There was more than a whiff of the Bad Times about it all. Supermarket shelves stripped empty. Public transport cancelled. Restaurants and shops shuttered up with hastily scrawled handwritten signs on the door. Not a sliced pan or a six pack of toilet paper to be had anywhere. And the children home from school, bribed with Netflix or biscuits, as their parents tried to send just one quick email or hop on a Zoom, keeping their microphones on mute to drown out the low-level background carnage.
Storm Éowyn triggered a sense of pandemic-era PTSD in lots of us, if my WhatsApp groups are any reflection of a wider mood.
It won’t be the last time we’re catapulted briefly back into a world of abrupt lockdowns, shelter-in-place orders and school closures. Extreme weather is becoming more frequent. Storm Éowyn brought the second severe weather warning for parts of Ireland this year, and it’s still (I’m sorry to have to remind you, in the event that your bank account is not already doing that) not yet the end of January.
Generally, we can’t say whether climate change caused this or that weather event, but what we can say with less ambiguity is what it will mean for Ireland: more intense storms, more red weather warnings, more risks to human and animal life, more storm damage, more flooding, more power cuts, more transport disruption, more enforced days working from home and more school closures. And while some school closures are more obviously necessary than others – the widespread closures on the first day of term in the parts of the country where there was no snow and barely a lick of ice were questionable – we’re going to have to gird ourselves for more of those late-evening texts announcing that the school will be closed “due to poor weather conditions”.
Storm Éowyn triggered a sense of pandemic PTSD - especially for parents of primary pupils
Enoch Burke’s lonely vigil at the school gate has not been entirely pointless
The vet was understanding when I phoned to say that the cat I euthanised was not, in fact, our cat
Dominique Pelicot and his co-defendants are not monsters, but something more frightening
This week, employers were advised to facilitate working from home. Unless it was absolutely necessary for you to be physically present in your workplace – unless you work in the emergency services, or you are a healthcare worker, like my friend who was on his way on Thursday night to sleep in the hospital, so that he could be on hand to look after his patients on Friday morning – the strong and entirely sensible advice was to work remotely. If you couldn’t work remotely, your employer was entitled to waive your pay, Mary Connaughton of the professional body for HR, CIPD Ireland, told RTÉ's Morning Ireland on Friday morning. “Where there is no work to be done, you may not get paid ... there is no obligation for employers to pay if the work isn’t there for employees to do.”
Some schools are still ‘experts at remote teaching’ while others – and the Department of Education – appear to have forgotten everything
There was one exception, one area of Irish society in which no widespread arrangements were made to allow work to continue uninterrupted. There wasn’t a whisper of a suggestion from the Department of Education that schools might consider implementing remote learning. To their credit, many secondary schools went ahead with it anyway, using the experience gained during Covid. As the principal at Donahies Community College told Carl O’Brien: “We’re ready for anything like this. Every student has access to Teams, and every teacher will be expected to log on as part of the normal timetable. We’re experts at remote teaching now.”
But this was by no means universal among secondary schools, and while some primary schools sent work home, others seemed to treat the closure as a day off. Safety always has to come first. But why isn’t the Department of Education insisting that schools deploy the very prolonged practice run they got during the Covid pandemic and operate remotely, as Stormont did? Schools in the North were told to “put plans in place today for remote learning”.
For those who didn’t have school-age children – or those of us who are so traumatised by the memory we have blanked it out – Irish primary schools were closed for 141 days, one of the longest closures of any western country. Schools were understandably unprepared for the transition to remote learning – even so, it took far longer than many parents (and, to be fair, many teachers) regarded as reasonable to get it up and running. But by the time the second round of lockdowns of January 2021 rolled around, most schools had mastered it. The schoolwork was at last coming through via Seesaw, Aladdin or Teams and live classes were being streamed on Zoom. Four years on, some schools are still “experts at remote teaching” while others – and the Department of Education – appear to have forgotten everything.
We now know a lot about the price children paid for the prolonged lockdowns of Covid. A single day here and there may not seem to amount to much, but it adds up. We also know the negative impacts on children were not evenly distributed. Children with special educational needs are particularly affected by closures, as are children from difficult home circumstances. And then there’s the effect on parents, particularly those who are working remotely. The evidence from Covid is that it is mothers who do most of the heavy lifting when children are home from school. A UCD study on the prolonged lockdown of 2020 found that “there was a clear gender difference in who was helping the children with remote learning, with 95 per cent of children reporting that their mothers helped them, compared to 52 per cent of children reporting that their fathers helped them.”
The decision on whether or not to offering online classes during weather events shouldn’t be left up to principals. This time the interruption to most of our lives was blessedly short-lived (less so for those who are still without power or wifi). Unfortunately, so too were many of the lessons we learned about remote schooling.
