Yes, it can be hard to get a restaurant table. But it can be impossible if you’re a wheelchair user
There are many things you can learn from a restaurant’s website: what stream the trout they serve swam in, which mountain range supplies the salt, whether there’s gluten-free bread. What you may not be able to establish, if you’re a wheelchair user, is whether you’ll be able to eat there. Courtesy of reader Jamie Hale I now know something about this. Jamie, who is a wheelchair user, advises institutions and theatres on disability access and runs the disabled-led arts organisation Criptic Arts, among other things. He emailed to request I include information in my reviews about disability access.
I often get requests to include details on vegan options, meat sourcing, piped music and so on. If I covered them all there would be little space for the actual review. Instead, I mention issues where appropriate. I’m not writing a guide book. If you’re concerned, check the restaurant’s website for yourself. But disability access is different, Jamie said, because websites rarely display that information. I got the point and suggested we meet for lunch. I would be responsible for booking somewhere that met Jamie’s needs.
Here’s the headline: it’s bloody difficult. I checked dozens of websites. All but one contained no information on accessibility at all. There were messages about sustainability, employment standards, even modern slavery, but nothing about whether Jamie would be able to go inside. Many don’t list phone numbers. “I usually have to email six or seven places,” Jamie said. Let’s hear it then for the recently opened Jamie Oliver Catherine Street, which has a clear and positive line about wheelchair accessibility on the website, confirmed by a phone call.
We met there for lunch: nice enough gravadlax, chicken en croute, and a rump steak. Jamie looked about the space approvingly. “Tables at varying heights, chairs both with and without armrests, a lot of space between tables, and full access because it’s on the flat.” This, he said, was not common. The biggest issue can simply be getting inside, courtesy of one or two steps. ‘“All it takes is a foldaway ramp, which costs around £100, less than most tables would spend. Many places don’t bother.” Disability access is covered by the 2010 Equality Act. It includes an “anticipatory requirement to make reasonable adjustments”. But it’s civil law. It’s up to individuals to take legal action against hospitality businesses for failing to comply rather than, say, local councils. “And that’s costly and risky.”
What would Jamie like restaurants to do? “Make everything clear on the website, even if it’s just that there are three steps and no wheelchair access. Having that information would take away huge stress. If I know they don’t have an adapted toilet, I can plan ahead.” But obviously they should go further. “It’s not just a shame that I can’t go to certain restaurants. It’s a moral obligation to remedy that.” Have an adapted toilet. Make it reachable between tables. Don’t use it as a store room.
And what can the rest of us do? “When you go to a restaurant tell them you know a wheelchair user who would like to visit and ask if they’ve got a ramp. The more they are asked about it, the more they’ll think about it.” As he says: “The absence of wheelchair users in your restaurant doesn’t mean they couldn’t be a presence.” Jamie acknowledges it remains tricky for me to provide conclusive information about accessibility in my reviews. Those with
disabilities would still have to check for themselves. But after our lunch one thing is clear: I’ll never look at a dining room in the same way again.
To learn more about Jamie Hale’s work visit jamiehale.co.uk
tive. Colman has said her favourite line in the script was “fuck you in the nose holes”. Favourites of mine include: buggeration, knobber, clusterfuck, arse biscuits and “fuckpigs”, which was also used by Dominic Cummings to describe the cabinet.
I can’t deny that my own potty mouth might have something to do with the industry in which I work. Would I be so sweary had I spent the past two decades in a corporate environment, or the public sector, and not under some male editors in journalism for whom calling someone a “cunt” counted as people management? That word might have been used with derogatory intent and some women find it horribly misogynistic, I know. But I relish saying it: that it immediately forces you to confront any preconceptions you might have about women swearing is, for me, where its power lies.
Of course, the conundrum in all of this is that I want people to stay a bit offended when I swear and, inevitably, the more you do it, the less impactful it becomes. But the least we can do is remain equally offended by foulmouthed men and women. Anything else is just rude.
Claire Cohen is a journalist and the author of BFF? The Truth About Female Friendship
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burned during a battle between the Irish Republican Army, which had rejected the terms of the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty that brought the Irish Free State into being, and the Free State government. “It was an act of cultural vandalism,” said Catriona Crowe, the former head of special projects at the National Archives of Ireland. “For a long time people didn’t realise what we had lost.”
During the civil war, the Public Record Office – adjacent to the Four Courts building, where the anti-treaty IRA had stationed itself – was used as an armoury. When the pro-treaty side enlisted the help of British artillery – which it eventually did, four months after the initial occupation of the Four Courts – the Public Record Office suffered the worst damage. I think of the cameras hanging off the corners of the Clonshaugh datacentre, their domed glass lenses allowing them a 360-degree view of those who might come to threaten the flow of information.
The burning of public records “was a massive own goal”, Crowe told me. “It wiped out the history of the occupants of this island, most of whom kept no records.” She mentioned Slievemore, a settlement of 80 to 100 abandoned cottages on the slopes of Slievemore mountain on Achill Island, off the coast of County Mayo: “It was thriving before the famine. If we had the 1841 census, we would know the names, religions, occupations of the people.” The area was settled for more than 5,000 years. With the birth of the new state, we lost all record of that famine generation.
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I asked Crowe what she thinks of digitisation in general, of the replacement of tangible records with a digital copy of each of our earthly transactions, stored among various servers. “Well, the first thing to say is that the most secure form of knowledge preservation is stone, and the oldest,” Crowe said. “After that, parchment – it survives all kinds of difficulties and remains robust. Then we had rag-based paper, from the 15th century onward, and after that acid paper cut from forests in the early 19th century. This deteriorates very quickly and needs to be kept stable. But by far the most unstable form is digital. We have a black hole opening in history. When Irish government departments started using computers in the 1970s, there was no network, and many of those files can’t be read any longer. There’s no real policy for digital preservation of state records. A nightmare is facing us. Emails, Excel, Word, PowerPoint – they’ll all vanish – unless there’s a decision made by the government.”
I have a little experience with the instability of digital files myself. In a past life, I worked on a project to digitise the extensive archive of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, the English-speaking world’s first state-subsidised theatre. I was surprised by the projected speed of deterioration of the images we were creating for our database; and even Tiff files, which don’t degrade, may become inaccessible if the software used to read them becomes obsolete. And so all that material floating around in the cloud – which is in reality being bounced from server to server, degrading each time this happens – is not really being preserved in the way we might imagine. Its continued existence is dependent on a steady flow of electricity, the continued provision of which is contingent upon governments reaching renewables targets they can’t agree upon. And even then, these files will degrade, deteriorate and become obsolete. Rather than creating something permanent and inviolable, we’ve made our memories more contingent than ever upon a fantasy of technological stability that, given the constant churn of history, seems inevitably fleeting.
As world temperatures increase, datacentres have migrated to places where the climate is temperate. There, they consume vast amounts of energy, increasing carbon emissions. It’s a frightening and seemingly unsustainable pattern; we’ve entrusted our memories to a system that might destroy them, and us. Because of this fraught reality, datacentres in Ireland have become controversial in the past five years, and the tone of the newspaper articles discussing them has changed. It’s suggested that if all the datacentres currently proposed in Ireland are built, they could be using up to 70% of the country’s electricity by 2030.
Reliance on fossil fuels and on-site generation has remained a concern for environmentalists in the intervening years, with close scrutiny being paid to developers’ commitments to contributing to Ireland’s renewable power grid. The journalist Aoife Barry, in her research for her recent book Social Capital, has identified the ways in which multinationals are greenwashing their contribution toward renewables, including the case of a high court review of a planned Apple datacentre in County Galway in 2018:
“The board sought more information on the plans, saying there was a lack of clarity around ‘direct sustainable energy sources’, including how Apple would live up to its promise of running on 100% renewable energy. When Apple submitted a revised environmental impact assessment to the council, it indicated that it wouldn’t be generating renewable energy itself. Instead, it would buy renewable generated power from an energy supplier ‘equal to the total power consumption of the datacentre building in any particular year’.”
This equation works out only if energy demands don’t continue to rise in the coming years, meaning any renewable investment is going to continue to lag behind the needs of the expanding datacentre sector.
In an effort to entice further foreign direct investment, the government has implemented measures aimed at streamlining the planning process for datacentres, which would allow concerned citizens less visibility into the estimated environmental impacts of these centres. Decreasing transparency in this instance seems unnerving, and symptomatic of the Irish state’s strange relationship with multinationals. In 2016, the Irish government rejected the European Commission’s ruling that Apple should pay Ireland €13bn in unpaid taxes, arguing that the lower corporate taxation rate the country offered at the time makes Ireland more attractive for investors. The logic behind that decision might have been confusing to everyday Irish citizens, given that at that time they were each saddled with €42,000 in debt accrued after the International Monetary Fund’s bailout of Ireland’s banks.
Datacentres have contributed €7.3bn to the Irish economy, but provide only about 16,000 jobs to a country of 5.28 million people. The lack of employment these centres provide leads to questions over who benefits from their existence. In August 2022, after two consecutive amber alerts for electricity outages in Ireland, thenfinance minister Paschal Donohoe appeared on national broadcaster RTÉ’s radio show Morning Ireland, where he was quizzed about the low employment figures at datacentres and the fact that their profit margins were soaring while electricity bills had reached new highs for Irish citizens. He dismissed the lack of employment, emphasising instead the “huge importance of them to really large employers within our country, whose taxes and jobs are playing an invaluable part in our economic performance at the moment”.
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The benefits of the data centre economy are diffuse, intangible. In 2022, due to concerns about pressure on the National Grid and the potential for rolling blackouts, EirGrid, Ireland’s energy grid, placed a moratorium on the development of new datacentres in Dublin until 2028. But applications for centres outside the capital are still being granted. Other European countries, such as the Netherlands, are halting their development of datacentres. Singapore imposed a three-year moratorium from 2019 to 2022, and is now seeking applications within new parameters to ensure sustainability. Unless Ireland figures out a way to surge forward with its slow development of renewables, these datacentres seem impossible to sustain. One potential solution is to look more carefully at what data we retain, and why. We must weigh the short-term financial benefits of seemingly infinite data retention against the long-term threat of climate crisis.
Ireland is no exception to the rule that what we remember and what we forget are always contingent upon the power structures and hierarchies that shape our contemporary moment. At the birth of the state, we burned our history in an act of carelessness; we also freed ourselves to create a new national history. We entrusted the church with our moral guidance and guardianship, and then allowed it to commit unspeakable cruelties on our citizens, including the abuses recounted in the Report of the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse (2009) and the Commission of Investigation Into Mother and Baby Homes (2021). At the latter end of the century, and in the wake of joining the EU, we moved away from our old bad memories and toward a prosperous new era, placing our faith in international investment, almost at any cost. But in a small country like Ireland, the old names – whether they be companies or state organisations or political dynasties – crop up again and again. Sometimes our faulty memories flash up a warning. But often that history is stored in the cloud: intangible, vulnerable to exploitation – and degrading over time. This article first appeared in issue 13 of The Dial
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