She may not be perfect, but Norma’s no Trump!

BEFORE we send a mob with pikes and spears and flaming torches round to burn down the Department of Education, can we just pause for a brief inventory of Minister Norma Foley’s shocking crimes?

Before we join the Shinners’ chorus of outrage and accusation, let’s go mad and actually look at the facts.

Minister Foley may not have covered herself in glory in her early days in her post, by bragging about strokes she’d pulled for her own constituency, but there are f ew politicians on the Opposition benches who’d envy her the task she faced when she took the job.

The Leaving Cert had been cancelled for the first time in history, but 65,000 students still needed a fair adjudication on their abilities in order for them to proceed to third level.

A system of predicted grades, involving school profiling and standardisation, had been substituted in the UK, and so that seemed like the best alternative to the actual exam. When the British system turned out to be riddled with institutionalised injustices, though, Foley looked again at the process here, and made what tweaks she could.

It still wasn’t entirely fair: in the UK, it had been the pupils from disadvantaged areas who had taken the brunt of the anomalies while here, it seemed, the children from the ‘better’ schools fared worst. There wasn’t much sympathy for them, especially when it emerged that several had already lawyered-up and made for the High Court, but they were still young people who had their hopes thwarted by circumstances entirely outside their control.

Most, though, were prepared to get on with things and take the college places they’d been given. Even if their early college days will be a far cry from what they’d hoped and imagined, with most courses largely online, they were set to give it their best shot. Then, this week, another complication. The company hired, at considerable expense, by Minister Foley to calculate the students’ grades had used the wrong algorithms and, long story short, some 6,500 pupils received the incorrect grade in one subject. That’s 10% of the Leaving Cert class of 2020, downgraded in one subject due to an error by a company contracted in good faith by the Minister for Education.

The focus for the theatrical displays of disbelief and dismay by the Opposition seems to be the fact that the Minister didn’t immediately run out of her office, all of a flap, to broadcast the error when she first learned of it last week. If she’d caused widespread panic and confusion with a premature announcement, no doubt, she’d have been pilloried too.

But instead, she commissioned an i ndependent analysis by another company, in parallel with a review by the original contractors themselves, and when the error was confirmed, she went public, took the blame and made a full and unconditional apology. And that, according to some opportunistic nay- sayers, makes her unfit for her important job at such a crucial time.

IF YOU want to see unfit for an important job at a crucial time, though, have a look back at last Tuesday night’s US presidential election. With the best will in the world, Joe Biden is uninspiring, and Donald Trump is a lying, conniving, corrupt, taxdodging, sex pest, bullying, racist crook – and with his cavalier attitude on Covid, has now contracted the virus himself.

You really wouldn’t buy a used car from either man, and yet they are the best that the world’s greatest nation, with a population of 370million, could field as candidates for Leader of the Free World. The options are so bad that some US voters are sporting bumper stickers proclaiming their support for ‘Any Functioning Adult, 2020’.

Whatever you think about Micheál Martin or Leo Varadkar or Minister Foley, there is no merit in the leftie conspiracy theory that paints them as evil , call ous, capitalist tyrants indifferent to the plight of the poor and the hard-pressed: they’re decent people trying as best they can to steer us through a desperate crisis without a roadmap, and not always getting it right. And any one of them would be a massive improvement on the beauties running the UK and the US right now.

Never mind Norma Foley – you could have put Ming Flanagan in his underpants up on that stage, on Tuesday night, and he’d still have looked like Abraham Lincoln beside that pair. So before we dump on politicians who are doing their best at a time of unprecedented chaos, let us look to the clowns to the left of us, conmen and jokers to the right, and count our blessings.