When progress was reported, I was asking the Minister for Education whether he realised that the policy pursued by the Fianna Fáil Party in regard to the revival of the Irish language was, in fact, killing the language. I was asking him whether he realised the significance of Deputy Booth's contribution when he spoke of our society consisting of a wide variety of groups, ethnic, religious and social.
There is an astonishing comparison between the situation of the language today and the language position 40 years ago. I am old enough to remember the time when we had very deep and passionate political divisions in which the cause of union with Great Britain was strongly and energetically sustained by a large minority in this country. We had southern Irish unionists and the Orangemen. There were Nationalists, and at that time my father was their leader, having succeeded the late Mr. Redmond. They constituted the great bulk of our people. There were supporters of Sinn Féin, and supporters of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and between them there existed very frequently a very bitter division which almost precluded social contact.
That was not peculiar at that time to Ireland because in England itself, and in Scotland very shortly before that, political dissension had created a depth of feeling which had separated people even in their social contact. But in Great Britain, that is, England, Scotland and Wales, those divisions festered and reached their climax in the mutual detestation of men like Gladstone and Disraeli and their followers. There, families were divided to the point of parting socially.
But in the corresponding situation obtaining in our own country there emerged the Gaelic League concerned to save the language. I am old enough to remember meetings of the Gaelic League where there were representatives of the extreme unionist persuasion, nationalists, Sinn Féiners and members of the IRB and in the atmosphere of their mutual solicitude for the language and its revival all the passionate dissension that separated them was sublimated and they could meet in that common cause. It was of incalculable value to the nation to which we all belong that we had that common cause.
Deputy Booth posed a question: do the majority of our people want to revive the language? He said it was his conviction that they did not. I believe that in saying that Deputy Booth was profoundly wrong. I believe the vast majority of our people do want to revive the language. When you examine fundamentally such a vital question as this you must ask yourself all the questions that arise. I want to see the Irish language revived as a spoken language and passed on to our children and our children's children as a living, spoken, dynamic language but I might well ask myself the question: If I do want that and if I believe the majority of the Irish people want it, why do they want it? I am obliged to concede at once, if I am challenged as to whether I want it for utilitarian reasons, that in my considered judgment there are no utilitarian reasons to justify the revival of the Irish language. If we are resolved to regulate our lives hereafter exclusively in terms of pounds, shillings and pence then it were better to let the language die and leave to our successors a dead language as is Latin, classical Greek or Aramaic, a study for scholars and etymologists.
I do not think any civilised people, and we are civilised people, can suffer their whole lives to be regulated by the pure utilitarianism of pounds, shillings and pence. If you ask me why I love music I cannot counter the proposition that music has no utilitarian value. If you ask me why I treasure poetry I cannot point to any utilitarian purpose of poetry. But our lives would be very bleak if we were to determine, on the grounds that the value of these things could not be measured in pounds, shillings and pence, that we had a duty to let them disappear, a duty to regard all musicians and all poets as a worthless burden on the society to which we belong.
I want to see the language live as I want to see music and poetry live but there is a special, additional consideration in regard to the language. No matter what we do in Ireland music and poetry will not die in the world. If we were obscurantist enough to decree their death in Ireland there would be other societies in the world with a greater vision than ours and they would keep them alive but there is nobody in the world who would keep the Irish language alive except the Irish people. On us exclusively depends whether a living language is to die or survive. I want it to survive because I believe it is an infinitely valuable treasure not only for us but for the world. It is a great catastrophe for the world when a living language dies.
I was speaking to a man the other day who knew Estonian very well. One of the things he told me was that Estonian was spoken when he went to work there. I think that language is now dead because it has fallen under the control of a utilitarian, marxist, materialistic dispensation which maintains that preservation of national characteristics is a hindrance rather than a help. The world is poorer if that language is dead. We have reached the stage at which it is immensely important, if the death of the Irish language is not to be rapidly consummated, that we try to find common ground.
I want to say most deliberately that the people who went to the Mansion House as an organised, bloody-minded mob to prevent law-abiding citizens of this State advancing their views are the greatest enemies the Irish language has. The denial of the right of others to advance views with which one is not in sympathy is intolerable. If those views be what I am told they are— and I am not fully informed as to the views of the LFM—if their view is that they believe Irish ought to be allowed to die, then I am against them. I think they are wrong but I want them to be heard. I want their arguments advanced so that I can argue against them, and I have no doubt that against such arguments I and those who think with me will prevail in the hearts and minds of our people. However, if any mob goes in to claim they have the right to forbid these views to be expressed, then the bulk of our people will say: "The cause which needs a mob to defend it must be rotten and undeserving of support". I repudiate with contempt and loathing the help of any mob to force Irish down the throats of the Irish people. I am convinced that no mob can do it and if they continue to attempt it, the Irish people will destroy them. The terrible danger is that in rightly destroying and trampling on a bloody-minded mob of that kind they may be misled into trampling on the Irish language as well.
I do not want to be rude to Deputy Booth, though I cannot help admitting that every time he gets up to speak in this House I am made to think of the Pharisee who went up to the temple to pray. There is something nauseating in Deputy Booth's getting up to tell us that in the secret recesses of his heart he has always cherished the sentiments he indicated today, while at the times of general elections he thinks it wise not to express them, not because he is afraid of his constituents but because he is afraid his leaders might turf him out. Without the Fianna Fáil vote he could not be elected and, therefore, he thinks it wise to keep his trap shut when he is on the hustings. When he is safely ensconced here and he thinks there is no immediate prospect of a general election he feels himself free to speak.
Far different has been our attitude in that regard because we felt that the people should be consulted and were entitled to have this issue put before them. I can well remember putting the issue clearly before the people at the time of the general election of 1961, not at some remote parish church meeting but in O'Connell Street, outside the General Post Office, addressing many thousands of the citizens of Dublin and others who had come there to attend the final rally of the Fine Gael organisation. I remember then being denounced by Fianna Fáil for bringing the question of Irish into the arena of a general election. I thought then, and I think now, that it is the Irish people who have the right to have this issue placed before them. It is the Irish people who must decide what the ultimate fate of the Irish language is going to be. As I have said, if there is one thing which is absolutely certain it is that the Irish language cannot be revived as a spoken language unless the majority of our people want to see it so revived.
Deputy Booth, in dealing with this question, reminded me of a cat walking along the top of a wall covered with glass. Manifestly the substance of what he said was: "You are trying to ram it down the throats of the people but you will not succeed because the people will take damn good care not to let you." Then he went on to say there were lots of people who said they loved Irish but it was always the other fellow who ought to learn it. They could not learn it themselves.
That is all cod. I was brought up in a household that loved Irish. My father did not speak a word of it. My mother learned it because she loved the language. Because they believed in the language and loved it they saw that all of us learned the language, but they did not force us to learn the language. No one of us was ever compelled to learn Irish but we felt in our home that not to know the language was to be inferior. For that reason we learned Irish not so much in the classroom as at Ballingeary, Cloghaneely and Tourmakeady where we went by our own wish on our holiday and learned it because we had been taught to love it.
What has happened in the intervening years? In the last 40 years a generation of men and women have grown up in this country who have had Irish forced upon them, who have had it held over their heads like a bludgeon, that if they did not qualify in it they would not be allowed to earn a living in their own country. They are rearing a generation of children who are learning through their parents to hate and despise it.
When I went to the Irish college in Cloghaneely, when I went to the Irish college in Ballingeary, there was not a single boy or girl, or man or woman who was there for any other reason than the love of the language. When I gave up going to Irish colleges, 90 per cent of the students who were there were qualifying to get a job. They were looking for the Árd Teastas, the Mean Teastas or some other teastas, and if you asked them why they were there, they would say: "We cannot get a school if we do not get the teastas.""We cannot get a job in the ESB if we do not have the leaving certificate and we cannot get that without Irish.""We cannot be called to training as a nurse if we do not get the leaving certificate and we cannot get the leaving certificate if we do not know Irish." I felt that to be with them was to be in a sort of jail. All the joy was gone out of it. It was now a scramble to get in six weeks enough Irish to secure whatever was the appropriate teastas. It is the children of those parents who are turning their backs on the Irish language at present.
That change has come about in my lifetime almost entirely as a result of the language policy of the Fianna Fáil Party. I do not want to suggest that they did it in malice. I believe there are members of the Fianna Fáil Party who are as passionately fond of the language as I am, but I do charge them with some of the mob mentality. I do charge them with feeling that it was in their power to force the language on the people, whether they wanted it or not. That is the fundamental mistake they made. I remember 25 years ago advocating in this House: drop all compulsion. I remember leaving this House one night to go over and speak in York Street, of all places. I remember some of my old friends in the Press Gallery, all of whom are now gone to their reward— Paddy Quinn, Mr. Curran, the old "Pol. Corrs."— following me over there, where they thought I was going to be torn to pieces. I remember addressing the poor women out of the tenement houses in York Street on the desirability of making Irish the educational passport for every child of this country, however poor, whatever home they came from, up all the way to the top.
I remember saying to them: "Let us get rid of compulsory Irish, but let us say to each one of these little children standing in front of us, as Napoleon used to say to the children of France that every child carries a field-marshal's baton in his schoolbag, each one of you here, by burning some little modicum more of midnight oil, can secure for yourselves a scholarship from the primary school. You can go through the secondary school and, when you have matriculated, you can become a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer or anything else you like. So long as you maintain in each academic year an honours standard in Irish, the cost of your education will be met by the State. That is because the State wants to revive Irish. We want to make Irish the hallmark of higher education in this country. At the same time, up to the limit of our resources, we want to open the doors of Irish education to every child in this country, no matter what home he comes from. Let us forget wealth and the existing background and let this be available to every child, whether he is the son of a millionaire or the son of the poorest labourer or unemployed family in the country."
Picture where we would stand today if 30 years ago we had done that, if we had been in a position to say now: "Anyone who does not want Irish, let him forget it. But it is a hallmark of higher education in this country that a man speaks and writes Irish fluently, that it is his second language." I often call in memory the situation in Russia before the 1914 war. Society was largely divided in Russia then, not on a class basis but on the basis of those who spoke Russian and French and those who spoke only Russian. We would have today an intellectual élite in this country whose common hallmark was that they were Irish speakers and were educated in the Irish language—not through the Irish language but in Irish. They would be engineers, doctors, scientists, philosophers. They could belong to any profession they liked. They would look back with pride on the fact it was Irish opened all this vista to them. They would tell their children: “You would not be where you are now and I could not be providing the living I am providing for you but for the fact that Irish gave me the chance to get the education that enables me today to earn the living to give you the advantages that became available to me through the language.”
Instead of that, we have insolent mobs storming a public meeting, clamouring that we dare not let the voice of opposition to the language be heard. If we allowed them to speak, the whole structure would come tumbling down around our ears. How low has the language sunk in the esteem of our people when it depends on such champions? How low has the language sunk when we see it as an instrument now in which the Minister for Education finds himself in the ridiculous straitjacket that he is afraid to say in Dáil Éireann what he honestly believes. He dare not say it, because his own Government are divided into two sections, one of which thinks it is politically inexpedient to permit the Minister to speak his mind and the other, to which he belongs, in which probably he wants to go further than I would be prepared to go with him in the abolition of Irish in the educational programme.
Now I am bound to tell the House that I have the feeling we are very near the end of the road. It is pretty generally agreed amongst us that we are now going to make education universally available. I do not know what inducement we have left to draw young people to the language. We are living in a very utilitarian and materialistic age, which is not peculiar to Ireland, but there are great, powerful elements in the Fianna Fáil Party at present who think it right and prudent to sell anything saleable for cash. They think anybody opposed to that is wrong and obscurantist and not "with it". I will still make the effort and I will still hope that the effort might succeed, but I think the task is ten times greater now than it was 20 years ago. It is vitally important, even at this eleventh hour, to take the steps that may be necessary to carry conviction finally to the mind of our people that we do not want to force the language down their throats. It is urgently necessary to carry conviction to the minds of the young people that Irish is no longer a bludgeon held over their heads.
I admit the Government have in fact moved some of the way along the road in that direction by prescribing that, where a child fails to get the leaving certificate in Irish, he will be given a second chance. But surely the time has come to face the plain, inescapable fact that it is an intolerable imposition on the children of this country to say to them that if the tiny minority who are not linguistically gifted fail to master the Irish language, they are to be denied the right to earn their living in their own country? Surely the time has come to say that if there is in this country a child rarely gifted in mathematics, in science, in engineering, for example, he is not to be denied the right of access to a university to develop the gifts he has got because he cannot pass an examination in Irish? Surely there is nothing inconsistent in adopting that change and in saying, at the same time, that in every primary school in Ireland, Irish will be taught as any other school subject is taught and in proportion to the time available for it in relation to the other essential subjects a child in the modern world must have?
We are living today in a world in which, for an untrained or uneducated man or woman, there will be no more chance of getting a living in ten years' time that there would be for a stray dog. That is a terrible thought to which few people are prepared to open their mind. We had a brisk interchange here during Question Time on the subject of unemployment. I think it was the Taoiseach who reminded the House of the number of unemployed in this country in 1956. He held up the figure to us as a rebuke. He did not go on to think of the 300,000 of our people who have been sent abroad since he took office in 1957 and that, of those 300,000 persons, nearly 250,000 must have gone to unskilled employment.
The fact we have got to face is that, in the decade that lies ahead, that same number of 250,000 will not find employment even if the Fianna Fáil solution for unemployment were to be found again, namely, to ship them out of the country into the anonymity of the unskilled labour market in Great Britain. There will not be any unskilled labour market in ten years' time into which to ship them. Automation is in its elementary stages today in Great Britain. It is more advanced on the Continent and it has reached a pretty high degree of development in the United States. If the element of automation that obtains in American industry today obtained in Great Britain tomorrow, then the scope for unskilled employment in Great Britain would virtually be exhausted. Therefore, our Party, have rightly put forward a very comprehensive policy proposal for education.
I want to ask the Minister at this moment, while these present policies exist, if he seriously proposes to go on claiming that a boy or girl who cannot pass an examination in Irish is to be denied access to university education. I do not think he believes that himself. I do not believe he believes that the boy or girl who cannot pass in Irish should be excluded from a technological institute such as Kevin Street or the other institutes. I do not believe the Minister believes that, if a boy is qualified in every respect to serve in the Civil Service, in the ESB or in any of the semi-State bodies in his own country, he will be told he must go abroad to earn his bread because he cannot pass an examination in Irish. I do not believe any rational Deputy believes these things to be right. The tragedy of the hypocritical pretence that such an arrangement is just and should continue is that it is making Irish hated and cursed by thousands of children, without whose love and enthusiasm the language has no hope of surviving.
There are many matters in respect of which I have acted the role of Cassandra in this House and, in respect of many of them, the prophecy I have made has been indignantly repudiated by the members of the Fianna Fáil Party. However, great damage would ensue. Then, after much of the damage had become irremediable, they would come to realise the truth of what I had suggested to them and scramble to put right what was wrong. I want to tell the House now that the ultimate existence of Irish as a living language will be settled within the next five years. Unless there is a complete revolution in the thought and feeling of our people, unless there is a sense of deliverance from compulsion and a corresponding inter-party movement representing all elements of our life such as the Gaelic League about 50 years ago, Irish will die—not in my time but probably in the lifetime of the Minister.
Do not forget that when I went to Gortahork first in 1919 and 1920, you would not hear a word of English spoken as far east as Falcarragh. You would have to travel ten miles west of Gortahork to be able to find that now. When I first went to Ballingeary in County Cork, I never heard a word of English spoken there. Does anybody who knows Ballingeary today imagine that the same is true? When I first knew Tourmakeady in County Mayo, 95 per cent of the people there used Irish as their vernacular: do you think five per cent do today? That is the awful test.
The pool which supplies what we hope is the running river of the Irish language is drying up and if it does dry up, the language will certainly die. I remember that near Ballingeary, one passed through Gougane Barra. The local fable was that the stream running down into the lake there was the source of the Lee and that the Lee got its name from this phrase: The stream was seen to roll like a silver ribbon down the mountainside until it reached the lake and seemed to move no more whereupon someone said: "Tá sé in a luí." But the Lee will continue to flow through the city of Cork from the little mountain lake in which that stream finds its source. If the lake dried up the Lee would cease to flow and the city of Cork would proceed to perish. The source of the language is dying out in the Gaeltacht and in the next ten years you will have "Gaeilge nua" or "Gaeilge státsheirbhíse" or anything you like, but I think the Irish language will be dead.
Before I depart from this topic I should like to say one last word. I want to speak Irish. By "Irish" I mean the language which was spoken by our people down through the centuries, the language spoken in various idioms and spoken in various accents. I want to speak it in such a way that those who hear me speak will say—"He learned it in Donegal", just as somebody who hears me speak now will say—"He was born in Dublin and he lived in the West of Ireland" or who hears the Minister speak and says "He is a Limerick man". I do not want to have thrust upon me any "Gaeilge nua". I do not want to have thrust upon me, on my children and my children's children, a language that nobody ever spoke, a language that has been invented, a language without character, parenthood, origin or source, and I urge upon the Minister that such a bastard language cannot survive.
The Irish I learned was a living language. It is still a living language. I learned Irish in Donegal 40 years ago. Nobody said "Níl"; everybody said "Chanil". I got into the habit of saying it and the people of the West would look at me twice when I said it. That has changed because it is a living language. No Irish person in Donegal in the old days would say "níl mé". But, the old people still say "Chanil", when they use the language for emphasis. There is the living language but it is subject to the law of change. We hear Irish being spoken on the radio and television. Better modes of communication bring people into contact with other parts of the country and they learn that nobody else used that form "Chanil".
I could give other examples of a living language changing to adapt itself as a living language should, but I know of no place in the world where we have a Government trying to substitute for a living language, a language that nobody speaks or ever has spoken until it was invented in the Department of Education and in the remote recesses of Leinster House where nobody caters for—I forget the name they call it; tá focal ann ach níl fhios agam cé'n t-ainm atá air anois—"Gaeilge nua" nó rud eile mar sin. Mr. Chairman, what a relief it is to me to find you have only resumed the Chair after I have completed my references to your observations. I should like to repeat them but with respect to your temporary dignity, I shall refrain.
Everyone has his own feeling about the language, but the Minister has announced that he is going to abolish scholarships altogether. I am not sure that he is right in that. I am not sure that scholarships are perhaps our last hope for making Irish something precious here. There is something infinitely attractive in being able to say to every child that he can earn his way to secondary school and ultimately that he can become a senior graduate in a university, through maintaining a standard of Irish scholarships.
I suggest to the Minister that he might bear that in mind. Over and above the broad sweep of general education for all, we might abolish compulsion and say that Irish shall be taught to every child in every primary school in Ireland but that thereafter it will be the means of relieving the burden left by the Minister for Education on the parents by letting those children who choose to make it their handrail on the stair of education to the highest rung so that they may aspire to whatever faculty their natural gifts lead them.
There is a further matter relative to education to which I should like to make reference. I am not trying to pursue the matter of the shortage of teachers. My Party dealt widely and comprehensively with the need for a revolutionary development in the whole scheme of the education of our people. I should like to deal with current problems. I make no secret of the fact that I have advocated repeatedly in this House the substitution of parochial schools for one teacher schools. I know some of my colleagues in my Party have dissented from that. I advocated that when I was Leader of the Fine Gael Party and I still do. I know when the Minister for Education and his predecessor sponsored that plan he came under heavy criticism and gross insult in public, but from a source from which I would expect nothing else, and he faced it with dignity and courage.
I want to emphasise that there is one mistake which the present Minister is in danger of making. It is one I exhort him not to fall into. He will not complete this job of streamlining the educational accommodation in rural Ireland in a week, in a year, or in ten years or 20 years. It will take a long time. I implore him not to be going down to individual parishes under the dictation of the Minister for Finance and trying to force on a reluctant people and, in some cases, on a reluctant manager, centralisation. There is a great deal of inherent conservatism in our people. It is sometimes an exasperating quality but it is often a very lovable one. There is, in many cases, a sentimental attachment to the school and a pride that the school is in the neighbourhood. Country people very often have an extraordinary horror of allowing little children to go unattended four or five miles from home and of the thought of their coming home four or five miles. It is a novel idea to them.
I would suggest to the Minister to make it known in any parish where the manager and the people wanted this new idea of a central parochial school with the many attendant amenities that his resources would make it possible for him to provide if there was one school in the parish instead of three, four, five, six or seven scattered small schools, that he provide free transport and see that the children were brought safety into school and home from school, and that he would propose a remedy for the problem of the infant classes who finish early whereas the other children do not come out until 3 p.m. or 4 p.m. Parents ask: "How are the babies to get home?" Explain to the parents: "We will have a room for them with toys and amusements and we will keep them occupied while they are waiting for the older children to come out for the bus." He would get applications from more parishes than he could hope to meet in the next ten years.
I believe that almost all the parents and managers would, by that time, have become converted to the concept, and the flow of applications would snowball in on top of him and instead of forcing it on people, he would be obliged to say: "Now you will have to take your place in the queue." I have had to draw the attention of the Minister to several cases in Monaghan in which he wanted to force the people. I pointed out that the people did not want it and in some cases he said that the manager did. It is not an uncommon situation, both in Protestant and Catholic schools, that the manager wants it but the people do not.
The Minister will see that in our educational policy we propose that there should be parent-teacher associations so that the views of managers and parents could be co-ordinated. Such an organisation does not exist in rural Ireland at the present time. It is overdue. The Minister is likely to be gravely misled. The manager says: "I want this. Do not ask the people; I know the way the people think." The people come to me, their Deputy, and say: "We do not think the manager is right at all." I have had occasion to say to them: "Do you know the manager has been up and told the Minister you want it." And I have been told: "We asked the manager to call a meeting and he would not call it." In another case, I was told that the people called a meeting; and they called the manager to it, and the manager went to it and said to them: "There is no use sending a letter to the Minister because I saw him and he told me he wanted no letter from ye."
Now I would be delighted to tell them if I could in conscience, do so— I think Deputy Colley was Minister at the time—"That is the kind of man Colley is", but I could not in conscience say that, and I said: "Tell the manager from me that I do not believe the Minister ever said any such thing, and if the manager will not send the letter from you to the Minister, send the letter to me and I will send it to the Minister." I must say Deputy Colley said to me that before a decision was taken in that particular case, he would send down a senior and responsible inspector of his Department to call a meeting of the parents and discuss the matter with them. I have not yet heard what the sequel is.
I found a parish in Monaghan where the manager and the people wanted centralisation. I must give credit where it is due. I rang the Department and I said: "Here is the ideal thing; here the manager and people want it. Come here and do it and when you do it in this parish—it is nearly in the middle of the country—I will guarantee you will be smothered with applications when they see how it works here, but for heaven's sake, take the pressure off the other parishes which are dividing into warring factions and where not infrequently it is creating ill-will between parish priests and people or rector and people." In Monaghan particularly, this is true, as it is in Cavan and parts of Donegal. If you have a situation in which that kind of grievance exists, a lot of the ordinary Protestant people of Monaghan are inclined to say: "If we were not Protestants, we would not be treated this way," though I know in some such cases the manager is saying one thing and the people are saying another.
I want to impress on the Minister with special emphasis that he should try to get it done voluntarily and that there will be more voluntary applications than he can deal with, and even though it may involve administrative inconvenience and may mean maintaining two-teacher schools for the present where it would be better to centralise, the whole thing is that it is far better to do it that way. He will have plenty of applicants to smooth the way before him. The other thing I want to say is this: Look most suspiciously at any application coming from an area where there is a Protestant school, unless there is an express wish from the people, the parents of the children, because the people are conservative. I do not think it is unjust to say that they are shy and they are slow to come forward to make themselves heard but they silently feel a sense of deep grievance and a feeling that they are being discriminated against which I am satisfied is utterly groundless but it ought to be borne in mind in cases of that kind.
I do not know whether the Minister has spoken of the role of parent-teacher organisations throughout rural Ireland. I hope this will be developed and that we will have a more stringent demand from the Minister that in representation regarding parochial education, he wants to know not only the view of the school manager but of the parents of the children and would like to get agreed recommendations from them.
I want to mention another thing. When I heard the Government were to make grants available for the improvement of secondary schools, I thought it was a forward-looking step and I was delighted. I wonder do Deputies know what the situation really is? It has proved to be largely an illusory fraud or a fraudulent illusion, whichever way you like to put it, because the form the grant has taken is that a school comes forward with a plan involving a capital outlay of £100,000 to put up new buildings; it is sanctioned; they put it out to tender and they accept a tender for £100,000. They then apply to the Minister for the £60,000 promised. What are they told? "Oh, we will not give you a penny." They then come to me. I go to the Minister and I am told: "Not a penny. They must borrow it. They must go to the bank. Our grant takes the shape of undertaking responsibility for the annual service of 60 per cent of the debt. If they borrow £100,000 they must service £40,000 and we will service £60,000 over 20 or 30 years, or whatever the period of the loan is."
School authorities were jubilant and ready to go, full of praise of this forward-looking plan. I need hardly say I reminded them that I advocated the plan at the Fine Gael Árd Fheis in 1963, and, as usual, those fellows picked it up. I am glad they did and, if I can help in any way, I ask them to let me know. They know I first advocated it and they come to me and tell me the whole project is held up; they were told they would have to borrow the £100,000 and the Government would guarantee to service 60 per cent of that £100,000. They are responsible for finding 40 per cent. They believe they can get that by way of bazaars, pledges and so on and so forth. However, when they go to the bank, the bank manager laughs at them. He will not advance one sixpence. The banks have no money because the Government have borrowed it all from them.
I found the whole thing astonishing and I asked if they had told the bank manager the Government were guaranteeing 60 per cent. The bank manager laughed. He said the Government owed the banks £60 million and they had nothing to lend. I advised that they should go to their superior in Dublin and he would go to the bank and get the money without the slightest difficulty. The superior said: "Oh, no; the day before yesterday I tried to borrow from the bank and the bank manager ran me out like a dog."
Does the Minister not appreciate that this is very fraudulent? Nothing can be done and nothing will be done until the credit freeze, for which the Government are primarily responsible, comes to an end. If one promises an educational authority 60 per cent of the cost of improving a school and that school so informs the parents, is it not a shocking thing then to inform them that they will not get a penny? The Government have borrowed all the banks have to lend and it is no use going to the banks. Surely something ought to be done to remedy that situation? The only thing the Government can do is to tell them to go ahead with the school and the Government will meet the bills year by year, as the building proceeds, up to the limit of 60 per cent, taking the risk that, when 60 per cent of the work is done, the banks will be in a position, or somebody will be in a position, to lend them the balance, which they will have to repay in accordance with the usual terms. I need not elaborate further on that. The Minister probably understands the problem and will let us know what he is in a position to do, without further amplification on my part.
There are two other things I want to mention. Both are contentious. One is the whole question of examinations. I do not know what has gone wrong, but something has gone wrong. Are other Deputies conscious of the number of their neighbour's children who are entering hospitals with gastric ulcers? When I sat for Matriculation I cannot remember lads of 17, 18 and 19 going into hospital with gastric ulcers. It was a very rare condition. How frequent has it become? Did any Deputies read recently the World Health Organisation publication on suicide? The suicide rate amongst students is statistically significantly higher than it is amongst almost any other category of persons.
Now, I am all in favour of some test but, unless we are all dotty, we are not going to drive our children into a sickness which may pursue them all through their lives. The odd thing is that it is my distinct recollection that 40 years ago students worked harder than they do today. They devoted more time to study, but, whatever the reason was, there did not seem to be the same angst amongst the young people, an angst which is, as I see it, a source of potential lifetime illness, psychiatric or physical. Whether or not that is due to the examination system I am not quite clear. I think it probably is, and I think one of the reasons is a new departure in a good many professional examinations; these used to be genuine qualifying examinations; today, they are highly competitive. They are not nominally competitive but they are, in fact, competitive. One sees in certain professional examinations that 50 per cent of the students have failed in their finals.
I have a kind of uneasy feeling that a standard is being consciously set designed to limit entrance into that particular profession and the pressure on the students is building up all the time. The total number of vacancies in the profession at which they are aiming is being silently and tacitly restricted. All examinations now are becoming competitive instead of qualifying. I sympathise with Deputy Booth when he says it would be desirable to have all examinations abolished, if that were possible, but I have never yet heard of a practical proposal for the selection and segregation of aspirants to higher education except by way of examination.
If there is a practical way in which you could personally interview every student and get an approximately satisfactory verdict from the board of examiners as to what a boy is fit to do, I think it would be much preferable to the system of examination, which, as Deputy Booth pointed out, may depend upon whether a child is nervous on that day, whether he has got a tummy upset, or any exceptional circumstance obtains, whether the board interviewing him could make due allowance for that and, if he were unduly nervous, calm him down and encourage him, or, if he got sick, tell him to come back in a hour's time or come back tomorrow. But is it practical? Can you do it, especially if you are going to have, as we hope to have, higher education for all? If it is, I think it would be better, because God knows, I remember an interview once conducted in University College by two of the most distinguished Gaeilgeoirí in the world, great scholars, and I was obliged to say to my old friend, Dr. Douglas Hyde, in Irish: "Tell that other fellow to shut up; I will talk to him no more", which I must say Dr. Douglas Hyde did, and I got the examination. I do not need to say who the other examiner was; he was a very great scholar but a very disagreeable man. But that is an exceptional case and, in any case, even though there was one examiner who was no help to the student, there was also present an examiner who understood and who saw that the student needed what I think, in retrospect, was manifestly a fair deal, when I passed. But is it practical? If it is, I am in favour of it; if it is not, then I think the whole question of examination ought to be re-examined with a view to lowering this element of tension which seems to have entered in.
I am not saying—and I do not want the House to think I am saying—there is being thrust upon students an undue volume of work in preparation for examinations, because I think they are doing less work. I think we worked harder—longer hours, did more home work—than students do now, but there was absent from our challenge to examination some element which creates that tension for students today which did not seem to exist in my time. Whether this is all due to examinations, or whether it is part of the general atmosphere of tension that builds up in the utilitarian world in which we live, I am not quite clear but I think there is something going wrong.
