Plenty of people in full-time jobs are running a little sideline business to make up for pay and tax cuts, writes ORNA MULCAHY
I HAVE just gotten hold of a very valuable piece of information. Tucked away in my contact book is a post-it note with the name of a man, let’s call him John, whose reputation in south Dublin stretches from Dalkey to Dartry. People tend to be cagey about John and indeed about the Johns of this world, and although several people I know have used him, they go all vague and change the subject when pressed for his actual name and address.
It was only through persisting with a good friend, interrogating her in fact, that the steel jaws of her own contact list snapped open and the information was mine, though not before
I had traded her several high-level bits of gossip in return.
No, John is not some Botox guru or personal trainer, but simply a very good maths teacher who gives grinds. He has a waiting list but it’s worth a try to see if he might take on my teenager and steer him through Leaving Cert 2010. All I have to do is stump up €70 an hour, almost double the going rate for grinds, but God, it’s worth it, says my friend.
The difference he makes! It’s a desperate amount of money, especially as we’ve been lashing out thousands on school fees over the years. However, there does come a time in a parent’s life when you will spend anything to get them over the hump. The whole fuss over the cost of Communion dresses and tiaras and stretch limos to the church is nothing compared to the ruinous enterprise of pushing a reluctant teenager towards the Leaving Cert.
Grinds are an established part of the extra-curricular week for second-level students. One countrywide study carried out last year among 1,000 Leaving Cert candidates found that 70 per cent were taking grinds at an average cost of € 40 an hour for one-on-one tuition. The figures did not include the vast numbers also attending intensive cramming schools such as the Institute of Education. The subject most were getting grinds in was maths.
The lengths that parents are prepared to go to was brought home to me recently when an old friend, who had drifted out of our lives, called out of the blue. Not a social call; he wanted advice. The situation was this: he is a wealthy man who never had much time for school and was selling things that had fallen off the back of lorries by the age of 15. Now he has several charming and enterprising children of his own and for years he let them do pretty much as they liked. They’re grown up to be street smart and fun but a tad lacking in As and Bs.
Suddenly, this is a problem, and their father intends to fix it. He called me looking for the name of a John or two, thinking that I had the magic contact list, being a mother in south county Dublin with children who wear Abercrombie. All I could suggest were a few websites where teachers and college students advertise their skills and hourly rates, some of the information alarmingly misspelt.
We met a few months later and he told me that he had hired teachers to come to his house after school, five days a week, to help his attractive dunces get their acts together. He pays cash.
Yet another reason, so, why teachers are now to be envied. Not only do they have permanent and pensionable jobs, and those long summer holidays, but they can make cash money on the side. Possibly tax free. In fact it was always so.
I can still summon up the stale biscuit smell of the teacher’s front room where I spent many hours as a teenager having trigonometry explained to me by a lady in a long cardigan who appeared to be about 90 but was probably 45. She too had a brilliant reputation for rescuing a situation but it didn’t work for me. I always understood it in that room, but never at home and certainly not when it came to the exam.
Now that we are technically in a depression, plenty of people in full-time employment are running a little sideline business to make up for pay and tax cuts. In the last week I have bought a fake diamond tennis bracelet from an estate agent friend who is importing them from India. As I showed it off at a ladies lunch, the woman next to me said she has been buying teeth whitening strips from a solicitor in Dublin who is bringing them in from the US and charging €25 a set.
She said she’d heard about the woman at the Residence club where suddenly everyone is going around with these huge white smiles. Meanwhile, another friend went to the trouble of buying a spray tanning machine that she intended to hawk around in the evenings after work, but the enterprise didn’t last. This was due to her unfortunate habit of laughing out loud when she saw the state of her “clients” naked breasts. Why they were spending money on making them brown when it was corrective surgery they needed, was her cruel assessment. Understandably, they weren’t in a hurry to have her back.