True Irishmen
Malcolm Gladwell in his book 'Outliers' refers to an interesting study of Canadian professional hockey players.
It seems that talented children are streamed into better and better hockey teams from an early age.
For under-12s, say, the cut-off is January 1 so that kids born on January 2 will be almost a year older when playing under-12s compared with those born on December 31. This means the kids born in the first half of the year tend to be bigger and better at hockey for any age group with a cut-off of January 1.
They found that all this selection bias results in a huge proportion of professional hockey players being born in the first half of the year.
This means their national team is effectively selected from half the population and they could double the talent pool by requiring teams to be mixed 50/50 across the calendar year or streaming by weight instead of age.
What makes this interesting to me is that Ireland is doing something very similar in how we run the civil service.
As a legacy of Clan Na Gael and Fianna Fail we have rules requiring all civil servants to have some Irish and for promotion we really only consider those from Irish-speaking families or those who can at least pretend to speak Irish at home.
These are the true Irishmen. Forget for a minute about egalitarianism and fairness, as that is really only something we like to lecture other countries such as Israel about.
Assume 5pc of the population are genuine Gaeltacht Irish speakers and another 5pc are wannabes who can fake it adequately after years of study. This means we are selecting our senior civil servants from 10pc of the population. Considering the power we are forced to place in their hands this seems risky.
I doubt that the secret to educating our kids to compete on the world stage is an expertise in Irish but clearly we are still in the grip of Clann Na Gael and their Fianna Fail descendants.
I believe Irish was promoted originally to emphasise that we were not English.
With that logic, perhaps English speakers should today be held up as the true Irishmen as they can attest to the fact that we aren't German.
Perhaps we should discriminate against anyone who speaks German at home, as we currently do against English speakers. We need to move with the times, as the English left almost 100 years ago.
We need to adopt a grown-up and competitive approach to running our civil service. We could ask Minister Ruairi . . . oh, why bother, sure how much harm can they do?
It's not as if they are running a bank or anything important and they aren't loading us up with loans or anything like that with long-term implications.
At least when the kids settle in Perth they'll have the Cupla Focal to put bread on the table.
G G Dalton
Dublin 4
Irish Independent
