Seana McConville volunteers at smaller sessions in the club that are adapted for children like her son who has additional needs.
She said if he was going into childcare over the summer she would have to pay for one-to-one support for him.
She said families like hers were “forgotten about”.
“I’m a full-time worker and every other year I would have to work term time, which is less money throughout the year in order to be able to take off the summer,” she said.
“But that’s not good for me or my son, because we are then tied to just being in the house.
“I miss the social side of being at work and the rest of the year you can struggle because your wages are less.”
School uniforms and PE kits
Ulster University surveyed 855 parents.
The research suggested 37% of parents reduced spending on sports and 35% said their child had missed out because they could not afford it.
It also found 30% of parents were unable to afford clothing and equipment needed for sports.
Healthcare Science lecturer at Ulster University, Maria O’Kane, said at this time of the year researchers heard a lot about the cost of school uniforms and PE kits as families were beginning to budget for them ahead of the new school year.
“Maybe it comes at the sacrifice of a family holiday or a family day out,” she said.
“We heard in the interviews even going for an ice-cream is a luxury they just couldn’t afford any more.”
The Clann Éireann summer scheme runs for two weeks and this year 180 children are attending.
Avoureen Coleman has worked at the club for 30 years and is a classroom assistant at the local school.
She said it was a lifeline for many parents.
“We know people are trying to cut corners on food, clothes, for basic toiletries, that’s the way it’s going, like back in your mummy’s day nearly,” she told BBC News NI.
Summer anxiety
Single mum Nicola Fagan said she felt many parents were “left in limbo” over the summer.
“Not everyone has grandparents or family who are going to cater to your needs,” she said.
She works overtime to save for the summer months and her children’s many activities.
“I try my best to make ends meet so they can get to everything they want to do and their friends are involved in,” she said.
“It’s a whole lot of pressure because you don’t want them missing out on anything that everybody else is doing.
“I come last all the time and I wouldn’t have it any other way, because you aren’t going to have your kids for a very long time when they are small so as long as they are happy I can do without for another couple of years.”
She said the summer scheme had given her children opportunities and day trips that they would otherwise not have had.
“It would have been an anxiety for me over how much it would be and what you are going to have to cut back on,” she said.
“Or are you going to be caught out in a week’s time thinking, ‘I shouldn’t have spent that money because I need diesel in the car or extra electric because Finnian hasn’t turned off his PlayStation overnight?’
“It’s stuff like that you need to think about when it comes to money and cost of living.”
Natalie Geoghegan’s children attend the summer scheme
Mum-of-six Natalie Geoghegan said the sharing of Gaelic kits at Clann Éireann helps keep costs down.
“With football, you need the latest kit, but with this gear, it’s not the latest – one from four to five years ago is just the same, you’ve got the badge and you’re part of the group,” she said.
For her family, holidays are a luxury that do not happen every year.
“You like to try and get away because life is hard and you like to get away in the summer, but you have to cut back in general on things like clothes and [use] hand me-downs,” she said.
“When they’re in school all year, there’s a routine. I’m lucky I’m at home – I’m not working – but for me to entertain them in the house and run the house, it’s mundane for them for me to try and do everything.”
While Clann Éireann is proving to be an affordable option for these parents, Maria O’Kane said summer schemes do not always suit working families as the hours can be quite short and they can be expensive.
“That puts another pressure on families if their child is expected to attend,” she added.
The survey also suggested that more limited disposable income would mean siblings had different opportunities.
That is the case for Claire King who said: “From my older child to my younger child, he doesn’t get as many days to soft play areas or trips to the zoo, things like that.
“Between camps, feeding them, childcare costs – they’ve all gone up in prices, so it is definitely more expensive than it has been in the past.”
Big numbers often get thrown around in the aftermath of legal battles, as judges hand down judgements—or attorneys arrange settlement amounts—in the tens, or hundreds, of millions of dollars. Still, even jaded legal observers can occasionally run into a genuinely daunting number while parsing this stuff. Like, say, the $1.5 billion settlement that AI company Anthropic has agreed to pay in the ongoing class-action suit against it, launched by authors who said the company infringed on their copyrighted works by feeding them as training data to its “AI assistant” Claude. Sure, parts of that sum (calculated at $3,000 per work for a staggering number of works, and with its first $300 million installment due just five days after the settlement is approved) might potentially vanish in a puff of future bankruptcy. But it’s still the “largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history,” according to legal documents from the authors’ attorneys.
That being said, the win here on the wider AI front is quite a bit less clear than “hand our clients the annual estimated GDP of Grenada” might suggest. Yes, U.S. District Judge William Alsup set the stage for Anthropic to eat that massive price tag by ruling that the company clearly violated copyright agreements via how it acquired the books it fed into its own personal woodchipper. (I.e., downloading pirated datasets of millions of books that had been floating around the internet.) And, yes, the settlement will require Anthropic to destroy those “shadow library” datasets in its possession. (But notably, with no actual changes to the Claude large language model itself.) Most critically, though, back in June, Alsup also ruled that “reproducing purchased-and-scanned books to train AI” falls under fair use, calling the case “exceedingly transformative” as a justification for the designation.
As such, both sides in the fight issued statements claiming a form of victory today, with the authors’ side focusing mostly on the massive size of the settlement amount. Anthropic, meanwhile—which has been backed in the past with more than $6 billion in contributions from Amazon and Google—focused its statements on the legal precedent it achieved in the case: “In June, the District Court issued a landmark ruling on AI development and copyright law, finding that Anthropic’s approach to training AI models constitutes fair use. Today’s settlement, if approved, will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims.” What this likely means is that AI companies aren’t going to slow down—especially with, say, a $1.5 billion mortgage suddenly hanging over their heads—but simply become a lot more choosy about how they get their training data.
At 84, veteran mogul John Malone is still a power broker, hinting at “further consolidation in the media industry” following a recent sit down with David Ellison. Should we be on the lookout for a Warner–Paramount merger? Meanwhile in Vegas, the Sphere’s $100 million Wizard of Oz reimagining leans on AI to expand the visuals and even slip in cameos of David Zaslav and James Dolan. The Directors Guild did not take kindly to the stunt. Partners in Banter Kim Masters and Matt Belloni pull back the curtain on the Sphere’s Emerald City sideshow.
Plus, Masters speaks with Runway co-founder Cristóbal Valenzuela about the role of artificial intelligence in Hollywood. The Chilean-born developer acknowledges that AI may lead to some job losses, but he argues it will ultimately benefit filmmakers. He explains why studios including Lionsgate, Netflix, and Disney are already using Runway’s tools. Plus, he compares the current backlash against AI to the upheaval that followed the introduction of sound in film.
