May 8, 2008 5:44 PM
Anna-May Brady grew up in the small rural townlands of Aghakine in County Longford during the 1930s. Rural Ireland back then had not been touched by any economic boom and so most rural people, just like her own family, lived pretty much hand to mouth.
Her mother died when she was only 6 months old and so she was raised by her father, Hugh Brady, and her grandmother in a small stone cottage on their own bit of land. I remember as a young child going to see what was by then only the ruins of the thing and thinking to myself as we looked through the overgrowth at what was left of it, what a different world she must have lived in.
Over the years my mother told me many stories of her childhood, of the hardships faced and of the kind of man her father was. We all, I hope, see our parents through the somewhat skewed lens of love and affection, but even with a little of the gloss removed, I do still think from all I have heard of him that I can honestly say that Hugh Brady was a good and decent human being.
I tell you all this because we here in New York City, and in the country as a whole, are going through what some experts are calling an economic slowdown. We are at the start of what will most likely be some tough times to come. What this means for me is that money will be a little tighter, things a little more expensive and so a greater prudence on my part will be called for when buying this or spending on that.
Our mayor at present must face just such a fiscal problem. There will not be as much money available in his budget as he first thought and so cuts to all city agencies had to be made. He wanted to be fair, he said, and so he would be cutting an even amount right across the board. Every agency got hit with the same percentage of a cut. Everybody was put on the line and everybody was asked to suck it up and carry on. Even our 1 million-plus public schoolchildren were treated the same. Overnight, without notice, millions of dollars were taken from school budgets. And come September, hundreds of millions more will be gone. Hundreds of millions of dollars is an awful lot of money, especially when it comes to the needs of our schoolchildren.
But the mayor is being fair — or so he tells us. Everyone is being treated the same, he says. Even the children.
Now I won’t pretend to know what kind of a mayor my grandfather would have made. The man died 11 years before I was born. I don’t know that he had much, if any, of a formal education and I don’t know what kind of head he would have had for big government issues such as Mayor Bloomberg faces. But I do know, from what I learned of the man, that he would have made sure that the very last people to absorb any of the pain from this fiscal pinch would be the children. Not until and unless everything else was tried and everything else done.
When times were tough, and according to my mother times back then were more often than not very tough, Hugh Brady did what any parent does: he protected his child as best he could from the hardships.
It was his clothes that were a little more frayed at the elbow. His plate had a little less food on it than his daughter’s and it was he, as much as possible and whenever possible, who did without or with less so that she would have even just a little more.
It’s what I believe moms and dads do everywhere. It’s what all of you do. We hide troubles as best we can, we protect as best we can and we do as best we can when it comes to those who need us most — our children.
I want to meet Mayor Bloomberg so that I can look him in the eye and tell him what I really think. I would say, “Mr. Mayor, if you do this, if you do this to the children of this city’s public schools, then you sir are certainly no Hugh Brady.”
And that, just like his proposed budget cuts, is not a good thing.
Dermot Smyth teaches social studies and is the chapter leader at IS 5 in Queens.