I am looking forward like the last speaker to the Minister's next Estimate in a few months' time. In connection with this Estimate, there is an unreal situation. We are trying to analyse proposals made by the Minister and to find out how the money he is asking for is to be spent, notwithstanding the fact that three-fourths of that money has been spent already, and the Minister's proposals and any of the brilliant proposals he gets from all sides of the House must be telescoped into a new period.
It is a boring truism that the Minister's Department is the most important Department in the State. The prospects we have of making this country a prosperous and progressive country, in which our children will grow up in security, really depend on what is done by the Minister and his successor, by the officers of his Department, and by those engaged in education, that is, accepting the proposition that we want every child to have full education to match his ability.
No Department is subject to such great criticism as the Department of Education. However, the Minister can be comforted by the fact that this happens everywhere in the world. Educational authorities everywhere are the subject of vociferous and sustained attack. Everywhere in Ireland there is a preponderance of amateur educationists. Even the Labour Party have decided they have proposals to make the like of which have never been made before. I am sure that in the benches behind him, the Minister will find varied views about what should be done for education. Furthermore, I do not think I am speaking completely for my Party when I urge the things I think should be done.
The Minister's job and that of his successor is to get a balanced view of education generally. It is almost asking too much because in this country we all have our prejudices and we all ride hobbyhorses. Nevertheless, the great variety of criticisms against which the system has to sustain itself leads me to think now, in my more advanced years, that probably the Irish system is not too bad, that it has served us pretty well. Bearing in mind our history, the peculiar circumstances of the country, the difficulties of transition, and the problem of imposing new ideals on our people two generations ago, on the whole, we have not done badly. That is the line we should take. We should not always cry stinking fish.
Some of the words the Minister has used in the past and even today show that he has tended to take a pretty long and steady look at the whole situation. It is a very complex picture. One thing we can all acknowledge is that an almost unpayable debt is owed by this country to the religious orders who have engaged in teaching here for 100 years. I do not refer particularly to such things as technical ability or educational qualifications but idealism and nationalism and, of course, before all of these things, belief in the word of God. What these men and women have done for this country will never be properly rewarded in this world.
Regarding the others, the great army of teachers who are non-religious, they too, have made a very considerable contribution and like teachers in most other parts of the world, they are rightly dissatisfied with the way in which society has rewarded them. Although the matter here can be said to be sub judice, may I say I think we should resolve it? I hope we will not obey the world pattern but that we will pay our teachers a reasonable reward for the work they do and that we will not make them the unpaid servants of the people they are in most other countries.
The Minister has recently expressed decisive views about the development of post-primary education. What he envisages is that this will give a choice to the secondary school student to move into advanced technological or technical training, a vocational type of education, or to go to the university and to study the humanities. There is evidence in his speech that there has been a very considerable public interest in this. What the evidence is of that I am not as sure as the Minister seems to be, but those of us who have participated in the work of conducting vocational education are very interested in the Minister's proposals which, however, would seem to be in the realms of paper planning at the moment.
Some much more concrete proposal will have to be devised before we can judge whether the Minister's plan will work or not. What the Minister proposes to do can be reasonably well done in the areas of fair concentrations of population, but there are many areas in the country where those facilities will not be in existence. I suppose it is the currently accepted version of education as we now understand it.
The Minister says that what has happened is something like the man who jumped on a horse and rode away furiously in several directions. I propose to get on the horse of vocational education and ride off steadily in one direction. Of course vocational education is not now, and has not been for years, what Deputies described here as the poor man's education. A completely different context has surrounded it: it is now akin, at lower level, to university education, particularly in the cities.
It is very essential that we make sure that these systems of education are fitted properly for the problems that the country now has to face. Our great lack has been advanced technical education. Now, under developments in industry and agriculture, the great growth of new techniques requires us to have facilities ready to do this work, and the money we spend on this will be the most sensibly spent money of all the Minister's Department controls.
The teaching of skills, and more than skills, is an essential part of the late 1960s. My experience is of the scheme in Cork city where we have 4,000 pupils taking vocational education, 200 teachers and five schools, and we have not got enough. The most important schools are those that teach technical subjects and commercial practices, but in a city like Cork, which is now attracting to a very large degree the main concentration of heavy industry in the country, it means a very considerable amount of extra work. Almost every month new courses are being provided by the vocational education committee for the city and the surrounding areas, courses of the type that were unheard of even 15 years ago, most advanced courses.
In the committee, we have to deal with this in a breathless manner. We are always trying to catch up with the job, and great credit is due to the officers of that committee who have tried to do their best to keep abreast of current trends and demands with insufficient premises, with insufficient staffs to meet this great new development, this great new encroachment of students. We have had to buy or hire new premises, to have them adjusted, in the most unsatisfactory manner, for want of a better phrase, and a lot of our training has been carried out in hole and corner circumstances.
It is quite obvious to us in Cork that this is a major and essential development, requiring a much larger school of technical education, a technical college, in fact. The Minister's Department is aware of the demands and I believe if the impetus of this kind of education in a place like Cork is to go ahead, great investment will be needed to provide the young people of that area with a place wherein to compete efficiently with the present unsatisfactory methods of teaching, methods which have had to be adopted because of the unsatisfactory nature of the buildings in which the teaching is being conducted.
We have another problem, that the demand is now greater than the supply of accommodation, and we are having trouble in recruiting the very advanced type of teachers we require for extremely advanced technological subjects. All this is something we cannot afford to talk about or look at: we have to get on and do it, and I would urge strongly on the Minister to ensure that this great burden being placed on this generation in the south is met at least to the extent of his proposals for Dublin. It is only reasonable we should expect that would be done. The teaching that is being done, the kind of students being turned out in very advanced subjects, will all add up to something of the utmost importance in the future.
I was glad to hear the Minister refer today to the success, which gratified us all, of the international apprentices' competition held in this country last July. However, I think for the sake of kind public relations, the Minister might have referred to the efforts made in Cork during the three days of the competition. I know one man who did not get to bed for 48 hours, he had so much to do during that period.
I want to move on now to ordinary secondary teaching. I wonder if there is enough consultation with those now involved in the educational machine, the teachers, to put it very simply? The decision of the Department last year to revise the Leaving Certificate mathematics course does seem to have taken the teaching profession by surprise. However desirable a development the decision itself was, I do not think it was good enough to make a decision of that kind on paper, without consultation with those who had to implement such a set of proposals. The Department were compelled, by reason of the fact that the teaching establishment were not either of a mind or ready to proceed with this in the manner the Department wanted them to proceed, to postpone it.
It is unreasonable to announce in April proposals to introduce such a revision in September. Most of the people in the teaching profession are reasonable, efficient and loyal, and I think consultation with them is quite important. Obviously, the Department must have considered this matter for quite a long time and I do not see why the teachers were not consulted sooner. There were certain difficulties in connection with the work proposed in regard to which consultation would appear to have been necessary. None of that consultation took place and the notice was really unbelievable. Obviously, the Department would have to postpone the proposal. Before substantial and probably very well worthwhile changes are made in curricula, the utmost consultation should take place with all involved in the teaching machine.
I do not know what I can say about the language that has not been already said but this generation has no right to diminish the effort to restore the Irish language. We may decide to change the emphasis or the method of teaching but we cannot diminish the energy being put into it. I shall be quite interested in Doctor Ó Brolchain's survey. It is quite a necessary investigation and the people will await the results of his examination of the state of the language with great interest. There is grave need to ensure that every one of our children, particularly those leaving secondary and vocational schools, will have at least one continental language. We must keep on saying that. The fact that English is rather overpowering in the world today does not prevent us recognising that a knowledge of French, German or Italian is an enormous asset for the future and the effort we must make to extend our influence and interests.
I believe there should not be a means test for scholarships which should be an encouragement to the brilliant child. If the child is good enough to obtain such recognition of exceptional merit, that recognition should not be withheld, no matter what the circumstances of its parents are. There are no very rich or very poor in the country now and no barrier should exist to the recognition of brilliant children.
The figures for the growth of secondary education given by the Minister are satisfactory but the provision of schools is a very great burden on those who conduct them. Many of them are now decrepit and the task of restoration or replacement is almost too grievous to be undertaken generally by the bodies conducting them. One of the most remarkable schools in the country is conducted by the Christian Brothers in Cork city, North Monastery. The Brothers are still teaching in the building where they taught in 1850 but it is now crumbling. These men came to Cork 150 years ago and did what I, for one, will always thank them for. They raised the ordinary Irish from their knees in the gutter—that is where they were—and taught them the love of God and Ireland and the ordinary essentials of elementary teaching necessary for them to make their simple way in the world. They have progressed enormously, and from the particular school I mention, men have gone all over the world into exalted places. They have manned the Irish Civil Service and the Front Bench where the Minister now sits. We owe them a great deal. But the Brothers who conduct this school are now trying to replace it because it is falling down. In spite of their recognised service, it is impossible for them to get any subvention to carry on that work. They must go out hat in hand, hold flag days, beg and borrow and they will not get a penny from the State. We should consider that situation.
Our universities have produced many brilliant and many less brilliant graduates, but, on the whole, they have been good. These graduates have gone all over the world. I think we send out three out of every five. I suppose they do good work but universities should be more than factories for producing that kind of product. I am old-fashioned enough to believe the university is a place where some thinking should be done. Besides the absorbing problem of who will fill forthcoming vacancies in university posts, is any thinking being done regarding problems besetting the country now or in the future? I think the universities have failed us. We want more than colleges to grind out graduates whom we will export in the proportion of three out of five.
I am sure the Minister knows more than I do about the work of the Institute of Advanced Studies. He told us nothing about it: perhaps when replying he would repair the omission. I was intrigued by Deputy O'Donnell's reference to the Gardaí giving instruction in our schools in such matters as traffic regulations. I commend that. No doubt children are impressed by uniforms and a pleasant young Garda who tells them of the dangers of the road will do more good than television broadcasts and advertisements in the paper. It is an excellent idea.
Each year of the ten years I have been here or in the Seanad, somebody has vaguely said that we should do something about teaching civics in school. It is one of the pious things we say and believe in as being quite necessary. We should teach the children civics; tell them about public property, about how the country is run. They should know how the county councils, urban councils, and corporations work. They should understand what takes place in the institutions of control here, and in the Dáil itself. They should be made aware of how we tick.
The Minister's obvious and displayed interest in design is very important. I feel very strongly that we must begin in the schools. Even for a very limited period—I know the educationists are worried about overloading the curriculum—we should try to have some weekly reference to the subject, 20 minutes or half an hour. I see that the Arts Council gave advice to the Minister on this subject. I do not know what the advice was; the Minister might refer to it in his reply because if he got advice from the Council, I feel sure it was advice along the lines I think necessary and right and we should have some result from that advice. If that were so, it would have a considerable influence and would actually mean that future Ministers would not have to worry much about design problems or some of the deplorable things that happen in the country. Future corporations would not entertain such savage proposals as covering in the canal. They would be taught that this sort of project is so frightful that they would not dare pronounce in favour of it.
On the question of the National Gallery, I asked last year that we should get some catalogue of what they had. I should like to find that out because I am not sure if anybody knows what is in the Gallery. I should like to know precisely what is being done with the Shaw Bequest, what kind of proposals the Minister has received from the Director of the Gallery, whether the money is to be spent on new galleries or on new pictures? Pictures seem to me to be bad value at the moment because there is a highly inflationary period in the picture world. In what way is the Gallery insured and in what way are the pictures insured? Are they insured on a real basis? If they are not, it seems fantastic to me to continue insuring them at all.
The Minister introduced legislation last year which permitted the National Gallery to lend portion of its collections to responsible authorities up and down the country. How many loans took place and, if they did not, would I be right in saying that the requirement to insure in transit was a hindering factor? Would the Minister tell us if any proposals are being made to replace that eminent public servant, Dr. McGreevey, when he leaves the Gallery?
I should like to congratulate the Minister on what he has done since he became Minister and to thank him for the unfailing courtesy which he always extended to me. When all the proposals are perfected, and I do not think they will ever be, I hope we are not going to produce only those who are proficient in technical subjects and science and in mathematics. The humanities must not be overlooked. We can produce technical and literate human beings but we must strive to produce complete human beings, not examination-passers or job-getters, but thoughtful men who will be able to reflect life in Ireland far longer than they can live.
