off.
As children ran around screaming and hollering in unsanitised play parks, the controlled environments of 4G pitches remained closed to them.
The GAA and the Irish FA’s respective challenges to the broad brushstroke approach of governments here have been powder-puff, more so the latter as they actually banned a football from being used in non-contact training, which effectively kept children away from sport for an even longer period.
Even public health expert Gabriel Scally believed there was no merit in keeping children away from outdoor sports in a controlled environment.
At one point in the madness, you could go into a betting shop but the kids couldn’t play outdoor sport.
Nobody summed it up better than Aidan O’Rourke, Performance Sports Manager of Queen’s University and Gaelic football underage coach.
“There were other interests at play here. The phrase I kept hearing was: ‘Get the club season finished so the county season could kick in.’
“That phraseology betrayed what sport is about,” he said. “There was absolutely no reason why juvenile activity had to pause at any stage.”
Far too much lip service has been paid to children’s physical and mental well-being during the pandemic.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of sport in a young person's life - for their esteem, their identity, for their growth and enjoying the company of their peers.
And now they can’t go to school.
You see, the adults were too distracted with other things while governing parties here did irreparable damage to their own moral authority, when that rare ability to lead was never more essential.
So many young lives, already under immense stress before the pandemic, will suffer in the years ahead.
But you'll not find them on some daily dashboard.
Sadly, that's not how it works.
