There is a lack of proper consultation between the Department of Education and the teaching profession. In recent years there has been a lack of consultation between administrators, school managers and teachers. That that should happen at any time is undesirable, but at a time of immense change in educational requirements, at a time when the Department of Education after decades of neglect is making changes, it is deplorable in the extreme that adequate consultation did not take place.
Many changes we have. Many changes are promised. Many of these changes are not changes for the better. They are changes for the sake of change. One particularly worrying change has been the apparent anxiety on the part of successive Fianna Fáil Ministers for Education to steal from the people who have done so much for education in this country the honour which is theirs. Of late we have threats of going even further and stealing not only their honour but also their property, to take by stealth the control not only of educational programmes but also of buildings and properties which belong to the parents and to school authorities who during decades of neglect invested their savings and their money at great sacrifice in secondary school building.
We have here evidence that the Department of Education is contemptuous of religious control in secondary schools. It would appear from the way in which the teaching brothers and sisters have been treated that they are held in greater contempt than anybody. I want to speak vehemently against those people who in recent times have been slighting the teaching brothers who have done more for secondary education in this country than everybody else put together. The teaching brothers not only have dedicated and sacrificed their lives to the teaching of Irish youth but they have also sacrificed income which was theirs by right so that by making these sacrifices they could invest in school building and school facilities. They have done even more than that, they have sacrificed portion of their own salaries to subsidise the inadequate salaries which were paid by the Department of Education to lay teachers.
It is churlish in the extreme when you see an Assistant Secretary of the Department of Education delivering a lecture in Britain, and later on repeating what was said in the lecture in print in Ireland, implying that the teaching brothers have been unfair in the treatment of their pupils and their lay teachers and that the teaching brothers have, as it were, reaped certain personal benefits for themselves at the expense of pupils and lay teachers.
I believe that we have come to the crossroads. If the Department of Education and the Minister for Education continue in this attitude the gauntlet will be thrown down and, as happened 100 years ago, the parents of boys attending the teaching brothers' schools will stand by the managers of these schools. The parents of boys of teaching brothers' schools send their children by their own choice because they have every confidence and faith in the teaching brothers and they will not accept that the people to whom they have entrusted the education of their children are to be replaced by administrators acceptable only to the Department.
The teaching brothers of whom I speak are the Irish Christian Brothers, the Presentation Brothers, the Patrician Brothers, the de la Salle Brothers, the Franciscan Brothers and the Marist Brothers. We have had criticism from the Department of Education and from other wiseacres in our community about the size of classes in the Christian Brothers' schools and other religious controlled schools. Any blame attaching to the size of classes lies not with the brothers but with the Department of Education for failing to provide the brothers with the means to engage sufficient staff. Even if the size of classes in Christian teaching brothers' schools were to be doubled, you would still have many disappointed parents because there are far more boys seeking places in all the teaching brothers' schools than there are places for them, notwithstanding the fact that the brothers have made such tremendous sacrifices over the years to receive into their schools as many as possible of those seeking to get in.
The Assistant Secretary of the Department of Education with the benediction of the Minister, whose permission he had to get before he went into print, has inferred that the brothers were laggards because they did not engage sufficient lay teachers. The truth is that the brothers have, I think, roughly speaking, an equal number of lay teachers to their own congregation members in their own schools. If there are schools in which there are insufficient teachers the blame lies not with the brothers but with the Department.
The geographical location of these schools is another factor. Many of the brothers' schools are located in parts of the country which are not acceptable to lay teachers and their families. There is no blame attaching to the lay teachers who do not want to go to many of the schools which are out of the way. But it has often happened that, when the brothers advertised for lay teachers to fill vacancies in some of their schools, they received numerous replies to their advertisements. However, as soon as the applicants learned the location of the schools, they declined to come there. Another reason for the shortage of teachers in secondary schools lies in the fact that we have not got enough specialised teachers, we have not got enough teachers available for certain of the disciplines. However, all these real difficulties were glossed over by the Minister for Education and by officials of his Department in their criticisms of those who had been conducting the schools over the years with little thanks —not that they ever looked for thanks —and with little help—not that they ever looked for much help. No matter what they looked for, they got precious little. It is time we had an end to this apparent prejudice on the part of successive Ministers for Education against the secondary schools of this country being conducted by religious teachers. If the day comes that Irish parents do not want secondary schools to be conducted by members of religious orders, I have no doubt that they will find alternative places to send their children.
The article to which I referred written by the Assistant Secretary of the Department ended up with a slighting comment inferring that the brothers, nuns and religious did not want to be partners, but that they wanted to be masters in secondary education, that they wanted to be the dictators in everything. I am not aware, Sir, that the teaching brothers and sisters want to be dictators. I am aware that they have, time and time again, like other teaching organisations in the country, sought consultation with the Department. I am also aware that no real consultations took place in relation to most of the problems.
We have been told that agreement was reached on the new form of Leaving Certificate. Agreement with whom? Certainly it was not agreement with the teaching profession because the teachers, both lay and religious, clearly indicated to the Department, again and again, that the form as prepared by the administrators in Marlborough Street was not acceptable to them. Although the Department was told that, the Department made a public announcement that agreement had been reached. We now have the ridiculous situation in which sewing is on the same level as mathematics for Leaving Certificate qualification. We now have the ludicrous suggestion that what you might call the domestic sciences are to be treated as equal in educational worth to knowledge of languages and mathematics. I do not think there are any parents in this country who for one moment believe that knitting is an achievement equal to that of higher mathematics, but apparently this notion is one which is acceptable to the Department of Education. This is the great new liberal syllabus we have. It is one which is certainly doing a great disservice to the whole idea of education.
An indication of the ill-treatment suffered by people who dedicate their lives to the service of youth is to be found in the manner in which the Department of Education discriminate between the pay they give to lay teachers and the pay they give to religious teachers. I would ask Members of this House to concern themselves about the unfairness of an arrangement whereby a teacher with experience in a national school who qualifies to teach in a secondary school will get credit for experience in the national school if he or she is a lay teacher, but will not get credit for experience in a national school if he or she happens to be a member of some religious order. We had the Minister for Education in London the other day saying that he was in favour of giving recognition to Irish teachers in respect of their teaching service abroad provided they were not members of religious orders. This is outrageous apartheid. Why should we victimise Irish boys and Irish girls who dedicate their lives to teaching simply because they are members of religious orders? If a Christian Brother qualifies after some years in a primary school to teach in a secondary school he will not get the increments and the benefits which a lay teacher in similar circumstances will get. But if the brother happens to be released from his religious vows and returns to "civvy street" he will immediately get an increase in salary because he leaves Holy Orders. This is a most unfair practice and one which I would earnestly appeal to the Minister for Education to stop.
I have spoken about the problems of the religious teachers because I think we are not sufficiently aware of the tremendous difficulties under which they are labouring. It may well be that the more recent attacks by successive Fianna Fáil Ministers on the religious teaching profession will alert people to exactly what has happened. I know we have a lot of easy and cheap talk about celibates not being the best teachers. One would think that they were reared in some sterile test tube and had no human or family associations before they entered religious orders or that, once they entered religious orders, that was the end of all their human experience. As I have said, the Irish people for over 100 years have sent their children to the care of religious orders and I have yet to hear any genuine body of criticism from all those parents. I am aware, however, as all Members of this House must be aware, that most parents are eternally grateful to the religious orders——
