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Athletes from the big medal-producing countries at the Olympic Games–China, USA, and Britain–certainly deserve congratulations. But, to find countries that did really well, you have to look at the medal count relative to population. Here’s a graph showing exactly that:
Interestingly, over half of this Top Ten list are post-colonial nations, from either the Soviet or British Empires.
Image courtesy of youcalc.com
Another interesting revelation from the UNICEF report on Child Well-Being in Rich Countries I wrote about previously is that books are not valued in many wealthy and successful countries.
Below is a chart from that survey showing the Percentage of Children age 15 reporting less than 10 books in the home. It’s hard to generalize (even for me!) based on these figures so I will just confine myself to noting that the paucity of books in over 10% of Irish homes should be a real cause for concern for parents, children, educators, and community leaders here.
Unfortunately, despite Ireland’s literary tradition and love of the English language–whether spoken, written, or sung–our libraries are generally lamentable.
It may surprise you to hear that their equivalents in Las Vegas, where we previously lived, were infinitely superior in every way than their oddly impoverished Irish counterparts. (See comparison figures below).
On top of this, booksellers here are not what they were (vide , for one, the stock-gutting of Waterstones on Dawson Street), we love television, and the public transport system is poor: together all conspire to reduce opportunities for people to read good books. Children, meanwhile, are not read to at night, and when they are taken to bookshops find either “franchise books” (which may or may not be good) and celebrity tie-in pulp, which is generally not.
Quite reasonably they conclude more fun will be had online or playing console games.
So, what are we going to do about it? Read to your kids every bedtime. Let them see you enjoying books. And maybe embarrass your local bookseller into thinking beyond Harry Potter, Madonna, and Enid Blyton
The figures from the two library systems: Las Vegas slightly outspends Ireland on library stock purchased [$5.47 to $5.10 per capita]. But the most telling characteristic, for me, is the non-stock spend: only 11% of the Irish budget is spent on stock. Las Vegas, by contrast, raises their stock-spend to 20%, almost double the Irish rate, while maintaining an ambitious expansion program to meet the needs of a continuing population influx. [Sources: Ireland; Las Vegas; and xe.net for currency rates]
A recent report by UNICEF on child well-being in rich countries seems to vindicate our decision to raise the kids in Ireland.
Across “six dimensions” averaging measures such as “Health and Safety” and “Subjective Well-Being”, the United Nations agency arrives at the conclusion that kids are best off being brought up in either Scandinavia/Switzerland, the Benelux, Spain/Italy, or Ireland.
The US and UK, though scoring high in Education (US) or Health/Safety (UK), manage to come dead last in the 21 OECD nations under analysis.
However, a closer look (click on table image below) reveals that free-market countries tend to fare poorly on these measures. Why? Because the internal wealth disparity is wider than society permits in, say, more socialist-leaning countries such as Sweden or France. And freedom of expression tends to be more valued in the UK and US, leading to lower scores for child “Behaviour and Risks”.
One corollary of this is that if you are wealthy (and thus healthy, safe, and well-educated) in the UK or US, your children’s well-being moves up to par with the countries at the top off the UNICEF table.
(Or it does if your “family and peer relationships” are not fractured: interestingly, the US/UK tradition of self-actualization means that, on that score, the two largest free-traders again trail their wealthy cohorts in Europe.)
Click on images above to enlarge data tables.
Source [PDF]: UNICEF, Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries, Innocenti Report Card 7 (Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2007)
An old friend of mine from New York, Aravind Adiga, has written a novel called The White Tiger which is stirring up some serious interest around the world (and has just been long short-listed for the Booker Prize).
That’s one thing…the other thing is that the book is a cracking good read and very witty.
Buy the book at Amazon US or Amazon UK
A share of the proceeds go towards running costs for The Second Circle, which I edit and Aravind writes for.
My play Grace of the Median, a comedy of Hiberno-American errors, got a public reading, with actors, in the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, on July 19th:
I am an Irish rock. Whoever treads on me–Norman or Gael, peasant or prince, child or crone–is all one to me. Civilization itself is but five minutes old in my day-long life; the British Empire, the Irish Republic, Eurovision, the blink of an eye…
It was a really useful exercise for me: I cut quite a bit of the text as the week progressed and have since, as a direct result of feedback, inserted 2 new scenes, made innumerable microcuts, and plan to redraft before I submit the play for a full performance.
The event was produced by Painted Filly Theatre Company, directed by Louise Lowe, and featured a great cast: Christopher Samuel Carroll, Derval Cromie, Mark Gordon, Brian McGovern, Sarah-Jayne Quigley, and Lorna Quinn. (Thank you to all–and to any of you that came on the day.)
Image: ‘The Road to Ragged Mountain’ by Chris Seufert on Flickr
My short story “Ursula’s Ghost” is in Crannóg Magazine’s summer issue (affording me the great pleasure of reading it at the launch event in Galway). The piece is a spooky little number about a returned emigrant with blood on her hands…
Was she thinking of the man she had just killed? No. She was back living in Ireland after twenty years away in America and, perhaps to take her mind off things, was idly flicking through the changes she had found.
What had she noticed? The cracked pavements, with their teeming weedlife, for one; washing lines and lace curtains; the smell of rain and the sight of rust; the smokers stooped about doors; the Slav and English accents everywhere; the stone and the grey and piped music and yes the damp, the mist, the rain.
You can get a copy via the Crannóg website.
Image: ‘Welcome, ghosts’ by The Devil is in The Details on Flickr
I just got some nice reviews of my short play Sing, Hibernia, courtesy of the excellent Painted Filly, the theatre company which produced the piece at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, a little while back.
All credit, while I’m on the subject, to Director Duncan Molloy and lead actors Sarah-Jayne Quigley and Colm O’Brien, all of whom did sterling work: I was whisked off after the performance by family and friends and wished I could have shaken them all by the hand.
Here are some choice quotes from the papers:
Fin Keegan’s Sing, Hibernia is the brilliant one, an exuberantly satiric and acid-edged jab at the pleasure-sated offspring of the Celtic Tiger. A couple lie in fine clothes, literally eating the heads off each other with spoons, while a line of black-clad servants–”our friends from the accession states”–leap to push the shuffle button on their iPods and clean stilettos with a tissue.
-Daily Mail
The sardonic zenith has to be Fin Keegan’s riotous Sing, Hibernia which somehow manages to send up middle-class drug-taking, attitudes to immigration and globalisation, all in a rich Synge-like English.
-Metro Dublin
The Irish Times also made a passing reference in its review of the evening to “Fin Keegan’s amusing Celtic folklore update”
Image: ‘Broadway’ by Timothy Neesam on Flickr
Recent riots in the Dublin suburb of Finglas and a teenage double suicide in my own county underline the responsibility we all have to help our young people grow up to become responsible, productive, and happy citizens. (Meanwhile, in my old home of Las Vegas, the radio station where I worked was hit by bullets following a post-school fracas across the street.)
The kids are not alright. An essay by Paul Graham examines adolescent unhappiness: his thesis, in a nutshell, is that because of the way we organize Western societies now teenagers are denied the experience of real and meaningful work in their teens. Money quote:
If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do.
But the problem is not that we choose to institutionally educate our children: the problem is how we teach them.
The trick is to teach our young their subjects as meaningful tools to live a better life. Literacy, numeracy, history, geography, and creativity can all be taught in a practical and useful way that has (and is perceived by the children themselves to have) direct benefits for themselves and their community.
Would the children of Finglas be so quick to destroy their environment if they had actually worked, through school, to determine it, say by planting trees or contributing to planning decisions? I do not think they would.
Paul Graham: Why Nerds are Unpopular: paulgraham.com, Feb, 2003
Image: ‘Halt’ by New York Observer on Flickr
My political satire Utopia Closes is currently was recently a semi-finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. The winner will be decided by reader response. You can download a sample chapter at
The best reader review will be given a $2000 token by Amazon so, beside my undying gratitude for your support, you may get a free shopping spree!
Came across something today you don’t often see: an obituary written by a dead man–or, more accurately, an obituary whose author (Douglas Johnson: 1925-2005) predeceased his subject (Julien Gracq: 1910-2007) by two years.
Gracq was a contrarian French author who shunned the fame and honours garnered by his work. His best known book is the war novel Un Balcon en Foret [A Balcony in the Forest]. According to the obituary, Gracq had his doubts about the style-cult which marks modern literature in France and…
believed in the importance not so much of style but of form. As his example, he gave the sayings of the countryside. Many of them are about the weather. These sayings are accepted. No one seeks to verify whether they are accurate. It is the form that makes them authentic.
Johnson: Julien Gracq: French novelist who refused the Goncourt The Guardian, Dec 24th, 2007
Image: ‘Death Applications’ by Raphco on Flickr