When I find a Deputy taking three and a half hours to say what he has to say, experience has taught me that he has not much of value to say. You cannot spend three and a half hours saying something that is worth listening to. I do not want to criticise anyone for speaking for three and a half hours because it is one of the proudest boasts of this House that a Deputy can speak as long as he likes and there will be occasions when filibustering will be necessary to defend some important fundamental right. You cannot say anything of substantial value if it takes you three and a half hours to say it.
I want to say to Deputy Corish now that it takes moral courage to deal as honestly as he has dealt with the question of corporal punishment, particularly after the tripe he listened to from Deputy Dr. Browne. I agree with Deputy Corish. I think Deputy Browne's talk made more impression on Deputy Corish than it made on me but whatever consolation it means to Deputy Corish, when the band begins to play and the old ladies and the whiskered gentlemen start telling him that he is a brutal sadist, I should like him to know that I wish to be in his company. But that will not protect him from the gentleman with the whisker or the lady in the low shoes and the tweed skirt and the man's hat—in fact, from the women who look like men and the men who look like women.
I should like the Minister to tell us, at some stage of these proceedings, how the surplus of teachers that existed ten years ago has suddenly turned into an acute scarcity. I remember helping to legislate here a most elaborate scheme of setting up diocesan registers so that when teachers had become surplus, instead of relinquishing their posts, they continued in them but their names were put upon a register. As soon as a vacancy became available they were transferred from the school where they were supernumerary into a school where a vacancy had occurred. Now suddenly we have discovered there is an acute shortage of teachers. Is there any reason for that? How did it come to pass so quickly?
The next matter I want to refer to is the question of Irish. It is a legitimate view in this country that the Irish language should be allowed peacefully to die. It is a view I do not share. I take the view that it is desirable to preserve the language, but I do not believe that there is any use in saying that if you are not prepared to suggest a means of doing it.
I do not agree with the present policy. I think that, judged by every available test, it is a bad policy. The principal test is that it has notoriously failed. I adumbrated a policy 11 years ago, in the discussion on this Estimate in 1947, which, if adopted then, I believe would have already yielded very abundant results. I am going to adumbrate it again to-day.
Before I come—to that I want to make some specific comments on the policy as at present operated. I want to protest in solemn form against the outrage of addressing infant children, entering the national school for the first time, in a language which is not the vernacular of their homes. At the present time, infant children going to school are addressed in class and instructed, in so far as they are instructed, through the medium of Irish, numbers of them never having heard a word of Irish before in their lives.
Now it is a difficult thing for a small child to go to school for the first time in his life, without finding himself in a situation in which he is addressed for the first time in a language not one syllable of which he understands. That seems to me so manifest an outrage that no rational person would defend it. Yet it is the widespread practice in the national schools of this country and it ought to stop. It ought to be provided that infant children going to school for the first time shall be addressed by their teachers in the vernacular of their home. That means that it is just as important that children born and reared in the Fíor-Ghaeltacht be addressed in Irish when they go to school, as it is that children born in the Galltacht, where English is the vernacular of the homes, be addressed in English. That is the first observetion I want to make.
My second observation is that it is an outrage to try to teach children the other subjects of the curriculum through the medium of Irish. In 90 per cent. of cases in the schools of this country, either the teacher or the children, and frequently both, are quite incompetent to teach or learn anything through the medium of Irish.
I remember the Taoiseach saying on one occasion here that with his own knowledge of Irish he would not dream of attempting to teach anyone through the medium of Irish. The Taoiseach is not very fluent himself, but he is a great deal more fluent than half the national school teachers of this country. Whatever chance a teacher with an imperfect knowledge of the language has of instructing those who are fluent in it, it is worse when you are confronted with a situation where neither the teacher nor the pupil is fluent in the language. It is a grotesque outrage to perpetuate a system in which that language, in which neither teacher nor pupil is fluent, is the medium through which the instruction is given in everything else.
I know I shall be told that there are regulations which lay down that unless both teacher and pupil are fluent the teacher should not use the language as a medium of instruction. We all know that is "my eye and Betty Martin." The teacher then does not get preferment and does not get good reports from the inspector. In fact, the system presses continually towards the use of Irish as the medium through which to teach a subject, but neither pupils nor teachers are qualified for the procedure.
The real truth is that the curse of the revival of Irish is the compulsion associated with it. It has begun to stink in the nostrils of those who once loved it. I myself have seen it operated in the Civil Service, where relatively incompetent people were preferred over highly competent candidates, because the relatively incompetent claimed and persuaded the examiners that they were relatively fluent in Irish, whereas the highly competent candidates did not get as high marks in that particular subject.
I remember distinctly, when I was Minister for Agriculture, trying to appoint a veterinarian, who required to be of the highest standard, for a teaching position, and I was fortunate to find amongst the candidates a man who had been doing research work in Cambridge and who was in every way highly qualified for the job. Of course, when he went to the Appointments Commissioners, he came out first by a street, in the technical examination. Then I was informed there was another examination pending in Irish. By the time that examination was completed, I was presented with a first year graduate, a boy who had just come out of the Veterinary College. I refused to appoint him and I left office refusing to appoint him.
I believe there was an almighty row afterwards in which the Government was involved; there was "meela murder", but as long as I was there he was not appointed and it was the subject of a great deal of comment that I did not take part in what would have been a disgusting fraud. It was quite wrong that Irish should be brought into the matter at all. There was not the remotest possibility of his ever having to use Irish in his work. He would never come in contact with a single creature who would discuss his work with him in Irish. The man who got it, while he was fluent in the vernacular—I think he was a native speaker—would have been wholly unable to use the language for the purpose of instruction in the particular branch of veterinary science which he was called upon to teach.
That is one single instance of the detestable scandal in which people who seek technical appointments are continually being ousted by inferior candidates who succeed in outstripping them in their facility in spoken and written Irish. It is that element of fraud and compulsion surrounding the whole language movement which has reduced Irish to the deplorable state in which it now is.
I have said before in this House —I do not think it is any harm to say it again—that I distinctly remember a time when many of us in University College, Dublin, used to adjourn on a Saturday night to the bandstand in St. Stephen's Green for the opportunity of meeting those who spoke Irish, just for the joy of hearing it spoken. I declare now that to hear people talking Irish in Dublin one is inclined to ask oneself what are they after, what are they up to or in whose eye they are trying to put a finger now. If you meet two civil servants talking Irish in Government Buildings it is a pretty good indication that there is a job on.
Everybody knows what I am saying is true. It is time, long past time, when we should ask ourselves what requires to be done. I am not prepared to content myself with describing these things as Deputy Dr. Browne did and then go on to say that something else should be done. I believe in the language. I should like to see it revived. I believe it can be done even at this late hour. It would have been much better done ten years ago.
The first thing to do is to abolish all compulsion with regard to the Irish language and then provide that Irish be made a passport to higher education in this country. Any child going to the national school who is prepared to show appropriate diligence within his own limited sphere, attains to a certain degree of proficiency and when he reaches his passing out diploma from the national school should be entitled to present himself for a scholarship examination in Irish written and oral. If by burning his modest quota of midnight oil, he can reach an honest standard in such an examination he should become entitled to a scholarship to the secondary school.
We should provide a special examination of honours standard with a proviso that those who took it and passed it would receive a scholarship to the university. In the university they should be allowed to follow any faculty they choose, architecture, medicine, law or whatever they wanted to do, always provided that at the end of each academic year they would submit themselves for an examination of a high honours standard in Irish, written and spoken. Those who did not choose to keep up that standard would lose their scholarships. The standard should not be in excess of the child, the youth or the adolescent but should be graded according to their reasonable capacity. It would mean that they would have to give special attention to Irish, written and oral.
If that scheme operated for ten years you would have coming out of the universities and colleges every year a highly educated section of the community who would have one common denominator. Some would be architects, doctors or lawyers and some would belong to the other learned professions. All would have this in common—they would speak Irish fluently. If some particular quality becomes associated in the mind of our people with higher learning, nothing is looked to with greater admiration or longing than that particular quality.
If Irish became synonomous in our society with superior education and learning that would be of infinitely more value to the revival of Irish than any compulsion which the genius of the Department or anybody else can ever think of. It would also restore Irish to the honourable place once held in making the Irish language a badge of distinction instead of a badge of fraud which it is now commonly held to be. I should like to see its dignity and its beauty restored. That is one way to do it. In our lifetime we could see Irish restored. At the same time, we could open the door to higher education, to the élite of our young people whose election would be determined, not by birth, wealth or background, but by their own capacity to do well according to their own standard at each stage of their educational life.
I remember adumbrating that scheme once from a lorry in York Street which is not very far from this House. As I looked down on the children in York Street it struck me that there was something wrong with a society which seemed to say to these children that in no possible circumstances would they ever attain to the advantages which I, through no merit of my own, can enjoy. It struck me that here was a means of saying to all of them, the poorest and the simplest as well as the most sophisticated in the land, that it is now open to them all, on the basis of absolute equality, to secure each one for himself primary, secondary and higher education right up from the infant class to the doctorate in philosophy. That thus we repudiate the absurdity that all men are born equal but affirm anew in every generation that all children born into our society, boys and girls, will have equal opportunity, so that the gifts given by God to all of us will, in this country, have ample scope for development.
I do not think it is an unreasonable price to ask the beneficiaries of such a scheme to pay that they should preserve, the language for the succeeding generation. It is a price they are very glad to pay and it is a very simple and satisfactory criterion to apply to children who aspire to higher education and, though it is by no means an infallible test, it is not a bad guide whereby to pick out the children who will benefit from secondary and university education.
Nothing can be more illusory than to imagine that it is a desirable thing to thrust on every child in our community or any other community secondary and/or university education. Many of them would be much better without either. I heard some Deputy to-day talking about Ballylinan. I could not help thinking of Mr. Grace, who left Ballylinan when he was 13 or 14 years of age to go to Buenos Aires. His grandchildren now have the Grace Line, the Grace Bank, the Grace Import and Export Company and dominate the trade of South America. Very possibly, if Mr. Grace had stayed at home and attended a secondary school, he would never have got cracking in Buenos Aires.
It is very difficult to know what kind of education can best help each individual child. Probably, the children's parents, in consultation with their teachers, are the best judges. The State is not equipped to carry out an accurate judgment of that kind. But here is one useful test which would sort out at least the children who wanted to try and it is fairly true to say that children who yearn for higher education are certainly within the category of those who ought to get it.
That may seem a simple device for the revival of the Irish language. I have not the slightest doubt that it is the only hope of preventing the language dying in our time and, by dying, I mean ceasing to be the vernacular of any sufficient number of people to allow it to develop as a living language. I am looking at an old colleague from Donegal and he and I know the extent to which the Fíor-Ghaeltacht in Donegal has shrunk in the last 25 years. The same is true of Mayo.
