Daniel Long farming activist and running for president of Macra na Feirme.

*****

Things that seem good aren’t always good, things that seem bad aren’t always bad, and things that really are good or bad can sometimes have the confounding outcomes.

If you get three education spokespersons in a studio, they’ll usually come out with at least four plans to reform the Leaving Certificate. There might be a lot of proposals out there, but they all use the same buzz words and phrases. Too much stress, continual assessment, can’t judge someone by an exam grade, credit for coursework, judge the whole student, no job interviewer will ask for it, reduce exam pressure.

Mix in all these cliches with a few badly thought-out ideas, half-bake them for a three minute interview, and hey presto, you’ve got an education policy.

Yes, there is some merit in some of the ideas that are proposed. And, yes, there are terrible things about the Leaving Cert, they are well-rehearsed, I don’t need to repeat them all, but the thing is that it makes sense to talk about what is wrong with it, that’s how we solve problems, but are we ignoring its good points.

And as for mixing up good and bad, the Daily Mail is a paper with, to say the least, an inglorious track record. Celebrity news and gossip has always been the mainstay of the Daily Mail, but directed by its owner Lord Rothermere, it was an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini, Hitler and nazis in general in the 1930s; it was sympathetic to the racist apartheid government in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, and the paper still regularly uses any story where it can link immigrants to crime as its splash headline, and it was reported to the UK Press Complaints Commission in 1997 for anti-Irish bias.

Their science coverage is so bad that the British doctor and science writer Ben Goldacre laughed about their never-ending campaign to categorise every substance in the universe into one of two categories, those that cause cancer, and those that cure it.

In the background there that’s the 1990s Punk band Antidote’s track Shock Horror!, no surprise that they pinpoint the Daily Mail as one of the many offenders in stoking up racism in Britain.