I am glad to have that assurance and I shall communicate with the Minister later today. I feel sure the Minister will not mind if I notify the parents concerned of his assurance to remedy the matter. There is another problem in relation to school attendance in Dublin on which I hope to get the Minister's assistance. A large number of children attending schools in Dublin must use public transport to get to them. There are cases where CIE do not appear to appreciate the necessity to adjust their schedules in order to enable schoolchildren to arrive promptly at school. CIE have been asked on several occasions to adjust the times of arrival of buses at schools.
In one Dublin suburb, they have been asked to arrange the arrival of the bus at the school three or four minutes before the school is due to open. Though pressure has been applied to CIE for years, the bus arrives daily one minute after the school is due to open and cases have arisen in which the children have been punished for being late for school whenever the bus arrives unduly late, as is bound to happen in the choked traffic conditions obtaining in Dublin at the present time.
I shall give another instance, and in these two cases there is little excuse because the terminus for the route is right outside the school door. The bus leaves the school daily about five minutes before the children come out of school and the next bus does not leave until 25 minutes later. CIE have been asked to adjust their schedules to suit the children concerned but they have failed to do so. I would ask the Minister to get his Department to approach CIE in an endeavour to get the company to adjust schedules wherever possible to meet the fair demands of schoolchildren.
Problems such as that which I mentioned last night of getting uniform school and lunch hours for Dublin schools may seem trivial to a Department so much out of touch with realities, with the problems of families in a vast city like Dublin. These problems are very real and very acute and where solutions would not be that difficult to find, and where it would not cost too much to implement them, the Minister's Department have an obligation to try to bring about that uniformity. It could be done through closer co-operation between the managers, the teachers and the Department.
Indeed, there are many problems in the educational sphere at the moment which need not arise if there were more co-operation between the Minister, the managers and the teachers. I should like to see in every county, large town and city, an educational committee representative of the Department, school managers, vocational committees, secondary teachers, national teachers, vocational teachers, in order that there might be a dovetailing of problems and of solutions for each branch of education. At present it is one of the most disheartening things about our educational system that there is so much reserve on the part of the different units in the system, that they are apparently unable to co-operate with one another in efforts to achieve reasonable solutions.
The Minister's plan for comprehensive schools had the attraction of novelty. The advertising world will tell you that to boast of something as being new or novel gives it an immediate lead over its competitors, though it does not mean it is necessarily good.
In this country we have a great deal of unused capital, of buildings lying idle for long periods of the day or in the evening, and a reluctance on the part of the managers of those buildings to make them available for other branches of education.
Dublin is dotted with national schools which close between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. and remain closed until the following morning, while there are in some parts of the country hundreds of potential students for evening classes for whom accommodation or other facilities are not available. It seems daft in the extreme that the capital facilities available in the form of modern buildings are not made available in the afternoons or evenings for people who could pursue courses.
The Minister has a tremendous problem in trying to overcome the reluctance of the establishments of these places to change with the times, but with the compelling need for post-primary education, those with managerial responsibilities in relation to those schools must modify their outlook and make these facilities available. Likewise, vocational schools in many parts of the country do not operate on Saturday mornings. Many of those schools have well-equipped laboratories and other facilities which many secondary schools have not got and it would seem highly desirable that in areas where secondary schools continue to operate on Saturdays, their students should be able to avail of those facilities. My complaint is that views on the needs of post-primary education are not taken seriously. There is an unreal, a wrong approach here. If we are to spend money on education, we should see that it is spent wisely. If we come up against the difficulty the Minister apparently has of getting money from the Minister for Finance, we should see that whatever moneys there are will be used to the best and fullest extent.
The problem of reviving Irish as a living language has invariably been discussed at length on this Estimate. I do not propose to deal with it at any great length because I submit such lengthy treatment bedevils the Irish revival. Many interested in education seem to consider that the chief and principal aim of an educational system should be to revive or give life to a language, be it Irish, English, French or any other language. Of course, the principal end of education should be to improve children, to allow them to develop the talents God has given them. To bedevil it with any national aspiration, however broad or generous, is to defeat the whole end and object of education.
I am one of those who feel that two serious mistakes were made in relation to the revival of Irish. I do not think we shall ever get over them, certainly not in this generation, the generation that had perhaps the key to the revival of Irish. I think that key has been thrown away and the door locked. Whatever goes on behind the door will never produce for us a spoken tongue such as might have been available if the door had not been locked and the key thrown away.
Those who went to school in this country from 1922 to 1950 were familiar with the Celtic script and learned to read Irish with ease. Like any people who master a language, they were able to read not by spelling the words but by recognising the sight and the shape of the words. When the experts began to meddle with the script and with spelling, they deprived all those who went to school in the first 20 or 30 years of this State of the facility of easily reading Irish. Therefore, they denied to them, without a tremendous effort on their part, the opportunity to maintain familiarity with Irish.
There is no doubt that the lack of reading Irish and the lack of usage are principally responsible for the failure to make Irish more widely used. However, throwing the foreign "h" into words, instead of the seimhiú, and abbreviating words that we recognise by sight and by shape has made it extremely difficult for people of my generation to maintain a constant reading and association with Irish.
In one's everyday business and other activities, the opportunities to use Irish are extremely few. Therefore, the only hope there was of maintaining contact with Irish was reading for pleasure. It is no pleasure, certainly for people familiar with the old Celtic script and the old shape and size of words, to have to labour through the official script and official spelling now available. I suppose that Comhairle Cosanta na Teangan, a body which advocates the abolition of the "h", is fighting a losing battle against the bureaucratic and ministerial experts. However, it is the view of many that, even if the Roman script were to be preserved, it would be better to drop the "h" altogether and that, in the ordinary everyday teaching of Irish, the students would soon appreciate which letters should and should not have a seimhiú, without the necessity of sticking in the "h's".
I understand there is some firm in Naas which has produced a script which allows accents to be inserted while still maintaining the Roman script. Although this might mean a third change in the script and spelling of words, I believe it would be a happy compromise and would again open the door to those of the first generation in this free State of ours to provide easy access to current Irish writing.
Again, I understand that the official rule is that the Celtic script is to be dropped entirely in schools. If I am wrong in this regard, the Minister might correct me. However, I understand that the edict has gone forth that the Celtic script is no longer to be used. I do not know whether that is the position as of now or whether the rule will apply at some future date. Whatever be it—I presume the fact that the Minister has not refuted me means that what I said is substantially true—it baffles me that at the present time children in the infant classes of schools, and in the First and Second Babies, are using Irish readers with the Celtic script. If there is any wisdom in getting away from the Celtic script and in using the Roman script, and if a rule has been made that the Roman script is to be used in future, why on earth are we imposing on children in infant classes the obligation to master both in writing and in reading the Celtic script?
I much prefer the Celtic script. I am sorry the Minister ordered that only the Roman script will be used. I am sorry that this strange spelling has been brought in to deprive those of the first generation of the first opportunity of continuing contact with Irish. But, if it has been done, the Minister should see to it that further damage is not done by imposing two scripts and two forms of spelling on the children who are now starting school.
The reason I think serious damage has been done that can never be repaired is this. Those who were educated in the first generation of freedom here are the parents of schoolgoing children today. They find that, because of the change in spelling and script, they are strangers to the language which their children are trying to master. Instead of being able to assist their children and, in so doing, to refresh their own knowledge of Irish, they find their children spelling words in a manner for which they themselves would have been punished when they were going to school. They also find themselves pronouncing the words in a way which children do not recognise.
I have great sympathy for those who are against any effort to achieve a degree of uniformity in Irish pronunciation and spelling and I have a certain sympathy with the Department in their effort to do so. However, I think they have gone the wrong way about it. To those who want to preserve the music of parochial dialects, I would say that, for those who were reared in the larger part of this country where Irish is not the language of the home, it makes the mastery of the language extremely difficult if we intend to preserve all the different dialects.
I was taught while at school by native speakers from Kerry, Connemara, Donegal and Ring and each of these good teachers had a different way of pronouncing even the simplest words. I instance the word "agam". We can readily think of the different ways in which that word can be pronounced in the different dialects. We found ourselves being punished by a teacher from, say, the Connemara Gaeltacht because we were pronouncing some simple word according, say, to the Kerry dialect. That is most undesirable. It breeds a dislike for the language in the minds of the majority of our children outside the fior-Ghaeltacht. While, culturally, it might be the perfect thing to preserve for ourselves and for posterity the individualities of the different dialects, quite clearly the Department of Education cannot hope to achieve that. If they try to do it, they will only do damage to the whole cause.
I should like to say how much we welcome the provision of reference libraries in schools. This is a sensible step forward. Every credit is due to Comhairle na Leabharlanna and the others involved in this. It is only in its infancy and one would not like to quibble unduly with the texts that have been selected. I suppose it would be next to impossible to get complete agreement in choosing the—I think— 37 texts that have already been selected, but it is an effort in the right direction and, no doubt, with experience and changing times additions can be made to the books available. The next step is to try to get children to use them without slavishly accepting all that is in them. That is one of the drawbacks: children, I think, are inclined to believe the printed word whether in a book or in a newspaper and accept it as gospel truth, not to be questioned. I suppose that it is a matter for parents and teachers to impress on the children that all they read is not necessarily true and that every printed word is a challenge to them to think whether it is right or wrong.
In that context we must welcome the establishment of the Council of Design. It is one of the great ways of opening the child's mind to get him or her interested in design or in art. It develops their personality and it shows them opportunities for expression which perhaps are not available in other subjects taught in school. But if we are to benefit by art being taught in schools we must take the first step and the establishment of the Council of Design and the work they will do is a move in the right direction.
One could seriously criticise some of the stories and topics in the ordinary school textbooks. In many cases they have little real association with the everyday outlook and activities of children, especially in the city and towns along the east coast. It seems that the Minister might be able to kill two birds with the one stone if in more school books stories relating to traffic problems or discourses on the rules of the road were included. Unless one lives next door to the school, in going between school and home, children must master the traffic problem which involves many decisions. It means that they must adapt themselves to the decisions of motorists and cyclists and others. It would help, I think, to cut down the mortality rate for children on the roads if there was a dove-tailing of traffic topics into the text books.
I must associate myself with the remarks last night of Deputy Barry in regard to the granting of recognition for teaching service abroad. I am particularly concerned with the failure of the Department to give credit for teaching service in England. It was the Minister's argument, and I think a most unworthy one, that to give credit for teaching service in Britain is to give credit for the rejects of the British teaching service and that it might encourage our own teachers to go abroad in their early years rather than go direct into our own schools. Many of our own people go to Britain for one reason or another and if they teach there they gain valuable experience. If credit is being given for teaching service in Africa or in Northern Ireland—this is a new step and one which we in Fine Gael claim some credit for: we think our consistent pressure forced the Minister to give recognition in respect of teaching there—we should also give credit for teaching service in Britain.
To deny it is to stop the flow of some recruits which we cannot afford to do without at present into the teaching service. We cannot afford to lose recruits at least for a decade or more ahead. It is most unworthy to say or assume that we should only get the worst back from Britain. The Minister is a medical man. I do not know whether he ever worked in Britain but I think the majority of his medical colleagues did. For a long time it was next to impossible to get a medical appointment here unless you had practical experience in Britain or elsewhere. It might do our schools some good to have men with teaching experience from abroad. It would perhaps lead to a stronger clash of opinion between the Department and the Minister on the one hand and the teachers on the other but that might be a good thing, particularly if the teachers won.
The extension of the scholarship scheme in recent times is to be welcomed. We in Fine Gael believe that it has not yet gone far enough. Scholarship schemes have one disadvantage and that is they still leave the apparently less brilliant to help themselves. It is not an infrequent experience for children not to blossom forth into the highest standard until they are well advanced. In my own experience I have seen cases of boys at school who were average or below average but who went to university and perhaps specialised at some particular course and blossomed forth there and achieved honours, rewards and scholarships without difficulty, leaving behind them, in many cases, some of the most brilliant colleagues of theirs at school, boys who had no bother at all in winning secondary and university scholarships, some of whom afterwards in the university were lucky to scrape passes in degree examinations.
This was not entirely due—I know of more cases than one—to allowing themselves to be distracted by extrascholastic activities while at university. Perhaps the subject of how brains develop at different periods is worthy of medical study, but while you have the situation in which there is, apparently, a variation in the development you may be obviously closing up further educational opportunities for those who may appear to have less brains in their earlier days.
That is why I think we as a nation will have to accept that we are not fulfilling our obligations to our children in providing only primary education in our day and age. If in 1937 or in 1922, there was a moral and constitutional obligation to provide what is known as primary education, there is at least an obligation at present to advance the age for free education from 14 to 18. Even going to 16, I think, is not sufficient.
However, I appreciate the obligation which is imposed on us of always trying to fit our resources to our desires, but on account of the fact that the least we should be doing is going as far as 18, we must accept 16 as an interim measure. That, of course, will impose further obligations on the Department and on the resources of this country, but we must face them now, not arrive at a position in a few years time such as we are now experiencing in infant classes in Dublin in which children, because of ministerial edict, find themselves without schools at all. We must plan ahead and take steps in good time.
We are very disappointed, to say the least, with the proposal which the Minister and the Government have to provide grants for secondary schools. We, of course, allow for the fact that the only reason the Government are doing anything about it is that Fine Gael announced that it was part of their programme to provide building grants for secondary schools and, in an effort not to be left high and dry, the Taoiseach rushed in with a statement indicating the Government's intention to fulfil this obligation. Then the Minister went along to the Minister for Finance and he was told that he was being reckless and what he has now done is to pretend that they are giving building grants but they are taking them back with the other hand.
The capitation grants for secondary schools at the moment are inadequate and to reduce these already inadequate grants wherever the building grant is given is to walk backward, not forward. The Minister deserves no congratulations for modifying in that degree the facilities for providing building grants for secondary schools.
It baffles one's understanding of events to see the restriction of these grants to schools with more than 150 pupils. I should like the Minister to explain why it is that building grants will not be made available for secondary schools with fewer than 150 pupils. Why is it that it is thought the greater the school the greater it ought to be, that once it has achieved a figure of 150, it ought to multiply its size? Why is it that if it has fewer than 150 pupils it must be kept indefinitely small and certainly will not get any assistance from the mighty State which could give it?
We have made a mistake, certainly, in the city of Dublin over the past 20 or 30 years in building monster and monstrous schools with little character, utterly impersonal institutions which have lost a great deal of the direct relationship that ought to exist between not only the individual teacher and his class in a particular year, but throughout the whole line of responsibility in a school from the manager to the headmaster and the other teachers and right down the line. But to impose this monstrous growth on the secondary school system and to discourage the establishment or maintenance of smaller schools is an undesirable trend.
There have been a number of happy developments in the secondary school field in a number of responsible lay teachers establishing their own schools. One does not at all wish to see a clash between lay and clerical authorities in any field, particularly in the field of education, but because of their limited resources these lay schools have not the opportunities to collect capital that some of the larger religious Orders may have and it is grossly unfair to prevent these institutions which are doing great and valuable work with the co-operation, I am glad to say, of clerical authorities, from improving upon the services they are providing. It is accepted throughout the teaching profession and the various clerical Orders which are helping in the teaching world that they cannot expand quickly enough to meet the growing demand for secondary education. So, every encouragement should be given to all responsible people who are prepared to do their part and even if the part of any institution is seemingly small, the building grant facilities being offered to their larger rivals ought to be made available to them as well.
Last week, I asked some questions about Comhairle le Leas Óige. I asked the Minister to consider extending the activities of Comhairle le Leas Óige out into County Dublin. The Minister's reply was that the question of the extension of Comhairle le Leas Óige into the county was not a matter for him but for the County Dublin Vocational Education Committee, that Comhairle le Leas Óige was a subcommittee of the Dublin City Vocational Education Committee. I asked the Minister to dwell upon the problem which has arisen all around the fringe of Dublin. There is no part of the city boundary of Dublin that does not now run through streets and houses, with the exception of small section out at the Albert College in Ballymun but that, as we hope, will be covered with houses over the next three to five years, in any event.
So that we are not dealing with a situation in Dublin in which you have a city which is some miles removed from the nearest towns or other units of population; we have a situation in which for all practical purposes there is no difference between the man living in the city and the man living in the county. The man living in the city looks out his window across the road and sees his neighbour who is living in the county but on one side of the road the man has available to him and his children the facilities, services, and subsidies of Comhairle le Leas Óige, which provides grants for boys' clubs and youth clubs which provide training in trades and educational facilities in the clubs, but, on the other side of the road, his neighbour who is living in the same parish, who has the same interests, whom he meets on the same bus going to the same job every day of the week, finds his children, if they attend the same club, may not have the facilities and subsidies provided. Or we have a situation in which the only available club premises in a parish may be situated in the county area just ten yards across the administrative boundary but all the children in that particular club may come from the city area and, as things stand at present, Comhairle le Leas Óige would not be doing right to give any subsidies or facilities to that club because it is situated in the administrative area of Dublin County.
Quite clearly that is a ridiculous situation. I know approaches are being made to the county authorities in an effort to resolve the difficulties but the Minister must know from his long experience of public bodies in this country that it is very difficult to get them to move quickly. He may be able to do a service by knocking their heads together and, certainly, so far as Dublin city, Dublin county and the Borough of Dún Laoghaire are concerned, having one common organisation of Comhairle le Leas Óige, or what you like, in order to achieve uniformity of facilities and grants for youth clubs, which must get help because our vocational schools are unable to cope with the colossal demands made upon them. That is generally accepted. There are some children who are unable, particularly at the end of their working day, to settle down to the discipline which must exist in a vocational school. The atmosphere in clubs may be more relaxed. It is a mixture of entertainment and instruction. It is desirable that the good work being done by these voluntary organisations in youth clubs should be encouraged and that they should not be stifled by the unnecessary, archaic, administrative difficulties which appear to exist at the present time.
I was also compelled recently to address a question to the Minister on the enforcement of the School Attendance Act in Dublin. The Minister promised me at the time that he would see what steps could be taken to make the Act enforceable. I would urge him not to delay unduly in this matter. We have had the embarrassing situation of a responsible priest, who has worked very hard on school attendance committees over the years, threatening to resign unless action was taken to make the Act enforceable.
It is not for the sake of persecuting the parents who do not send their children to school, because in many cases it is the parents of these children who need training just as much as the unfortunate children themselves. In many cases there is mental deficiency or lack of discipline in the parents themselves. They are to be pitied and one does not want to see them unduly punished. In most cases they come from an improverished background which, possibly, has had this effect on them. Obviously, it is essential that the children be protected. I would be the last to advocate any interference with parental authority, but where parents are failing in their obligations in relation to education, society must step in to help the children and the parents to see that educational facilities are used by the children so that their lives will not be blighted in the same way as their parents.
The problem is not particularly difficult. The courts have been requiring the attendance of the father and, because of his absence on his job or down at the labour exchange, the school attendance officers have difficulty in effecting service. Like anybody else, they do not wish to work in the evenings. If that be the kernel of the problem, it should be a simple matter to provide for alternative service. I would press on the Minister to take the necessary legislative or other steps to see to it this is done.
The system of making appointments in vocational schools leaves a great deal to be desired. I think the Minister is of the same opinion as many of us in this regard. I know whenever there is a vacancy in Dublin, not only are the members of the vocational committee canvassed but other members of the corporation and Dublin members of the Dáil are pestered by applicants. I have no objection to speaking to persons seeking to improve themselves, but I do not think it desirable that appointments to these schools should require that candidates be obliged to take themselves around from Billy to Jack in order to secure appointment. We should have reached the stage where candidates could be selected by an expert committee.
I am appreciative of the fact that, while this canvassing goes on to a colossal extent, as far as the Dublin Committee are concerned, it does not play any great part in their ultimate decision. No candidates have been appointed who were not fit for their jobs. But it is unseemly, undesirable and unfair that these responsible, qualified people must take themselves around because of the notion that the man in public life is all-powerful and all his decisions are affected by the people who canvass him. I should hope there will be a change in that system.
I should also hope that the day is not far distant when there will be a change in the system of appointment to the National University. It is quite daft that candidates for appointment to the university must present a few hundred copies of their references and qualifications and that they, too, feel obliged to take themselves around to members of Government bodies and senates in order to get appointment, or that a professor of economics, a professor of Latin or a professor of mathematics should have a say in the appointment of a professor of gynaecology. That system is out of keeping with the moral standards of the 20th century. It is to be sincerely hoped an opportunity will be taken, when proposals are made in relation to higher education, to do away with this archaic system which again, I must admit, has not worked too badly and, in the main, has not given us bad appointments. But, again, it is undesirable. The right people are sometimes put off by the notion that they will be obliged to take themselves around, to peddle their academic wares in order to get appointment.
I should like to conclude by referring to the unwanted baby of the Department of Education. I do not put it last —the Department do—but in the sequence of my remarks it might not have been appropriate to mention it earlier. I am referring to the National Library. I am amazed that notwithstanding the increase in the cost of books, on one hand, and the increased amount being spent by the Library in acquiring manuscripts of Irish texts on the continent, there has not been a much larger allocation for the purchase of books.
From figures I got from the Minister, we find in 1943-44, during the war, at a time when books were not generally available or were of poor quality, £2,210 was spent on purchasing new books. We find that just 20 years after that in 1962-63, we spent only £4,643 on the purchase of new books. In the meantime the price of books has at least trebled and the Library has been spending a great deal of money and effort on the purchase of microfilms of Irish texts from libraries abroad. That is first-class work, but it is only being done at the expense of cutting down on the purchase of new books. Perhaps this is deliberate policy because of the lack of accommodation in the Library; but it should be possible to find somewhere in the city or elsewhere accommodation for books which at present cannot be got at because the place is choked with books. At the same time, many modern publications are not being acquired because of lack of funds. By the time we have a new Library, we may not be able to get some of these modern books except at excessive cost.
I wonder would the Minister advise me on this, or perhaps I should put down a separate question? I see that in the year 1947-48 £23,320 was spent on acquiring new books for the Library. This is more than ten times the amount usually spent for the acquisition of new books, and I am curious to know what might have been purchased at that time to explain such a large allocation. It is estimated it will cost £1¼ million to build a new National Library. A site has been acquired for it. I know the experience in the past has not been the happiest as far as meeting the demands of a new building are concerned. I hope the day is not too distant when we will build that new National Library.
Now is the time to do it, before the cost becomes even greater, in order to provide the facilities for study and research the Library can give, to provide the space for books so drastically needed at present and so as not to provide any further reason to discourage the acquisition of new books, which appears to have been the policy since the War.
There is another point. The figure for 1962-63 was £4,643. But ten years before that the figure was about the same. In 1951-52, it was £4,944 so that, in fact, we have not increased the allocation for new books in the National Library for more than ten or 12 years. Clearly, with the change in prices in the meantime, there is no justification for a coninuation of this policy.
