

Last night.
Prime Time on RTÉ One.
Meanwhile via Simon McGarr:
….Yesterday morning the Minister for Education was on the airwaves. He told Sarah McInerny that schools weren’t going to reopen properly come September. We’d still be doing the online learning a few days a week, with a few other days with the children in school.
This was… bonkers.
For decades the Education has steadfastly insisted on behaving as though every home still had a stay at home mother to look after children at any given time.
But proposing to put that presumption into action, by forcing parents trying to return to work to give that work up for some, unspecified number of days a week, yet to be determined did not go down well.
By Prime Time at 9.30pm, The Minister for Education was back out on the airwaves, to come out swinging against the Minister for Education from that morning and his daft talk.
The Minister for Education has said he would not accept a “half return” to school which would be required if the current two-metre social distancing guidelines remain in place in September.
At the start of the covid discussions, a lifetime ago in March 2020, there was talk of the idea of ‘lockdown fatigue’ where the public just would refuse to comply.
Homeschooling a 9 year old, while also trying to educate a 6 year old, while trying to work a full time job all at the same table seems like a circumstance designed to test the limits of that fatigue to the maximum.
We may yet see the Department of Education’s certainty on what can and cannot go ahead in September is as unreal as the Leaving Cert that never was.
Schools Out Forever? (Simon McGarr, The Gist)