Welcome

Welcome to Rialto. This is a blog where I hope you will find something of interest to you. I work in Further Education and my hope is to supplement my work in the classroom with extras and advice. I also like to dabble in creative writing and you will find bits and pieces along the way. Feel free to subscribe or pass by again and you may find something of interest.
John.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

BBC News - Do zero hours contracts create real jobs?

BBC News - Do zero hours contracts create real jobs?:

'via Blog this'

"Us and them" by Peter Mc Verry S.J.


I have taken the liberty of reproducing Peter McVerry's article around the discourses of crime in our society.



 All of us, whether on the political left or right or in the centre, have a common interest in reducing the level of crime in society.
To develop effective policies, it would seem reasonable to discuss the causes of crime. But such discussion often produces more heat than light – perhaps for very understandable reasons.
First, many of us – probably most of us – have been victims of crime at some point, and some have been very upset or even traumatised by the experience. We may have little patience with efforts to understand what causes crime; we just want the perpetrators punished.
Second, any attempt to understand the causes of crime is frequently – and wrongly – misinterpreted as trying to excuse the perpetrators of crime. However, to suggest that a local authority should eliminate a bad bend on a road, where speeding motorists frequently cause accidents, is not to excuse the reckless behaviour of the motorists who speed round the bend. Third, the debate on crime is, to a large extent, filtered through an ideological lens.
Discussion on crime generally presupposes a distinction between the offenders and the victims of crime: “them” and “us”. However, most of us are both victims and offenders.
If I have ever broken the speed limit, I have broken the law. But we do not consider this offence, which is one that “we” might commit, to be in the same category as joyriding, for example, which is one “they” might commit, even though far more deaths and injuries on our roads are caused by speeding than by joyriding. It is also worth remembering that the greatest suffering inflicted on Irish people in recent years was caused, not by burglars in jeans, but by professionals in designer suits.
Many of those who end up in prison were also, in their earlier years, victims of serious crime. Following a visit to Mountjoy Prison some time ago, I was reflecting on the lives of the nine prisoners I had just met: six were known to me to have been victims of sexual abuse as children, and the other three I did not know well enough to be able to say. As a society, we express a great sympathy for the victims of institutional abuse, but my very conservative “guesstimate” is that at least one prisoner in four is a former resident.
The majority of people in our prisons come from a small number of disadvantaged communities, as John Lonergan, former governor of Mountjoy, repeatedly tried to remind us.
We know from various studies that a totally disproportionate percentage of people in prison have low levels of literacy, lack skills and qualifications, have left school early and never had a job. A high percentage have an addiction to drugs and/or alcohol. The incidence of mental illness among prisoners is also disproportionate; many have experienced homelessness and/or housing insecurity.
This is not to excuse their involvement in crime, as most of those who experience poverty and deprivation do not turn to crime, but it does suggest that if we are really serious about reducing crime then the social deprivation and addiction problems that underlie much criminal behaviour would be a good place to start.
Furthermore, if we want to reduce crime, then the focus of imprisonment must be rehabilitation, given that recidivism plays a major role in crime levels. The recidivist rate in Ireland is high: one in two leaving prison will be back again within four years.
Why should we be surprised? Great numbers of our prisoners spend their time in overcrowded, drug-filled and violent prisons with little or no constructive activity to occupy them. The only skills that many prisoners acquire while in prison are how to commit crime more successfully when they get out.
The boredom, even meaninglessness, of prison life, combined with a ready availability of drugs, creates a drug culture within some of our prisons that is difficult for some prisoners to resist. I personally know of at least 40 young people, who never touched a drug before going into prison, and came out addicted to heroin. Warehousing of prisoners is not conducive to their rehabilitation.
Many people leave prison with no arrangement having been put in place to ensure they have accommodation, access to a social welfare payment, and supports to help them adjust to life outside. When people are in custody, we have a great opportunity to address the personal difficulties that they have experienced in life. We also have a duty of care to ensure that on release they have some chance of not rapidly sliding back into crime.
Ultimately it is society’s attitude to criminals such as “them” that prevents any serious attempt to reduce crime levels. Most people now know that 196 young people died in, or shortly after leaving, the care of the State in the decade 2000-2010.
Most died from unnatural causes – drug overdose, suicide, violence. There was an investigation and a report, followed, quite rightly, by widespread outrage at the failure of the State to adequately care for them.
The need to rectify the deficiencies in the system and provide the necessary resources to do so was agreed by all political parties.
However, in the same decade, 135 people died while in prison or within one month of leaving prison. In other words, at the time of their death they were, or had recently been, in the care of the State.
Most died from unnatural causes – drug overdose, suicide, violence. But there was no investigation, no report, no outrage, no comment from any politician and, of course, no commitment to dealing with the deficiencies in the system that may have led to some of these deaths.
Some will read this opinion piece through their own ideological lens and write it off as typical left-wing liberalism. But through my ideological lens, it is common sense. And this is where most discussions on crime end up.

Fr Peter McVerry SJ is a director of the Peter McVerry Trust and a member of the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice team. He will be speaking at the conference Re-imagining Imprisonment in Europe, Trinity College Dublin, September 5th-7th 2012. For information visit www.jcfj.ie

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

The Stolen Child by William Butler Yeats with music by the Waterboys



This is a magical poem put to music beautifully by Mike Scott and the Waterboys. We all grew up with the myth of the fairies and who knows maybe they do exist. They certainly exist in our imagination. Some say they are the Tuatha De Dannan who were driven underground with the arrival of the Celts to our shores. Yeats paints a dream-like landscape, where one can venture for sometimes this 'world's more full of weeping than you can understand.'






Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.


Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.


Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To to waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.


Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
from a world more full of weeping than you can understand.

Monday, August 13, 2012

Spelling, English and Maths websites

I have put together some of, what I consider to be, excellent Internet resources. Have a  look and see what you think!
http://www.algebrahelp.com/
For all the algebra topics you will meet. Excellent self-testing exercises are a great feature.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/
BBC GCSE Bitesize is a brilliant study resource for all subjects and utilises all the media that is at the BBC's disposal.


http://www.mathtutor.ac.uk/

Clicking a title from 7 subjects will open up a list of topics, each one having a video tutorial, support text, diagnostic test and an exercise to do. Some topics also have an extension film and/or an animation to accompany them.
Work through at your own pace, pausing, rewinding, testing and exploring until you've grasped the concept. Mathtutor is not a course and does not offer accreditation - but it does offer excellent revision possibilities! So off you go. Get stuck in!'

In his own words: making free and hopefully useful maths videos for the world. 


Rethinking Public Money and Taxpayers' Money.

I have written before about the perennial dichotomy that permeates the political and economic discourse in advanced economies: taxpayers' money versus public money. One former British Prime Minister declared quite cogently and sincerely that there is no such thing as 'public money'. The state has no money of its own. Any of the state's monies are borrowed from our savings or accumulated through the  taxes we pay. Implied in Thatcher's peroration, was the notion that the state is a bit of a leech; grabbing our hard earned money for its own purposes, to justify its existence, as it were. There is a grain of truth in this stance (it's hard to be absolutely wrong).
The binary opposition to this perspective is that taxes are legislated for by a directly elected representative parliament and there is a moral foundation underpinning all that the government does, of which collecting taxes and borrowing money is one of its  major functions. This money is now public money. We, the people, have given the parliament our consent. 
So, roughly speaking, there are the two competing ideological positions around  the role of government. They both have substance and both must be taken on board when deciding and implementing government policy. The parliament must consider that it is not completely its own money it is spending when devising programmes.  Hence, due care must be taken, when allocating public monies. It is the government's job to be a judicious custodian of others, i.e., taxpayers' money, that granted, has been transformed into public money.
Likewise, it is a moral imperative of citizens to pay taxes due to government, a government to which we have given our consent to - a government endowed with a moral raison d'etre. A government which provides  a lot of services and should redistribute wealth in a fair and thoughtful manner. Public money is for the public good.
Hence, a bipolar debate is not helpful. Government finances can be understood both as public money and taxpayers' money. It is not one or the other. And there is a moral compunction on citizens to contribute to public money and for public officials - also citizens - to spend taxpayers' money wisely.