SAOIRSE32

Plans to press on with exams fuel selection row

Henry McDonald, Ireland editor
iGuardian
Sunday 4 January 2009

Northern Ireland’s grammar schools are to hold their own 11-plus examinations in defiance of the education minister’s aim to abolish academic selection. The private examinations to the breakaway grammars will be held in November, with the results published in January 2010.

The lobby group opposed to the 11-plus’s abolition said the test papers were now “very advanced” and would be revised and ready for printing by the end of this month.

Up to 30 grammar schools in the state system have signed up to the private exam scheme. Meanwhile, three Catholic grammars in Derry, Downpatrick and Enniskillen have also indicated they will draw up their own separate entrance examinations for 11-year-olds when Sinn Féin’s education minister scraps the 11-plus.

Catriona Ruane’s plans are set to become one of the most controversial issues facing the Northern Ireland Assembly this year. Last week Ulster Unionist peer Lord Maginnis predicted a “titanic struggle” over academic selection in the coming months.

Marcas Patterson, of the Association for Quality Education, claimed yesterday that its exam would be even fairer than the 11-plus because pupils would be tested on three papers instead of two as at present.

“On three alternate Saturdays this November primary school children will be tested inside the grammar schools that have signed up to our system.

“It will be fairer, as the child and their parents will decide which of the two papers from the three they did best in. Only these two test papers chosen will be sent away for marking.

“This will get around the concern many parents have that their child might have an ‘off day’ and not perform as well. Three papers gives them a better chance,” he said.

The private tests this autumn cannot be conducted within the primary school system. Patterson said “an international education expert” was overseeing the drawing up of the test papers, although he declined to give a name.

The tests, which will be controlled by the AQE, will have to be paid for by parents, he said. However, Patterson stressed that families on lower incomes should be exempt from the fee.

He denied charges that the AQE was defending the elite status of Northern Ireland’s grammar schools.

“I teach at Belfast Royal Academy on the Cliftonville Road and we have a broad social and religious mix,” said Patterson. “In my class I have the children of millionaires sitting beside pupils from working-class Protestant and Catholic areas. These forthcoming exams will ensure that that broad mix continues.”

Although local teachers’ unions back the minister and support the abolition of the 11-plus, Patterson said he was confident they would get volunteers among the staff at the 30 schools to monitor the exams this autumn.

The breakaway schools include some of the top grammars in Northern Ireland such as Methodist College Belfast, the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Portora Royal School in Enniskillen.

The bitter divisions over academic selection were laid bare last week when the deputy first minister, Martin McGuinness, robustly defended the Sinn Féin education minister. In his new year message McGuinness claimed that there was a “vicious campaign against her by the old establishment”.

Northern Ireland’s power-sharing cabinet is split down the middle on the issue of academic selection at age 11. Sinn Féin, with the SDLP, supports the abolition of the 11-plus while both the Democratic Unionists and the Ulster Unionists want to preserve the grammar school system.

David Leppard
Times
4 Dec 09

THE Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant.

The move, which follows a decision by the European Union’s council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of the surveillance state which drives “a coach and horses” through privacy laws.

The hacking is known as “remote searching”. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office or hotel room.

Material gathered in this way includes the content of all e-mails, web-browsing habits and instant messaging.

Under the Brussels edict, police across the EU have been given the green light to expand the implementation of a rarely used power involving warrantless intrusive surveillance of private property. The strategy will allow French, German and other EU forces to ask British officers to hack into someone’s UK computer and pass over any material gleaned.

A remote search can be granted if a senior officer says he “believes” that it is “proportionate” and necessary to prevent or detect serious crime — defined as any offence attracting a jail sentence of more than three years.

However, opposition MPs and civil liberties groups say that the broadening of such intrusive surveillance powers should be regulated by a new act of parliament and court warrants.

They point out that in contrast to the legal safeguards for searching a suspect’s home, police undertaking a remote search do not need to apply to a magistrates’ court for a warrant.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, the human rights group, said she would challenge the legal basis of the move. “These are very intrusive powers – as intrusive as someone busting down your door and coming into your home,” she said.

“The public will want this to be controlled by new legislation and judicial authorisation. Without those safeguards it’s a devastating blow to any notion of personal privacy.”

She said the move had parallels with the warrantless police search of the House of Commons office of Damian Green, the Tory MP: “It’s like giving police the power to do a Damian Green every day but to do it without anyone even knowing you were doing it.”

Richard Clayton, a researcher at Cambridge University’s computer laboratory, said that remote searches had been possible since 1994, although they were very rare. An amendment to the Computer Misuse Act 1990 made hacking legal if it was authorised and carried out by the state.

He said the authorities could break into a suspect’s home or office and insert a “key-logging” device into an individual’s computer. This would collect and, if necessary, transmit details of all the suspect’s keystrokes. “It’s just like putting a secret camera in someone’s living room,” he said.

Police might also send an e-mail to a suspect’s computer. The message would include an attachment that contained a virus or “malware”. If the attachment was opened, the remote search facility would be covertly activated. Alternatively, police could park outside a suspect’s home and hack into his or her hard drive using the wireless network.

Police say that such methods are necessary to investigate suspects who use cyberspace to carry out crimes. These include paedophiles, internet fraudsters, identity thieves and terrorists.

The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) said such intrusive surveillance was closely regulated under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. A spokesman said police were already carrying out a small number of these operations which were among 194 clandestine searches last year of people’s homes, offices and hotel bedrooms.

“To be a valid authorisation, the officer giving it must believe that when it is given it is necessary to prevent or detect serious crime and [the] action is proportionate to what it seeks to achieve,” Acpo said.

Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, agreed that the development may benefit law enforcement. But he added: “The exercise of such intrusive powers raises serious privacy issues. The government must explain how they would work in practice and what safeguards will be in place to prevent abuse.”

The Home Office said it was working with other EU states to develop details of the proposals.

Sarah-Kate Templeton, Health Editor
Times
January 4, 2009

THE organs of 50 British National Health Service donors have been given to foreign patients who have paid about £75,000 each for private transplant operations in the past two years, freedom of information documents show.

The liver transplants took place at NHS hospitals, despite severe shortages that mean many British patients die while waiting for an organ that could save their lives.

The documents disclose that 40 patients from Greece and Cyprus received liver transplants in the UK paid for by their governments. Donated livers were also given to people from non-European Union countries including Libya, the United Arab Emirates, China and Israel.

The surgeons who carry out the transplants receive a share of the operation fee — believed to be about £20,000 — as all the work is done privately in NHS hospitals.

It comes as a record 8,000 Britons are on NHS lists waiting for transplant organs. About 260 British patients are waiting for a liver.

Last week leading transplant surgeons and patient groups called for an end to the practice. Professor Peter Friend, president of the British Transplantation Society, said it was unethical to give organs to people from abroad while British patients were dying.

“While there is a surfeit of UK residents awaiting transplant it is correct that these patients should have priority,” he said. “Were the situation such that there were organs that were not required, it would be appropriate to make them available to other nationals.

“We do not have a European organ donation system; it is a UK system and I therefore feel that . . . the system is there essentially for the benefit of residents in the UK.”

Jane Dodd, whose nine-year-old daughter Rebecca died while waiting for a liver transplant, said she was shocked and upset to hear that organs from British donors have been given to overseas patients.

Dodd, a part-time bank clerk from Wirral, who also has a 19-year-old son, Matthew, whose life was saved by a liver transplant, said: “I do feel that organs donated in this country should go to people from this country unless there isn’t a suitable recipient.

“If you are signing a donor card in this country you expect someone from this country to get the organ.”

The Healthcare Commission, a watchdog body, conducted brief inquiries last summer after being alerted to the practice at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in London, but decided it was not breaking any rules. It referred the matter to the Department of Health.

The documents show that another hospital, the Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust in London, has also carried out four liver transplants on foreign patients in the past year, the most recent being in November.

Despite the criticism, King’s College hospital said last week that it would be “business as usual” and surgeons would continue to give British organs to overseas patients in private operations.

The hospital gave livers from British donors to 19 overseas patients last year.

A spokesman for King’s College hospital said: “We are continuing to treat citizens of the European Union as they have the same entitlement to treatment under the NHS as UK patients under European law.”

Under European law , patients from member states have a right to seek treatment in other European countries. Britain is not obliged to treat these patients, however, and the decision is left to individual hospital trusts.

If the trusts do decide to perform transplants on patients from elsewhere in Europe, they must give them equal access to British organs as those who live in the UK. When an organ becomes available, a recipient is selected according to the severity of his or her condition and the blood group.

Some leading transplant hospitals refuse to carry out such operations. Dr Mervyn Davies, a consultant hepatologist at St James’s University hospital in Leeds, which does not carry out private transplants on overseas patients, said: “There is a shortage of donors and we cannot cater for the whole of the EU.

“It is tragic for these patients but the system that we have cannot cope with the UK demand as it is. Extending that to the whole of the EU and beyond we consider is inappropriate.”

EU rules say patients from outside the bloc should be offered an organ only if it is not considered of a high enough standard or suitable for a patient in the UK.

Transplant surgeons argue, however, that if livers can save the lives of patients from Israel, Libya and the United Arab Emirates, they must be of a sufficiently high standard to treat a British patient.

The Department of Health has admitted there are concerns about the issue and is understood to be in talks with the European commission seeking clarification.

By Teresa Levonian Cole
FT.com
**Via Newshound
January 3 2009

I learnt how to draw at Long Kesh prison. when the troubles arrived in ireland in 1968, people of my generation joined the IRA automatically. That’s how 11 out of 13 people in my football team ended up imprisoned or dead. I volunteered at 15, in 1970, and three years later robbed a bank for the IRA, with two 16-year-old mates. We were just kids - we even forgot to bring a bag to put the money in. But there must have been a tip-off, because the police were waiting for us. A passer-by wrestled me to the ground, and I was shot three times as I tried to escape. It was like a scene from Dog Day Afternoon.

At the hospital, I was guarded by two young British soldiers. Even then, I loved drawing, and I would do pictures of Marc Bolan, Michael Jackson, George Best. The soldiers would ask me to draw Tommy guns for them. In return, they played Pink Floyd outside, loudly, so I could hear.

I was sent from the hospital to Long Kesh [the Maze] prison for four years. It was January 1973. We weren’t allowed drawing materials so we smuggled them in, and drew on handkerchiefs - political subjects - then smuggled them out again. As I’d been shot, I couldn’t play football, so I drew to pass the time, and became like the prison artist. We were kept in Nissan huts inside cages, with about 80 men in each cage. Bobby Sands was in the same cage as me, and one of my fellow-robbers, Seanna Walsh, became his closest friend. In 1981 he wanted to join the hunger strike, but Bobby wouldn’t let him. What no one knows is that Bobby, the first Republican hunger striker to die, was a poet, a guitarist, a man of great humanity who loved life. My painting of him on the wall of the Sinn Fein offices in the Falls Road tries to capture that spirit.

When I was released, I became a political activist for Sinn Fein, doing agitprop. I painted on boards, posters, newspapers. So, in 1978, I was arrested again - with Tom Hartley, who’s now the mayor of Belfast - on charges of sedition, but was released after nine months. That’s when I started painting murals, in a protest at the conditions in H-block after special category status for political prisoners was lifted. People were scared to employ me, so I went to Dublin, to do publicity for Sinn Fein. And I got shot again. I was walking back to the office with Pat Magee, and we ran into a UVF gunman, who was probably targeting someone else. Three years later, Pat bombed The Grand hotel in Brighton during the Conservative party conference. I didn’t have a clue.

My first mural on what’s called the “international wall” in the Falls Road - one of 41 walls still standing between Protestant and Catholic areas in Belfast - was in 1995. It dealt with the issue of deaths from plastic bullets. But the murals reflect the mood and political consciousness of our community, so they have become less bellicose since the Good Friday accord in 1998. I am totally committed to the peace process: there has to be a political solution.

Nowadays, my paintings along the wall draw attention to conflict and injustice all over the world - Iraq, Guantanamo, Palestine. I have teamed up with Mark Ervine, the son of a prominent Loyalist leader, and together we painted a mural of Picasso’s “Guernica”. We are involved in several projects to promote peace and understanding between our two communities, including work with children at schools where, for example, a Protestant school is on the boundary of a Catholic area, or vice versa. Mark and I were also invited to paint a series of Beatles murals in Liverpool, for the European Capital of Culture celebrations this year.

Ironically, the West Belfast murals are a big tourist attraction now. I was invited recently to give a talk at a library about the posters I did in prison. In those days, you could be arrested just for having a poster. I seem to have gone from agitator to establishment figure. It gives me hope for the future of Ireland.