Aindre Reece-Sheerin: Five things I would change about Guernsey

Friday 17 August 2018

Aindre Reece-Sheerin is both a passionate advocate of accessibility and inclusion, as well as a music teacher with a charitable streak.

He puts on charity shows each year supporting local good causes, and is married to local songstress Kim Reece-Sheerin, who joins him in many performances. We caught up with Aindre to find out what five things he would change about Guernsey.

1: Utilise our waste and create electricity.

"We will almost all, via social media, have seen the 'rivers of waste' pouring into the seas and oceans and the untold damage this is doing not just to wildlife but the effect it is having on our food chain. So, firstly, I’d find a way to use a natural resource which we dump currently into our food chain. Let’s find a way to pump our pee and poo - and that could include excess animal waste possibly as well - into a giant vat. Let’s ferment it and create gas to heat turbines creating electricity. Yes, there will be a cost to this but it will not be a finite resource and, equally importantly, it will clean up our sea beds and not allow us to use sun and tides and or, somewhere else to deal with our effluent. The Bailiwick, all would agree, is beautiful - let’s enhance and protect that for future generations."

2: Work closer with Jersey.

"Give much more serious consideration to partnership working with the sister island of Jersey. Money is much scarcer, so each jurisdiction could pool monies and one island have a specialism in cardiac treatment and diagnosis and the other perhaps one in paediatrics or disease screenings (obviously not an exhaustive list). There will be much we could share in terms of both knowledge and resource to help one another. That might even include waste management solutions like suggested in my first thing to change."

3: Disability inclusion.

"As some will know, disability Inclusion is something I am very passionate about. In my work as an Equalities and Change Management Trainer, I believe, that real inclusion starts in the home and then within the education system. We can educate out ignorance. A child has no concept of the ‘F word'. Child A hears it from another child, who heard it from perhaps an older child who in turn may well have heard it in the home. So too, does negative discrimination begin this way. I would like to see an end to educational apartheid in our schools’ system. I offer you one concept, accessibility discriminates against no-one.”

4: Create an environment where children connect with the world not just devices.

"Every five-year-old, will know something about ‘connectivity’ as more and more are being handed tablets or phones as an ‘essential’ in the 21 century. This is a double-edged sword for me. I believe a child’s early years should be just that, as a child. Allowing them to be bored occasionally stimulates the brain to discover new things. How many of us remember sitting inside when it was raining and we put sheets over chairs and created an underground camp or very own table mountain etc. Perhaps you used the tin with a string or used the Blue Peter latest to create your own space ship etc. So connectivity, is not always about devices and fastest internet speed. Although it is vital we are 21^stC -eady for the global market, we need first and foremost to be able to connect with ourselves."

5: Better care for older citizens.

Aindre is passionate about the work he does with music for older residents and wondered if this will change in the future.

"Caring for our elder citizens and our often unpaid carers. I facilitate my music as therapy sessions at least once every week here in the Bailiwick. songs, poems and nursery rhymes, that believe it or not, I am not actually old enough to have learned when they came about. Yet, if I said to a majority of people over forty, ‘… it’s a long way to …’ or '… my old man said …’, they would, with relative ease, be able to fill in the blanks. I will leave you with one thought, what will be sung to our grandchildren in their dotage."