Boyle’s Law – life in a vacuum!

Lismore “Boy”, Robert William Boyle, was an inventor, alchemist, chemist and physicist. He was actually born in Lismore Castle, to the 1^st Earl of Cork. He led a privileged life and was sent to Eton College, England, to be educated at the very highest level and also spending time at Oxford. He published his own law, Boyle’s Law, around 1662. Because I paid no attention to “Big Jim Skull”, my Bell Baxter High School secondary teacher, I have absolutely no idea what use Robert’s Law does in today’s world. Or for that matter if I have ever used or come across his law – but I am sure I must have!

I do know that he worked with pressure, gases and vacuums. His worksheets, papers and books are all kept in The Royal Society archives. Vacuums were just great things, in the old chemistry lessons, and we all remember blowing up balloons, by sucking ALL the air out of that bell shaped glass vacuum.

We heard last week that the planning permission for the proposed Michael Street Shopping Centre development was also granted. Lecturer at WIT, Mr Ray Griffin, producer of a recent excellent WIT economic report on Waterford’s potential, was on WLR FM talking about the need for this development to go ahead. As we now expect, when we hear from Mr Griffin, he says it as he sees it, and he let the listeners know that we have been in a political vacuum for a number of years. This has contributed significantly to Waterford’s lack of actual real development.

Some might say that these were harsh words, however I totally agree with his accurate description. We have endemic problems that are not being addressed and until such times as we dig deep and see what needs to be changed, then change will not be made.

Whilst we are not living in a complete vacuum, we are to a greater extent, being pressurised by others, with greater political clout, to feed off the crumbs from the Department of Finance’s funding trough. But alas, we have been in the same political vacuum for many, many years and we do not seem to be getting any further forward? Are we just willing to accept yet another 3 or 5 years of others deflating our balloon?

Only a few months ago we heard that funding would be available for the airport, the hospital would get X, Y and Z, investment would be made in the City which would transform our economic future. The clock has been ticking very quickly since the last general election and now we have no more commercial flights in or out of Waterford Airport, the report on our hospital needs is now overdue, what is happening to our “University” bid and whilst other cities win European funding we are once again left wondering – “Did that really just happen!”

I cannot imagine Cork, Limerick or Galway standing back and accepting the same lack of funding that isn’t coming to the Sunny South East. We know that their political super heavyweights would simply NOT agree to anything else but the development of their City and Towns. They have political clout that is not affected by pressure and, trust me, they do not work in a vacuum.

Our competition box clever and fight for every Euro and cent that might just make their constituents’ life that wee bit better. They bang the table, have the ear of Kenny and Noonan, they threaten political revolt and have the cajones to barter a better deal for the very people that vote them into power.

Robert Boyle was a visionary of his time, with many, many sceptics who questioned his work and his findings. But Robert ploughed on regardless and is remembered as one of the founders of modern chemistry. 

Maybe we need to rekindle that “never say die attitude”, that Robert showed in his work, and make sure that we develop Waterford, not in a vacuum, but as part of our resurgent Sunny South East.

The last thing we need is another wee p*”@k bursting our balloon.

Time to support your future generation!

As our children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews prepare to sit Junior and Leaving Certificate exams, we can all I am sure, remember just how we felt as the exams’ deadline approached. We can all recall fretting and worrying about whether or not all of the information we had stored and crammed into every corner of our brain could be regurgitated in the right order, for the specific questions we were answering.

I know that some, uh hum, thirty odd years ago, I was studying hard in my bedroom in Pitlessie Village, just a few miles from my secondary school, Bell Baxter High School, in Cupar, in a wee county called Fife. I very quickly realised that I was not the brightest match in the box and that if I was to succeed in my future life, I would have to work very, very hard and more importantly I would have to find a study system that worked for me and the limitations I had personally identified in the various subjects I was studying.

Strangely enough, the subject that I found the hardest was English and those closest to me will know that in my whole life I have probably read, cover to cover, just a handful of books. Such was my inability to like this most necessary of subjects, that my parents invested in tutoring and by some minor miracle, or divine intervention,  I managed to pass, with a sufficient Higher Grade, enabling me to go further on to third level education.

Little did I know that in my future careers and work life, I would need English probably more than any other subject I studied?

Despite having an almost complete hatred of the whole subject of English, I now find myself writing more and more in my everyday life and I owe a very big thank you to both my parents, for persevering and investing their time and energy in me, to ensuring I passed that most dreaded of English exams.

As those nearest to us prepare to go through the very same exam pressures, I know that we as parents must give the necessary support, encouragement and guidance to allow our children to perform to the very best of their abilities. We must become coaches and perhaps more importantly mentors so that they know they are not alone in the difficult journey they are about to embark on. As exam mentors, we need to be cognisant of the fact, that we all learn and study in different ways and our children will differ in the way they study, the way they retain information and the way they set down that information on an exam paper.

Luckily, today’s children are assessed throughout the school year and their performance is not all based around just one examination. We all know that a one-off examination will suit some children but will not necessarily suit others. The fact that children are now assessed, will bode well for future careers in the workplace, where they are continually learning and benchmarked. The ability to continually perform and improve is a hard lesson to learn but a necessary one if our children are to continually improve.

The pain and concern all our children are going through this exam time, will stand them in good stead for third level education and their future careers. The more as parents, we can relate to the fact that we too suffered, panicked and bombed some of our exams, will help them through this tough period of their lives. We must find a way of relating our own experiences back to them at the right time and in the right place.

I would wage a bet that the best bosses are in general those who are less gifted, those who found exams very hard, those who may not have a degree and those who had to find the means to get across the line.

It is hard to fail but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

Purple Flag will restore some balance to City spend.

As a wee boy growing up in Glenrothes, in central Scotland, our family lived on an estate that was designed as part of a number “New Towns” built to house the overspill of the redevelopment of Glasgow’s infamous tenements.

These new town planners had designed self sufficient housing estates that contained the entire infrastructure needed for modern family living in 1960’s Scotland. This included compact modern housing, a “village green” type grassed play space, secure garage lockups for your modern car, local shops, primary schools, a post office, lots of open space and one of my most enduring memory’s was a state of the art playground with new shiny brightly painted playground equipment that was in my mind the best in the world.

The playground that serviced Cromarty Court was on the way to my school, Rimbleton Primary, and was the most wonderful of places to start an adventure from. Included in this playground was one huge monolithic slide (or "shoot" as we called this in Scotland) that was in my eyes simply the highest structure I would ever have to climb, a series of three swings, the essential (yet lethal) brightly painted steel and wooden roundabout, but the most impressive of all these items was the yellow and blue seesaw that sat at the very heart of the playground. This to me was the best of the best of all the things to play on and partly due to the fact that a fall from the top of the shoot one sunny day put me off this once favourite play structure.

One of my many memories of playing on the seesaw was of course seeing just how many of your friends you could get standing on this balance beam on what would today be seen as a health and safety on no. Unfortunately, the once common seesaw has been replaced by those wobbly and springy ducks, hens and elephant contraptions that break ALL your teeth or give you children whiplash.

One abiding memory that will stick with me forever would be when one of my, shall I saw heavier playmates, would sit at one end of the seesaw and I would be left dangling one hundred feet in the air helplessly bumping up and down on the seat to try and bring my end of the seesaw back down to terra firma. On the odd occasion, when I would be feeling brave, I would push myself over the brightly painted safety handle and edge inch by inch towards the central pivot point and through the powers of some mystic magic seesaw fairy I would somehow make myself heavier thus levelling out the weight distribution and bringing the seesaw back down to ground. I would later learn in Physics classes, at Bell Baxter secondary school, that at five years old I was in fact implementing one of Newton’s many laws, which to this day I still do not understand and so I will be sticking to my fairy theory.

It was this memory that sprung to mind in early December when I was in the City Centre and several businesses from the George’s Street, Gladstone Street and O’Connell Street area of the City stopped me and asked why there were no additional Christmas lights etc in these areas when compared to Christmas of 2013. I believed that the reason is due to the fact that the ice rink this year had been moved and was set up further down The Quay, towards Rice Bridge, and that this meant there was no additional emphasis on the entrance to Winterval up and through Gladstone Street and along George’s Street. In 2013 there was a greater importance stressed on bringing footfall through the City Centre by directing people up Gladstone Street and along George’s Street and thus in 2013 there were significantly more lights, a number of craft cabins, some food stalls, better signage and even a gigantic blow-up snowman or bear or something on The Quay showing you the way through Winterval.

This year there was very little in the way of Christmas decorations in these areas and many traders and businesses were feeling that they had been forgotten in 2014.

Some traders and businesses had even said to me that there was a clear inconsistency in terms of investment in this area of the City when compared to other areas of the City and this of course has led to many metaphors coming my way.

But the one that seemed to be coming to the fore was the idea of an unbalanced seesaw where one side of the seesaw had seen significant and continued monetary investment at the cost of the other side. Thus there will always be one area of the City looking better than the other and for a City the size of Waterford this is extremely noticeable and sticks out like a sore thumb.

Clearly, there has to be a rebalancing of the seesaw and this cannot be the sole responsibility of the traders and businesses that have chosen to invest, work and trade in this once bustling area of our City. Over the last few weeks we have seen and heard of numerous entrepreneurs investing in property in this part of the City to start that renaissance process. But this would be made much easier if it was felt that there was at the very least some parity in terms of future investment. If we are truly to drive the City forward then we need to encourage more investors into the City and this will be made much easier if the current set of entrepreneurs feel that the seesaw can be balanced.

The proposed Purple Flag for Waterford City will incorporate this area of the City Centre and in fact extend right the way down The Quay towards Rice Bridge. If we are to be successful in marketing the City as a future Purple Flag destination then we need to see an accelerated investment outside of the Viking Triangle area. There are a significant number of commercial rate payers across the City Centre that wish to see not only an increased investment but fairness in terms of balancing that investment. An investment that is ultimately partly paid for in the commercial rates contributions made on an annual basis by the businesses and traders across the whole City Centre.

Through the wonders of Google maps I have discovered that my playground still has the slide and three swings, but sadly the roundabout and my seesaw have been removed – no doubt removed by the mad health and safety world we live in today.