‘The only way out of here is through sport or education’

On October 31, 2006, I left Ireland with a group bound for South Africa to do a walk and raise money for ‘Bone Marrow Transplant’. I remember the date well because the last thing I did before our evening departure was to make a mad dash down to Westport to see my first-born grandson, only a few hours old. I brought Jack home a big stuffed Springbok from Cape Town – which he still has.

While in Cape Town, we visited a township. It is something that has remained in my mind since. Nowhere else on Earth does a boundary fence separate such opulent wealth on one side and abject poverty on the other. I have never seen a poorer people.

But what I took away from there was how hope springs eternal in the human spirit and how people, instead of wallowing in despair, decide to ‘get on with it’ and strive to improve the future for their children.

We visited a school, and how I wish that those we hear complaining about the variety of hot school dinners on offer in our schools could spend a day with those township pupils and their inspirational teachers. I arrived empty-handed, but some of our group who knew brought bundles of school books from back home.

The children, bright-eyed, and probably dressed in their Sunday best for our visit, displayed a remarkable thirst for learning, matched only by the dedication of the teacher.

That teacher gave us a history of the basic building that was their school, and how it came about through voluntary work and donations from Ireland, and what I remember most was her emotional last word when she said, “the only way out of here is through sport or education”.

There is a film I remember seeing one time, a true story of a young white teacher in California who inspired her deprived Black and Hispanic students to reach for greater things in life. Another similar story is where a debate coach inspired his charges from a rundown Black school to take on and defeat the prestigious Harvard University.

There are many such examples out there and most of us remember watching, ‘To Sir with Love’, starring Sydney Poitier.

Meanwhile, here at home in our own great little country, Troy Parrott and Kellie Harrington show how sport can lift not only the achievers but an entire forgotten community to believe and reset all their goals. We are not trying to compare Dublin’s North Inner City with a township, but it has been ravished in the past through drugs and crime.

We just wish to make the point that ‘down-market’ areas everywhere have risen through sport and the best people from our country are those minorities who get out of there through education. Those who come through the school of hard knocks prove to be the best of us when given the chance.

Philly McMahon is a great example of the leadership coming from a deprived background. Philly credits sport with saving him from the addiction scourge and an early grave, like his unfortunate brother. Throughout the country, we see what the sport of boxing can do for disadvantaged areas and the fine young people it straightens out and gives a different focus to. The reason boxing is the most common ‘way out’ is because it doesn’t cost much for a pair of gloves, or much space to provide a boxing gym.

We can be good in Ireland at trying something new. CAB and the smoking ban showed what can be done with a will and innovative thinking. It is time now to look differently at the rundown areas of our towns and cities. A bit of money pumped in for this or that, or talk of ‘regeneration’ isn’t the answer.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting a different result. Why not try something different instead? In a nutshell, educate the kids from our ghettos (if that’s too strong a word, forgive me, but I wish to further a point).

Decide to discriminate in favour of poor and rundown areas. Build a school, using unorthodox methods and unorthodox teachers. ‘They won’t go to school,’ I hear you say. But they will when a special sort of teacher delivers the message. Such teachers will first convince the parents, not by calling a meeting, but by calling and talking to families in their own homes. Show them the ‘way out.’

Build better than adequate sports facilities, let those people, who are ‘the salt of the earth’, know that this is just for them to take on the outside world… and the kids will flock in. Don’t hide behind ‘insurance risk’ and ‘H&S’. Just do it!

Start with a pilot project somewhere just to prove it will work – way beyond anything tried before – and for less money. The community will soon appreciate that the way out of there is ‘though sport or education’.

Don’t Forget

There are 17,000 homeless people in Ireland. There are 70,000 unoccupied dwellings in Ireland.