I move that the Estimate be referred back for reconsideration. I put down the motion because I wanted to give the Minister an opportunity to deal in a satisfactory way with some of the matters that were discussed on the original Vote. The Minister has failed in every way to do so, and there are a few points, therefore, that I should like to raise on the Vote for Primary Education. The Minister gave us some figures to show that the situation was not so bad, and that there was quite a large number of children between 14 years of age and 16 years of age who were getting a certain amount of education some place. He indicated that something like 50 per cent. of them were doing it. There may be something in the Minister's figures, although in these figures he is taking credit for children who attend, say, a vocational school for one or two days a week, but the Minister's own report for the year 1942-43 makes a very positive statement which we must accept at its face value. It is on page 18 of the report, and is as follows:—
"Caithfear cuimhneamh, ámh, gur beag de scoláirí na mbun-scol a gheibheann caoi ar dhul thar an mbun-scoil le'n a gcuid scolaidheachta. Bíonn ar a bhfurmhór mór mar sin aghaidh a thabhairt ar an saoghal agus tabhairt fé shlighebheathadh de shaghas éigin a bhaint amach dóibh féin nuair a bhíonn ceithre bliadhna déag d'aois slánuighthe aca."
That is, most of them have to go and earn their living when they are 14 years of age, and that gives some indication of the position in regard to primary education in this country. Now, there are two things to which the Minister failed very much to give any kind of a satisfactory answer. One is the position with regard to teachers and their salaries. The last report of the Department of Education, on the primary education side, gives no general information about what progress has been made in any section of the primary schools system. The whole of it is devoted to an idealisation of what the teacher ought to be in his person, in his relation to the child, and in the kind of teacher-child relationship that we ought to try to bring about. The Minister, however, tells us that so far as the teachers are concerned, in relation to their salaries, nothing is going to be done in any branch of our educational system expect on the same basis as in the case of any other class in the community, and that only when the emergency permits. I want to ask the Minister if he would answer this question. Is he not going to regard the teacher in a different light in the future, in view of the work that has to be done by the teacher in the future, than that in which the teacher was regarded in the past? Is the teacher to be left in the position, from the point of view of society, from the point of view of the realisation of what his function is, that we have had in the past? Are we going to realise that the human material we have in this country is the greatest and the richest of our raw materials, the material that has the greatest potentiality?
We see that in Great Britain, now, after all the various experiences and vicissitudes that they have had, and facing the difficulties of commercial and economic life in a new and very difficult world, they are declaring that education is going to be the foundation of their well-being and of their future. If that is so in the case of a people with their experience, their organisation and their capacity to lay their hands on raw material, how much more does it apply to us who have not their economic development, their commercial development, or their manufacturing development: who have limited raw materials and limited resources in the country, and who must realise that it is only by improving in every possible way the education of our people and their capacity to face things that we are going to improve the economic situation in this country at all and, I might even say, the spiritual situation in this country, because if there is anything retarding the spiritual advancement or the idealisation of life in the country, it is the unfortunate economic conditions in which we are drifting and have been drifting for the last ten years, even since the great depression in 1929 and 1930. The British are setting out to train 10,000 teachers a year, and they have got something between 120,000 and 140,000 teachers, so that they will not have to go outside the normal course in the training of the children in that country.
In going into the great improvements in salary scales that have been put into operation in Great Britain I shall take two figures. Take, for instance, before the war a four-year trained graduate teacher in an elementary school. The scale ran from £204 by £12 to £366. That scale is being changed to run from £345 by £15 to £585. Thus the salary at the end of four years will be higher by £141 and the salary at the maximum scale will be higher by £219.
The cost of living has risen much less during the emergency in Great Britain than it has here. Here the teachers are told that they must stay exactly where they are at present and that no new concept of them or of their functions or of the salaries they ought to be entitled to will be entertained by the Government. I want the Minister to say positively whether that is so or not. If that is so, then I think the country and this Parliament ought to know it very definitely. If there is a changed concept on the part of the Government with regard to the teachers and their functions, we ought to know that, too. We ought to know whether the Minister has considered in any way the facts put before him in the debate on the previous Estimate as to the salaries and outgoings of certain teachers for the maintenance of their families, and whether he proposes to make any different approach to the settling of what the scale of a primary teacher should be, I am taking the primary teacher at this particular stage because of the importance of the primary teacher not only in respect to the children who get only primary school-going, but in respect of the primary education system as the basis upon which we must build.
The next point the Minister has been very unsatisfactory about is the position with regard to spoken Irish in the higher classes. If we are serious in restoring a capacity to speak Irish, knowing the difficulties that are there, we cannot afford to take things for granted. The Minister gibingly says that I should get some new points. The point I am raising here is 12 months old. It is the point as to which the Minister's annual report for 1941-42, dealing with the position of Irish in the higher classes, states:—
"Is minic a leigtear i ndearmad ins na h-Árd-Ranga cuid mhaith de'n eolas a bhíonn ag na daltaí ag teacht ó na bun-ranga i n-ionad a ngreim ar an eolas san do láidriughadh, agus é do chur i ndoimhne agus i leithne."
Very often a good part of what is learned in the lower classes is forgotten in the higher classes. The Minister tells me that I ought to drop that point. When he was challenged with that report in a serious and inquiring way last year, he may have slipped into the position of saying that he had not read it. But he ought not to slip into the position of thinking that this House has no interest in the matter referred to there and is not entitled to get more detailed information than the Minister has given us. I think the Minister's suggestion that I should drop this point and get a new point is the greatest condemnation of the position that we could have had from the Minister. We know that there are difficulties, but it is because these difficulties are not discussed and faced here and because we do not get the explanations that we ask for in a constructive and reasonable way, that that report rings so true.
There are some of us who are concerned with the position of the Irish language in the country and in the schools and our great difficulty is that the handling of the situation very often by the Minister both here and on the platform, and in some of the schools by some of his inspectors, is such that it is driving a large section of people into a lack of sympathy with the language. The result is that in one of the Minister's Estimates before us to-day-Estimate No. 49: Science and Art—we are asked to vote £5,000 for Comhdháil Náisiúnta na Gaedhilge. We are being asked to finance out of State funds work that was done with pleasure in a voluntary way by many organisations throughout the country in the past; that is, that by the stubborn and almost ignorant way in which the Minister treats discussion of the question of the language in the schools in this House and elsewhere he is creating a situation that State funds have to be used to try to encourage an interest in the language by other means. We want to know why that report was written and to what extent it stands true to-day. It is a very reasonable request to make. I would ask the Minister, if he does not reply to that, will he at least tell us why he thinks we ask these questions and press these questions.
Anybody looking at the language position in the higher classes and in relation to the higher classes must be concerned with what they see. While that situation is developing, I for one am concerned with the people in Dublin who want some sound primary education through Irish for their children. There is no school in Dublin where it can be got to-day. When a small body of persons brought up their children to speak Irish and wanted to secure that primary schools would be available in the city where they could send their children, the idea was that where there were families bringing up children with pre-school Irish they ought to be able to send them to schools where the work carried on through the medium of Irish would be well done, because you had there the home and the school working together. At the time when there was a demand for that, Scoil Mhuire and Scoil Colmcille were set up, but they were not reserved for children coming from homes where Irish was the language of the home. It was not in the Minister's time, but the Departmental policy at that time was to get uniformity and to have no difference between the schools in the city; that any child in the city was entitled to enter any school it wanted to enter. The result was that children without Irish were allowed into Scoil Mhuire and Scoil Colmcille. Then a preparatory school was set up to act as a kind of sieve through which children would have to pass before they could pass into Scoil Mhuire and Scoil Colmcille.
Very good work was done in Scoil Mhuire and there was a time when Irish was completely the disciplinary language of the school. But in Scoil Mhuire to-day that position has broken down and, as I say, there is not a school in the city where people who have Irish in the homes can send their children to be educated completely through the medium of Irish. Scoil Colmcille hardly exists. I think there are three teachers in it, if one has not gone to England within the last week or two, attracted by the higher salaries there. So that even where the best work has been done for the language in the past deterioration has set in and the discipline in respect of the language has broken down. There may be difficulties in connection with it, but that is all the more reason why special care should be taken and why everything should be done to help to maintain the standard that was achieved to some extent in the past, even if that standard was not as high as some of us expected it to be brought to.
This kind of aiming at a dead level of uniformity of approach to problems in schools that differ very much seems to be leading nowhere, and I suggest the Minister should be frank with us as to what progress is being made in different classes and different schools, what the difficulties are and what the failures are, so that we may know what has to be done. Let us not be living in a fool's paradise, where we are simply planning and squabbling with one another about things, the facts of which are denied to us. I resent being told that we should drop the old points and get to new points. Nearly every old point that I had with regard to the educational system here has had to be dropped, getting up against the stonewall, ignorant approach that the Dáil has been accustomed to from the Minister. I consider that the money we are spending on primary education will be completely wasted in the future unless there is a new approach with regard to the status of the teacher and a new approach in estimating the work that is being done for Irish in the schools.
