The Department of Education Estimate, seen in correct perspective, is of course one of the most important Estimates this House is called on to consider. It is proper that a number of detailed matters should be raised in connection with the administration on this occasion, but it is also good that wider issues should be considered, too. When I look back over the past 12 years, beginning in 1948, it is a striking fact, and one I think we ought to bear in mind with some satisfaction, that the annual appropriation for primary education 12 years ago was something in the order of £5,175,000 and this year, it is £10,478,000. That represents an increase of 104 per cent. In 1948, the annual appropriation was £886,000 for secondary education and today it is £2,629,000, an increase of 210 per cent. In 1948, the appropriation for technical education was £595,000 and today it is £1,478,000, an increase of 143 per cent. The annual appropriation in 1948 for University education was £323,000 and today it is £986,000, an increase of 203 per cent.
Those global figures are satisfactory as evidence of the effort being made to improve the educational facilities of our people but somebody said in the course of this debate, and I think it is profoundly true, that the best test of an educational system is the product, and I am not altogether sure we can all be satisfied that, judged by that test, we are getting value for our money. I often wonder what it is that seems to abridge the quality of the education that we should wish our children to receive. I propose to touch on a few of the matters I think want correction but there is one matter which is peculiarly dear to my heart and which, I think, stands in very urgent need of attention.
The primary claim of children upon us is that they should get a decent education and I am often afraid that certain zealous souls in this country are quite prepared to say that, if needs be, they are prepared to sacrifice the education of a generation for an ulterior end, and that ulterior end is what they are pleased to call the restoration of the Irish language. In my opinion, to sacrifice the education of a generation to that end would be criminally wrong, even if it were necessary, but I think it is doubly tragic that people should proceed along those lines when there ought not to be any conflict at all between the promotion of the Irish language and the promotion of the sound education of the young people of this country.
Unhappily, this is one of these questions that gives rise to a great deal of irrational fury and excitement when anybody dares to touch upon it with a view to reform. Rightly or wrongly, I was reared to love the language. I acquired that love of the language when I was very young and I have never been able to get rid of it. When asked the question—I am not often asked it but I ask myself—why do you want to hear your neighbour speak Irish, why do you want it to survive? —I cannot find any utilitarian answer to that query. The only satisfactory answer I can formulate for my mind is: why should Callas sing, why should Kreisler play the violin, why should Solomons play the piano? Who is any richer for their activities? The answer is that I do not think anybody is, but I think something infinitely precious is preserved because such people as Callas like to sing, because such people as Kreisler like to play the violin, and because such people as Solomons like to play the piano. Some precious element in our lives is preserved and it is on that analogy I feel that a language that is living deserves to survive.
But, mind you, a lot of rational people take the opposite view. Approaching the question from a purely utilitarian point of view, they say how much better it would be if all people in all countries spoke the same language, how much better it would be for mutual understanding, the promotion of trade and commerce, and the exchange of ideas if everybody spoke the same language, and we cannot close our eyes to the fact that there is a great deal of force in that argument.
I reject that contention on two grounds, one, because I do not think it is by bread alone that man must live, and the second, the more practicable ground, that I do not believe we are going to see in our time a universal lingua franca. If you have not got one language for the whole world, you have to face the fact that there are many languages, amongst which ours is one and, for romantic and cultural reasons, I belong to that section of our people who desire to see that language live and to see it one of the spoken languages of our people.
I freely confess that I do not fully understand my own motives or reactions when I attended an international conference as a representative of this country, attended by officers of the Department over which I presided when I was Minister. I do not understand why it gave me peculiar satisfaction to transact some of my business, in the presence of strangers, in the Irish language, but it did. Perhaps, that reaction has no permanent value, but it is present in the hearts of many of us in this country and certainly present in a sufficient number of us to deserve respectful attention.
Therefore, I am greatly distressed by what is borne in upon me by the evidence of my own eyes and ears, that the present methods of imparting Irish in the schools and the element of compulsion associated with those methods are creating in the children attending the schools a kind of prejudice against the language that did not exist at all 35 years ago. It is becoming an unhealthy kind of fashion amongst pupils in primary and secondary schools to say that they do not like Irish. I attribute that distaste to the fact that it is thrust upon them and that they feel a constant sense of coercion in respect of their studies in Irish which they do not feel in respect of the other subjects imparted to them.
I am fully aware that this whole generic expression of "compulsory Irish" is largely a misunderstanding. Children have to learn arithmetic; children have to study English. Every curriculum includes a certain number of subjects which a child is obliged to study, but, the fact remains that you will find children who have a peculiar facility in mathematics or certain subjects and little capacity for linguistics or the study of language, for whom the compulsion to study and pass at a certain standard in Irish constitutes a very serious problem.
We have seen in our own time in such citadels of the classics as Oxford and Cambridge a movement there to remove the compulsory element that did relate to Latin and Greek for their entrance examinations. Greek, I think, ceased to be compulsory many years ago but Latin is now being removed. I have the feeling that one of the most urgent things now requiring to be done if the language revival is to be achieved is to eliminate from our approach to it in the highest possible degree all thought or talk of compulsion.
Very recently, the Minister made a new regulation in regard to national schools. Up to that time, there was in effect a compulsory regulation requiring that children in infant classes be taught through the medium of Irish. I am well aware that in the infant classes very little of an academic kind is taught. I am very well aware that the Department of Education told the teacher: "If you are not competent to teach infants through the medium of Irish, you need not do it", but I am also very well aware that national teachers, being human beings, did not care to proclaim to the Department that they could not teach even infants through the medium of Irish and, of course, the effort was widely made. I am told that that regulation has now been substantially amended and I think that is a good thing.
I want now to suggest to the Minister something which I have not the faintest hope he will adopt, but the fact that people will not do the right thing is no reason why you should cease advocating the right thing. I think the language is dying and will be dead in the Minister's lifetime, if the present procedures are adhered to. The only hope we have of restoring the language as a living language with the vitality to survive and spread is to embark on an entirely new approach to the whole problem. I want to say quite frankly that I believe the best we can hope for, and I think probably it would be the best of all hopes, is that Irish should become in this country the hallmark of higher education to which every child, no matter from what house he came, rich or poor, could aspire and attain through the system of education made available to him.
I have referred to the very substantial increase in the cost of our educational system in the past 12 years but I believe that money is well spent if it is producing results. We could brace ourselves to the task of spending more if we were satisfied it was going to produce the desired results. I believe the ideal is the system obtaining in our wealthy neighbour, Great Britain, where any child, whatever his financial circumstances are, who attains to a certain level of academic distinction, I understand it is 55 per cent., shall be facilitated to acquire secondary and ultimately University education. I doubt if our resources will extend to that at the present time. If they did —I entirely agree with the last speaker —that is the ideal at which we should aim. I think it is the ideal at which we should aim in any case but we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that we can approach it only as our resources will allow.
I believe that an interim measure could be a powerful instrument for the restoration of the language and could at one stroke eliminate the whole talk of compulsion which at present, in my judgment, is destroying all the efforts that have been and are being made. If, instead of presenting Irish as a compulsory affliction on children in schools, it could be presented to them as the passport to higher education, I believe the entire reaction of parents and children would be dramatic. I cannot see that it is impossible to envisage a plan whereby all compulsion in relation to the teaching of Irish would disappear overnight and that thereafter we should prescribe that the child in the primary school who qualified in the ordinary subjects of the curriculum and, in addition, maintained a certain high standard in Irish, should be provided with adequate scholarships to carry him to the secondary school; and then, provided in taking his Leaving Certificate or matriculation examination, he acquired a pass standard, or better, in the required subjects for that examination, plus an honours standard in Irish, he would be provided with a scholarship sufficient to carry him through University to whatever Degree he aspired to, always provided that in addition to the studies appropriate to the Faculty for which he elected, he would also undertake to take Irish as an additional subject and possibly accept the obligation to maintain an honours standard.
I believe that one reform would result in a metamorphosis in the whole approach to Irish. The language, instead of being an affliction on the young, would be presented to them as the passport to higher education and it would result in the Universities turning out, year after year, a considerable number of educated men or women who would have one hallmark in common—they would be fluent Irish speakers. We would create an intellectual aristocracy in the country whose one common hallmark would be their command of their own language.
If I am any judge of our people— and I think I am—fundamentally, there is more esteem in their hearts for learning than there is for wealth or distinction of any other kind. If you once associated in their minds a command of the Irish language with higher education, if that became the mark of the highly educated man or woman, instead of having to thrust the language upon them, you would find them clamouring for better facilities to learn it. In that metamorphosis, the whole problem of the Irish language revival would disappear overnight and we would be back on the lines which saved the language when it was almost dead, the lines of the old Gaelic League of 1906 where, at a time when this country was rent with the most vindictive political issues, you could find on the one platform an old Colonel Blimp who had spent his life possibly in the British Army, some old lady who dearly loved the Queen, with the baker, the butcher, the shopkeeper, the teacher and every other element in our society all drawn together in this extraordinary combination of devotion to the language.
Those of us who participated in that movement as children or as more mature people had a very exciting experience in the unifying effect of the common love of the language and it was reflected, as I have often reminded this House, in the attitude to the language of the University student. When I was at U.C.D., we regularly spent our Saturday afternoons assembled around the bandstand in Stephen's Green for no better reason than that we knew certain students of our own age who knew Irish, wanted to talk it and would frequent the bandstand also. Can you imagine any grade of students at the present time, without some kind of organisation or direction, devoting their Saturday afternoons just to meeting others who wanted to talk Irish? All that appears to me to be dead. I think an effort is being made by Gael Linn to revive a purely voluntary enthusiasm for the language and the promotion of those things that will promote the language. I should like to see the whole revival movement handed over to a kind of movement such as Gael Linn is, and harnessed to it the passionate zeal of people who want to revive the language out of love of it and who are quite indifferent to the baser ends for which many people seem to pay lip service to it at present.
When I first went to an Irish College at Ballingeary and subsequently to Cloghaneely, there was not a single person attending either of these colleges who was there for any other purpose but to learn the language: by the time I gave up going, there was not a single creature there who was not there for the purpose of getting a job. That was a horrible change. Everybody there was looking for a Teastas, a Meán-Teastas or an Árd-Teastas and they had it all measured out that you could get a certain job with a Teastas, that if you wanted to go further, you needed a Meán-Teastas and if you wanted to go the whole way, you had to have an Árd-Teastas. When we went there first, nobody was interested in, or talked of anything else but the language. That was not long ago. Nobody gave a fiddle-de-dee what Teastas he got. He spent his days sitting on the bridge outside Lucey's house with old Dr. Daly trying to get us to say: "Tá mé in san ngort," and Dr. Daly almost put his two fingers down our throats to help us pronounce it correctly. Other distinguished scholars frequented the place and the students were eager to learn all the teachers could tell them. Even when they were outside the class, they wanted to teach something that we wanted to learn. All that is gone because instead of being something which people want to do and for which they are prepared to work for its own sake, they now feel Irish is being forced down their throats.
I know that the Minister can be briefed up to the hilt to demonstrate that nobody is compelled to do anything beyond passing certain examinations in Irish, as they must do in other subjects, but the fact is that people feel that they are so compelled and it is spreading all through our social pattern in such a way that it may be impossible to correct it. But, so long as there is a chance, I propose to impress on the Minister and the Government the urgent desirability of correcting it.
I do not think this element of compulsion is exclusively within the province of the Minister for Education or that it is exclusively a problem of the schools. I think a great many other things contribute to it but they are all ultimately focussed on the school. The thing is so complex that I find myself trying to elucidate it even while on my feet. I think one of the reasons why the children feel this awful resentment of compulsion is not only that they cannot pass the Matriculation examination without presenting Irish and that they will fail if they do not pass in Irish, but the knowledge that, in a wide variety of public appointments, if they aspire to enter the public service or the local authority service, this same restriction is put upon them, and it is true. It is a public scandal in the public service. The extent to which Irish is becoming the instrument of inefficiency is a public scandal.
I remember a case when I was Minister for Agriculture, when I wanted a research professor for the Veterinary College. There were several candidates and the matter was referred to the Appointments Commission. One candidate was a research lecturer in Cambridge; another was a veterinary graduate who had graduated about three months before and who was assistant to a veterinary surgeon somewhere in rural Ireland. On the technical examination conducted by the Appointments Commission, the research graduate from Cambridge sailed out in front, and we counted ourselves lucky that he had applied, because he was the kind of man we wanted. We were delighted when we were told that on the first round he was away out on his own.
There was a second round. The man out in front, a Cambridge graduate but an Irishman, had a competent knowledge of Irish, whatever that may be, but the other chap who had graduated months before was a native speaker. Before I knew where I was, I was presented with the fact that the man who had graduated in general veterinary medicine three months before was to be a professor. I refused to appoint him. At that stage I stuck my heels in and said: "I will not participate in this farce. If I appoint this man professor for the next 40 years he will be labouring away and he simply is not competent to be a professor."
That battle was still going on when I left office. I do not know what happened afterwards. That happened in 1951, and I heard rumblings afterwards in the Department of Agriculture that there was blue murder. I think the post was ultimately re-advertised. That happens regularly in the public service.
I remember another occasion upon which it was a question of a dispensary or some other medical post in Athenry, I think. On the first round, a competent man was chosen but then it was discovered that Athenry was deemed to be in the Breac-Ghaeltacht and, therefore, because the candidate was obliged to undergo some examination in Irish, someone entirely different was chosen because he was deemed to have a knowledge of Irish superior to that of the doctor who had been originally chosen.
It is a public scandal and every rational person knows it is a public scandal. We do not get the best men for the jobs they are required to do. That is the kind of thing that is filtering back into the schools and disrupting the whole movement for the revival of the Irish language. It is souring hundreds and thousands of people whose goodwill could be secured and without whose goodwill we have no prospect of succeeding. The great danger is that, with the passage of each year, the prospect of enduring success becomes less likely than it was the year before.
I heard with amazement and dismay that the modern classic Seadhna, by An tAthair Peadar Ó Laoghaire, is now being issued, not in the Munster Irish in which he wrote it but with what the Department of Education are pleased to call modern spelling. I doubt that the syntax itself has not been changed. I understand it is being issued in the standard Irish which is to be universally employed. It seems to me that people have gone stark staring mad if they take the modern classics and impose upon them what they are pleased to call standard Irish and destroy the real value of these classics in the sacred cause of standardisation.
That seems to be as insane as the proposal that was made to me once by a person I regarded as a relatively rational man—as a highly rational man, in fact. He said that Radio Éireann was making a great mistake in hiring native speakers to speak on the radio, because they discouraged the people who learned Irish in schools, and that Radio Éireann ought to be prohibited from employing native speakers and only permitted to employ people who had learned Irish in Dublin. I cannot understand that. That is what my neighbours in the country used to call "book Irish".
I think we have manipulated ourselves into the position of having invented a language—a kind of Irish Esperanto. I solemnly declare we are in danger of letting Irish die and substituting and imposing on our people something that has no roots at all, in the sacred name of uniformity, to give something that everybody can use. That seems to me to be stark staring mad, because, while there is still a very strong army of us in the country who love the language, I doubt if you will find any substantial body of people at all who are prepared to make any effort whatever to acquire what I can really describe as an Irish Esperanto, which is neither fish, flesh nor good red herring, and is certainly not Irish, whatever else it is.
I am trying to draw a picture for the House to show that there is in existence a growing antipathy to what is popularly called "compulsory Irish". You can rebut that charge that there is compulsory Irish, but if you do so, you will be simply ignoring the existence of something that is very real. What I am trying to do is to analyse what is, in fact, the thing against which people are reacting to the grave detriment of the movement as a whole. I think it is very complex. Part of it is that it is an essential qualification in the provision of technical branches of the public service and the local authority service, and appointment to these services is distorted by this absurd requirement that persons who will never have to use Irish in the ordinary course of their duties must qualify in it and that someone who has a superior knowledge of it is preferred before someone who is technically superior to the Irish speaker.
It also involves a number of other factors. If a secondary teacher wants to qualify for an increment, he must satisfy the Department that he can speak Irish. Whether the standard required for him is that he must satisfy the Department that he can teach subjects through the medium of Irish, or that he can speak Irish with a sufficient fluency to conduct conversations with the other members of the staff, I am not quite sure, but it is a grotesque fraud, and we all know it is a fraud. Many secondary teachers are not equipped to do it, but an abracadabra is gone through and the inspector interviews the teacher and says: "Nach breagh an lá é," to which the teacher replies: "Tá an lá go breagh". The teacher says: "Is fear mé" and not: "Tá me fear." They both agree on that.
The inspector says: "That man speaks Irish" and the difficulty is overcome. But everybody knows it is a fraud. Yet it is in existence. It operates effectively to prevent a school that wants to employ a graduate of a French University to teach French from employing him because he cannot even say "Is breá an lá é" and he will not try. His attitude is: "My business is French and I do not know Irish." That man is not entitled to an increment and they cannot employ him. The same is true of an Italian, a German or a Spaniard or such person required to teach a language in a secondary school. Unless this farce is gone through, those who are native speakers of these languages are excluded from employment.
I think most parents will agree that if they want their children taught French, German, Spanish or Italian as a general rule it is desirable that they should receive instruction from somebody who has it as his native language. If they get started right in a language and get the right accent, the right intonation, the right inflection, they can subsequently go abroad and use their knowledge but if they go off on the wrong foot at the early stages they are gravely embarrassed for the rest of their time.
It seems absurd that Irish should be the reason for preventing a school from employing what they conceive to be the best teacher for a particular subject. The same problem arises in this way. You will get a highly competent Latin teacher or a distinguished Greek scholar or, what is much more common now, a Science master—and they are as scarce as white blackbirds—but he cannot speak Irish. He cannot get any increment. Therefore, he cannot be employed. The school cannot afford to pay him the full salary including the increments and if he cannot get them from the Department he goes to Northern Ireland and works there. All that is contributing to a growing hatred of the language in this country.
It ought to be our concern to prevent the development of any antipathy to the language. It ought to be our concern to help in every way we can those who feel the romantic desire to provide the language as the spoken language amongst our people to realise that dream. I think we are on the wrong road at present. I think if we travel this road much further the language will be dead and we will be left with nothing but the Irish Esperanto which the Department are developing for themselves and when that day comes no rational person will wish to see that Esperanto long survive.
I am convinced that if we go about the problem in the right way we yet can save the day. It would require imagination, courage and money. I believe most people would be glad to see the money spent, even those who do not share our love of the language, if it was spent on the promotion of the language and, incidentally, provided educational opportunities for numbers of our young people who otherwise would have to go without them.
I suppose the Minister will tell us when he is winding up that he is considering the Report of the Commission on Primary Education, that he awaits the report of the Commission on Secondary Education and that he will set up another Commission to report on Higher Education. If the Commission on Higher Education takes as long as the Commission on Primary Education and the Commission on Secondary Education did to prepare their reports the Minister will be a venerable figure in the Opposition long before any of these reports come to be acted upon and will be in a position sternly to rebuke whoever has succeeded him in the meantime for not having done something.
I have a great respect for commissions. They are splendid bodies. They give their time freely and generously to the excogitation of these immense reports. I wonder if I would shock Deputies if I asked how many people ever read the reports. Cross our hearts and hope to die, how many Deputies have sat down and read the Report on Primary Education from cover to cover with which we were furnished some time ago? Very few. When we get the Report on Secondary Education, it will have been most carefully digested in the Department, with cross-references, and the Minister will be given a copy with little tabs sticking out all over it. He may read it, being a conscientious man, but thereafter he may rely on the tabs for the spicy bits on which he will rest his future arguments.
I am prepared to concede that these commissions do good work. They are prepared to hear everybody and they do, I suppose, digest all the material that comes before them. They consist of persons with specialised knowledge who are prepared to make specific recommendations in a form that it might be very difficult for this House to undertake. However, I do not think we must depend on commissions for the broad policy decisions for which ultimately this House must be responsible and it is on these broad policy decisions that the survival of the language largely depends.
I venture to say that if the language revival movement continues to be associated with the concept of compulsion in the minds of our people the language will die—the language I care about, in any case, the living language as spoken by the people who were born to it. I am sure of that. Compulsion will kill it. I am equally sure that even now it could be preserved and in a form that would make it equal to any spoken language in the world in vigour and beauty. It is fairly safe to say that in 10 years' time, if there has been no change, no effort will save it in a form in which it can long survive.
It is certainly true that if the whole educational machinery of the country is concentrated on forcing on the people what I have described as an Irish Esperanto, some shadow of the language will continue to flicker in the backgroud, but it will have no vitality, no staying power and certainly no beauty. As far as I am concerned it will be a matter of complete indifference to me whether or not an Esperanto of that kind survives. It is a matter of very real concern to me that the language I heard my neighbours speak as their native language should continue— the language which Thomas Davis came to our house in Ballaghaderreen to learn 120 years ago. It is very precious to many of us, and I believe to the majority of our people and if it were disassociated from this accursed compulsion I believe it would survive. It would be no mean achievement on the part of the Minister if he could achieve the revolution of divorcing compulsion from the whole context of the language movement.
I want to make a special appeal in that regard. One of the great needs of trade and commerce, and, indeed, of the tourist trade, is that we should turn out of our secondary schools a growing number of pupils who would have some familiarity with the vernacular of other countries. I think we are being greatly hindered in that by not being able to employ competent teachers in these languages through the operation of this rule. I would ask the Minister seriously to consider permitting the employment of teachers to teach languages, especially if they are natives of the countries whose language they teach, without being required to pretend that they are in a position to teach the language through the medium of Irish, or being required to pretend that they have a knowledge of Irish, which, of course, most of them cannot have.
I make the same appeal in regard to teachers of the classics, Greek and Latin, and of science. So far as I know it is extremely difficult for schools to get teachers with the proper qualifications to teach science purely for the simple reason that men and women who have these qualifications can so readily get much more remunerative employment in trade or commerce. It is almost impossible to attract them to the vocation of teaching which, in fact, is largely restricted to people who have a real vocation. If you add to the existing difficulties the obligation on anyone who wishes to follow the vocation of science-teaching that he must also pretend to a knowledge of Irish that he has not got, you make it virtually impossible to get the kind of teachers we ought to have if the stimulation of science teaching in secondary schools, which is so urgently necessary, is to be provided.
In that connection I should like to draw the Minister's attention to a problem which exists. We all know about the difficulty of getting science teachers. Even when you do get them there are relatively few secondary schools in this country which have the resources to provide adequate science laboratories. I do not believe in making excessive comparisons between the situation here and in Great Britain. We have got to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we are not as rich as Great Britain and that they can do things there which we cannot do because we have not got the money. It is no use yearning for the fleshpots of Egypt. We had them and we rejected them by our own volition and if we had to make the choice again I think we would make the same decision. The Six Northern Counties are enjoying them but at a cost, a cost which we are not prepared to pay, so far as I know, and if we are not prepared to pay, there is no use repining for them.
It is surprising what we are able to do with our limited resources. Provided we are able to give the essentials we are better off but we ought to recognise what the essentials are. One of the essentials, in our present set-up, should be better facilities for teaching science in our secondary schools. I think an undergraduate going to the College of Science, who has had no adequate science teaching in secondary school, is labouring under a very heavy handicap and, incidentally, throwing an unreasonable burden on the Science Faculty of the University which is trying to teach such students the elements they should have learned in secondary school. They cannot learn these elements if the secondary school has not got the necessary facilities.
I observe that Messrs. Arthur Guinness, a very public spirited company, have launched a fund to which they have invited mercantile interests to contribute in order to help to endow science laboratories in schools. I suggest to the Minister that he ought consider seriously some plan whereby if the secondary schools apply to that fund or to him for the wherewithal to equip, or indeed if necessary to build, a laboratory, the Minister might consider saying that for every £1 the fund provides he would give another £1, or develop some scheme to make it possible for those schools which have the staff and the pupils desirous of studying science, but which have not got the equipment or accommodation, to have some ready means of acquiring them without delay.
Now I come to another broad topic on which I wish to make an appeal to the authorities, and not for the first time. One Deputy to-day spoke about the difficulty of teaching the whole of Irish history in the short period set aside for it in the school. That is a problem of which I have no experience but whatever history is taught in the schools, the Minister has a very solemn obligation, which I do not think is being discharged at present, of revising the text books used in our schools for teaching history. This country has a long and chequered history. So have most other countries in the world.
We have had periods of persecution and we have had periods of war and they belong to far-off distant days. They have their place in history but it fills me with horror to read in history books long stories of religious persecution clearly designed to foment hatred and ill-will between our people and the British people. You would really imagine from these documents that the British zealots were burning and hanging our people because they were Irish Catholics. Nothing of the kind was the fact. They were burning our people because they were Roman Catholics and, when they were finished burning Roman Catholics here, they bustled home and started burning Roman Catholics at home and, if the truth were told, they burned more Roman Catholics at home than they did in Ireland.
If you investigate the matter far enough you will find that the Roman Catholics when they got around to it burned a few Protestants too. The sad part is that these tragic details of centuries ago should be presented to the children in our schools as evidence of a peculiar desire on the part of the ancient enemy to persecute our people because they were Irish Catholics. These incidents were incidents in a period of religious enthusiasm of a kind to which I do not suppose anyone would subscribe in this modern day. We do not believe now in burning people who are heretics but there was a time when we all believed in it. It is more than folly; it is criminal to present that kind of history for the purpose of fomenting hatred between ourselves and the British people. It is wrong and it is evil to use the story of our country in its relations with Great Britain for the purpose of reviving ancient hatred. By the mercy of God's Providence, we have passed through that period and these hatreds are much better allowed to die.
I always think of the lines of Tom Kettle who was called upon to forget the past and who replied that he kept the past for pride but he had not the slightest intention of forgetting anybody, the humblest creature that laid down his life for this country, that he remembered them not for the purpose of hating those who were opposed to them but for the purpose of taking pride in the sacrifice they made of their lives.
I wish there were more of that in the history text books that are being used in the schools. The Minister for Education has an obligation to look at all these text books and where in his judgment they are designed more to foment hatred and misunderstanding than to portray the glories of our past, he should direct the attention of the educational authorities responsible for these publications to the fact that their duty is to record history and not to use the complex event of history for the purpose of engendering hatred and resentment in this generation against people with whom we ought to learn to live in good neighbourly relations.
When one sees young fellows going out and being shot, when one sees young fellows engaging in that sort of daft activity that one sees them engaging in at present, nothing is more certain than that they have allowed themselves, in the vast majority of cases, to be misled into this kind of activity as a result of the education they have received in the schools to which they have gone where they were taught that it was their duty to hate and where they were exhorted to believe that there was something admirable and desirable in reacting today to the distressing events of 300 years ago, and their simple enthusiasm, which one cannot but in some degree admire, is very often deflected by evilly-intentioned persons to a very bad end. If they were better informed from the history books from which they learn the story of the past these young men would not be so susceptible to misdirection and misguidance as they now are, with disastrous results for themselves and for the nation as a whole.
There are only two details with which I wish to deal. There is £13,370 provided in this Vote for the National Gallery, but My Fair Lady is providing a great deal more. I always used to be ashamed of my life when I was Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee when reading in the annual Vote the appropriation for the National Gallery to acquire pictures, which was some derisory sum. They used in fact to save it up from one year to the next: “Purchase and Repair of Picture: Grant-in-aid Subhead B, £2,500.” You would want to save that for about 20 years before you would get the price of one picture worth hanging on the walls of the National Gallery. However, that problem has been largely resolved by My Fair Lady who is now pouring a golden flood into the coffers of our National Gallery which I assume will be used with prudence and discrimination in acquiring suitable pictures for display there.
The present position is that the National Gallery has nowhere to display these pictures, but it is much worse than that. The cellars of the National Gallery are full of pictures and we hope there is an exhaustive list of them. That itself is very doubtful because to go through them and find out what they are and prepare an inventory of them is practically impossible.
I want to warn the House that, in my judgment, the situation in the National Gallery is such that precious canvases may suffer irreparable damage because there is no place to hang them; there is no place to store them properly and they are simply stacked in the cellar. I think they are being stacked with all the care and anxiety that can be shown by the staff available in the National Gallery but there is no room to handle them properly.
Surely the Minister ought to be able to complement in some degree this golden flood from My Fair Lady by, at least, envisaging the provision of some extension of the Gallery, which I believe is possible, where the new acquisitions could be shown and the existing stock could be properly stored if it is not possible to display it all at the same time. I am not asking that provision should be made to display all the pictures at the same time. Few National Galleries in the world are in a position to do that, but the pictures that are not on display ought to be properly accommodated for their safe-keeping so that in due course they can be taken out in rotation and put on display. I would urge that strongly upon the Minister, because it would be a grotesque reflection on this country if, having fallen in for this fortune of bequests, we have the money to acquire paintings but no room in which to show them.
The last detail to which I wish to refer is a phrase employed by the Minister in the course of his speech. It does not appear in the Irish version of the speech, I am happy to say. In-the Irish version the Minister says:—
An titim i líon na leanaí ins na scoileanna saothair go ndearnadh tagairt di le roinnt bhlian anuas ...
He says on page 13 of the English translation:—
The downward trend in the numbers detained in industrial schools, which was referred to in previous years, continues.
Is that an appropriate phrase: "detained in industrial schools"? It is a mistake to think that industrial schools are places of incarceration. They are very largely homes for orphan children and are looked upon as such. They are not to be associated in the mind of the people with reformatories and so forth. It is true that some children are referred to industrial schools who get out of control at home but the majority of the children in industrial schools with whom I am familiar are, in fact, orphans who, if they had not an industrial school to go to, would have nowhere to go. They look upon it as their home.
I make no great consequence of this phrase because I know that the Minister realises as well as I do the kind of paternal service these schools provide for many of the children committed to their care. I thought the word "detain" grated a little in this context. I hope the Minister will agree with me that, while theoretically it may be correct, in fact, it is scarcely appropriate to describe the relationship that exists between these schools and the majority of the children in them.
I cannot conclude without asking the Minister to give us some account of what he has done for what I used to call Summerhill and which is now Marlboro' House, a place of detention. I cannot find any reference to that in his speech at all.
