Natural Selection

national | health / disability issues | opinion/analysis Saturday April 29, 2006 09:50 by Sean Crudden - impero sean.crudden at iol dot ie Jenkinstown, Dundalk, Co Louth. 042 9371310

Picking the Right People

The points system for entry into university is a token of what was a fascination in Ireland with selection processes. Is it time to relax?

Sean Crudden

I remember nearly 60 years ago my mother and maybe one or two of her sisters with a needle and the page of runners in the Grand National spread out on the table - trying to pick a horse to back. Some of the children, even, got a chance to close their eyes and stab. However, I think the spirit of the process was often abandoned and if one did not like the choice that came out on the first attempt you closed your eyes and tried again. My memory does not tell me what horse came to be backed in the end - maybe it was just "Pat Taaffe’s" horse - or was that before Pat Taaffe’s time?

We know, too, that great selectors like Sir Alex Ferguson can get it wrong. For example expensive players like Cleberson and Diego Forlan did not work out for him in recent times.

A pupil in the third or lowest stream got first place in Heat and Mechanics in the Group Cert when I was teaching in Dundalk Tech many years ago. That was at a time when pupils still got an actual mark - not a grade - and you could tell who was first in the school.

Fianna Fail in Wicklow have picked Dick Roche as a candidate for the next general election. But they are abandoning the idea of a selection convention and, instead, are going to conduct interviews to decide who the other hopefuls on their ticket in Wicklow will be.

It is a common experience where promotion is concerned in factories and institutions that the greatest bully or conniver "gets the job."

Where projects "for funding" in the voluntary or community sphere are concerned they are often now subject to an elaborate "points" evaluation. One wonders if this is merely a sham process to give the nakedness of the selection some threads of credibility?

I rehearse all of the above to underline the point that I am old enough to be sceptical about selection processes and, in my lifetime, I have often seen them do more harm than good.

For example, I worry about the affects of "streaming" on disabled children in second level schools. If the well-being and morale of disabled children are to be maintained and enhanced as their education is mainstreamed then this aspect of schooling will have to be reviewed and tempered.

Where refugees are concerned I think the application of the law is rejecting people who would contribute more to the good of the country and the community than some of the people who are being allowed to stay. As I said I think that selection systems are often wrong. In this particular case I think (irrationally?) that they are actually perverse.