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Dáil Éireann debate -
Thursday, 16 Apr 1970

Vol. 245 No. 9

Committee on Finance. - Vote 27: Office of the Minister for Education (Resumed)

Debate resumed on the following motion:
That a sum not exceeding £5,899,000 be granted to defray the charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1971, for the salaries and expenses of the Office of the Minister for Education (including Institutions of Science and Art), for certain miscellaneous educational and cultural services and for payment of sundry grants-in-aid.
—(Minister for Education.)

Anyone who has had to concern himself, whether on the Government side or the Opposition side, with the problems of education in the last few years must sympathise with the task of any Minister faced with the complexity of the problems that exist today, problems some of which are the consequence of the accumulation of neglect, lack of action, lack of policy, by the Government over a long period of time. I do not think it would be right to say that the entire blame for it rests on the other side of the House. Over the last 50 years all Governments have given inadequate attention to education, have tended to let education drift. It must be said that in the last few years the Government have begun to face up to these problems. In doing so they have at times tackled accumulated problems in a moment that has given rise, perhaps, to unnecessary difficulties. They have shown perhaps a lack of tact at times in coping with problems, and I shall have criticisms of this kind to make in the course of my remarks.

Over the last few years the 50-year lag in coping with educational policy has begun to be made up. However, although there are many useful things in the Minister's speech, I am disappointed that there is no overall perspective in relation to educational problems. There is no review of the whole situation, no attempt to set out principles by which problems might be tackled, no attempt to identify the major issues, to state what should be the aims of educational policy.

This is one of the reasons why some of the problems we face today are so intractable. For anybody not deeply involved—as the Minister now is; of course he has always been involved to some degree because of his profession, as the officials of the Department have been deeply involved throughout—the educational issues to seem extraordinarily complex and there is no clear view as to what the Government aim to do. If you want to find out what the problems are and how the Government intend to tackle them and what their aims are, it is necessary to do an enormous amount of detection work. One has to read a variety of ministerial speeches and different debates. One has to read articles by officials of the Department or interviews with them in the press. One has to read through a mass of material difficult to find, difficult to collect, out of which one then has to construct some kind of picture as to what is the philosophy of the Government in this regard.

What one finds is very largely that the broad aims of the Government are given and they are tackling many of their problems energetically. However, I do not think the informed public, the teaching profession, school managers, have any clear picture of what the Government aims are. There has been no White Paper on education, no overall statement of Government policy. We are in the extraordinary position that we lack any basic Education Act setting out the rights and duties of the different interests engaged in education. Indeed we have the most ramshackle system, I suspect, of any country in the world, built on a number of Acts, some over a century old. The most recent Act, I think, for secondary education was 1878. The national school system is founded on Acts of the 1830s. Legislation seems to have come to a stop with the School Acts and the Education Act of 1930. Educational legislation generally in Ireland came to a stop almost a century ago. Since then, whether under the British Government or our own Government, we have pursued, for the most part, a policy of masterly inactivity and have allowed things to take their course.

In the last few years new pressures have galvanised the Government into action. New policies are being pushed ahead but without any legislative basis, without any effective policy statement, without any White Paper and without any clear understanding on the part of those who are subjected to these new policies as to what the aims are. At the moment the educational interests are sectionalised and this is manifesting itself in the present campaign for salary increases. But even if one can get those concerned in education to raise their sights above the problem of teachers' salaries it will be to no purpose if the Government do not set out their policy. Many of the suspicions that have been created among educational interests have been due to this lack of clarity on the question of policy. If the Government set out their policy clearly and cogently, set out their argumentation, how they proposed to tackle the problems, the arguments they could put forward would be so strong as to command far more support than they are getting now, because all the individual educational interest sees is that pressure is being exerted on it to change some aspect of its activities. Neither the reason for these changes nor the aims are clear and the natural resistance of people to change is reinforced because they do not know what the change is all about. From talking to those interested in education of all kinds it appears that the Government's policy is regarded as being obscure. When the Minister has time to take his mind off the many complex problems he has to deal with I suggest he should get to work on a White Paper outlining the Government's aims and policies, so that we would be able to find the whole education picture in one document. Certainly, nothing of this kind exists today.

I have been trying to find out what the main issues in education are and what main principles we should be concerning ourselves with. One could of course tackle a debate of this kind by taking primary education first, then secondary education and so on. To some degree it is necessary to do that in order to cope with the details but I prefer to start by trying to isolate certain general issues in our educational policy and then to consider the implications of each of these in the main sections of the educational structure. There are five issues which we have to consider and the Government's problems derive mainly from the fact that these different aspects of the problem can be in conflict with each other.

I am not putting these five issues in any particular order but first of all there is the desirability for maximum participation by all concerned in decisions affecting them, which is, in effect, full consultation in the truest sense of the word. Secondly, there is the need to secure more effective utilisation of resources. We are spending over £50 million a year in this area and there is a need for economy by avoiding duplication and employing resources to maximum benefit. Thirdly, and this needs to be stated most at a time when it is not receiving the attention it deserves, there is the need to maintain high standards. Indeed, our standards have not been high in some respects and the need to secure high standards has tended to be understressed. The very proper concern about equality of opportunity has tended to lead to a situation where high standards are played down, and if you speak about the need to maintain high standards you are accused of elitism, which is, of course, the great modern sin. Fourthly, is the achievement of equality of opportunity in education and in society through education. This is the predominant theme of modern thought in which education tends to be seen as a means of securing this objective which is vital to society. It is, therefore, understandable that people place great importance on it yet we must beware, while pursuing this end, not to impinge unnecessarily on some other aspects, particularly on the question of high standards. Finally, and this again involves the possibility of conflict with equality of opportunity, there is the need to maintain maximum variety in education in order to avoid uniformity of curriculum in the whole school system.

Each of these five objectives of an educational policy is potentially in conflict with some or all of the others and this is the basic dilemma. If you are going to pursue high standards singlemindedly this will be at the expense of the most effective utilisation of resources as it is going to be uneconomical because high standards in education are costly. If you are going to maintain variety, which will give a freedom of choice, this may be done in a way which would have a disadvantageous impact on the achieving of equality of opportunity. Everyone concerned with administering educational policies must tend to view maximum participation as an obstacle to progress. The more you bring people into decision making the slower the process will be. As people tend to think narrowly in their own interests there is a danger that they will have sectional and individual interests. Participation is most desirable in this field because the whole of the public can be involved. Pupils, students, parents and teachers can all be involved in the making of policies which affect them; there are few more sensitive areas and few areas where participation is more critical.

These five objectives are constantly in conflict with each other as our educational problems are so complex and so difficult. There is always the danger that at any given moment one particular strand of policy will be uppermost in our minds and the others will be set to one side and given inadequate attention. It is very difficult to make a balance of conflicting interests because there are fashions; at one time the fashion may be maximum equality of opportunity, as it is at the moment, and we are all dedicated to achieving that goal, but this is in conflict with other aims and the problem is to ensure a balance.

Moreover, in this country we face additional problems. The problem of achieving those five aims is complicated by certain historical factors. The main one is that which I mentioned earlier—the total neglect of educational policy for almost a century, the attitude of mind expressed by a former Minister that his job was simply to look after the plumbing and ensure that the water went through the pipes and that the leaks were mended but not actually to do anything to modernise the plumbing in any way. The fact that that has been the attitude of successive Governments—British and Irish—for so long has meant that there is an accumulation of educational problems in Ireland which is probably greater than anywhere else. It would be difficult to find another country where the structure of education and the legislative base is as antiquated as it is here. I recall some years ago doing a study of secondary schools statistics dealing with the question of the languages being taken in the secondary schools over the years. I was fascinated to find that I could go right back to the beginning of the system in 1878 and the statistical tables were in identical form throughout the whole period. For a century nobody had even thought of improving the lay-out of the tables, never mind the content, not that there was anything much wrong with them necessarily but there was here evidence of an extraordinary continuity, an extraordinary carrying on of the same method without ever looking at it afresh. In this, I think, we are unique and therefore our problems are so much greater because there is such an accumulation of past problems to be overcome.

We have a problem also—and this is something which is firmly stated in Fine Gael policy and something that has to be said—in that our Department of Education has not developed as Departments of Education have elsewhere with a staff of professional educationists concerned with policy-making. We have the problem that in our Department of Education, and this is increasingly rather than decreasingly so, policy-making at the highest level is carried out by people who are not professional educationists but administrative civil servants. They have, of course, acquired enormous expertise in their field over the period. Nobody who has had any dealings with them will doubt their competence and their grasp of the problems but that is not quite the point. The style in which a professional educationist would tackle some of these problems would be different in general from the way in which an administrative civil servant, however competent and fully informed, would tackle problems. The absence at the highest level in the Department of professional educationists formulating policy as is in fact the practice in other countries is a serious defect. I recall hearing that a senior official from a Department of Education in another country visited here some years ago and remarked to somebody when leaving that he found it absolutely astonishing that this situation could exist, that in his country it would be inconceivable that anybody other than professional educationists should be concerned with policy-making, and that there should be no one at the highest level in that position seemed to him to be astonishing. To be precise at that stage I think there was one official who was a professional educationist but he has since been moved to another post and we are now in the position for the first time in many years that there are no professional educationist at the top level in the Department. This is a serious defect and something that has affected the style in which the policies have been carried out. I do not necessarily think that professional educationists would have adopted strikingly different policies but the way in which they would have implemented them would have been different and I think there would have been less problems and tensions. This is merely a matter of opinion and I cannot expect everybody to agree with me on this.

A further complication and one on which I must dwell for a little while, because it is something which we do not talk about sufficiently but it is of vital importance, is the very complex relationship between Church and State in relation to Irish education. It is a relationship of many dimensions—on the one hand the benefits that education has secured in Ireland with the participation of the Church are enormous in both primary and secondary spheres—notably of course in the secondary sphere where the whole burden of building up the system devolved effectively, on the Catholic side, on the religious orders. At the same time this deep involvement creates problems. One of the first problems is that by taking the development of post-primary education off the shoulders of Governments in fact it encouraged governmental neglect in this area. This was partly remedied in 1930 by the introduction of the Vocational Education Act but nevertheless in the whole secondary area Governments opted out because the job was being done for them on the cheap by the Church. This held back the development of education in Ireland because no matter how devoted the efforts of the religious orders, no matter what enormous proportions of salaries they ploughed back, no matter how they devoted their energies to fund-raising, the pace at which they could expand the educational facilities was necessarily limited. It is incredible that such a large educational sector was developed privately. I doubt if there is a precedent anywhere.

I remember looking at figures some years ago relating Ireland to Britain in the field of grammar school education. I reckoned at that time that the volume of pupils produced as a proportion of the total population was several times higher in Ireland than in Britain although here the whole burden was carried by the religious orders. I feel, however, this has created a number of problems. One is that it encouraged governmental neglect. Another is that the performance of the Church was for academic type education for reasons associated with the very nature and character of the training of the clerical personnel involved and perhaps also because of their preoccupation with securing vocations to maintain the life of the Church in the future. For these reasons they have tended to concentrate on the academic side of education and we have an academic educational sector in Ireland which is very large in relation to our needs and which because of the devoted work of the clergy has developed such an esteem in public opinion, an esteem going beyond that normally granted to academic versus vocational type education in other countries, that it is in fact very difficult to restore the balance. There is on the one hand the fact that too much resources are devoted to academic type education.

We are turning out a much higher proportion of academically trained people than a country like Britain. We do not have the opportunities for them. We are in fact in some degree, because of this academic orientation, encouraging emigration. The Minister will recall the Drogheda manpower survey from which it is clear that if one simply takes people who have an academic intermediate certificate and pushes them on to the academic leaving certificate level one merely reduces, in a sense, their job opportunities because the proportion of jobs available at the higher level is so much smaller that one is educating people in the academic stream beyond the availability of posts for people who are very academically educated.

Of course this is one of the problems the Minister's Department have been trying to tackle and indeed their efforts here certainly deserve praise although the methods adopted have at times not been as tactful as they might be nor as successful as they might be. However, they have certainly identified the problem, the problem of an excessively large academic sector, an inadequate technological or technically orientated sector. They have identified the problem of the lack of parity of esteem between the vocational schools and the academic or secondary schools aggravated by the exceptional esteem in which the clergy themselves are held and in which their schools are held because of the atmosphere there is in these schools and the character training and formation that they provide. The Minister's Department have been tackling this and trying to restore balance.

I will not say this problem has been created by the very considerable role of the Church in Irish education because the problem exists in every country to some degree. It has, however, been aggravated here and the imbalance between the academic and technical sides is greater here than in other countries. This is due to the fact that the Church have concentrated solely on the academic side. There is no use trying to find fault with the Church for that. They concentrated on what they knew they were good at and did it superlatively well. They provided us with virtually free education because before free education the majority of schools provided education for a fee of £10 or £12 a year which is virtually free and in many cases of course they did provide free education where parents could not afford fees. They provided free secondary education to a very high proportion of our people and the fact that it was more academic than was perhaps appropriate to our needs is not something for which they could be blamed. They did what they knew they could do well but objectively this has created a problem of imbalance.

There is also a problem arising out of the existence of this very large private sector in secondary education, the fact that our secondary education system is entirely privately owned— a problem which the Government have not yet succeeded in resolving. I do not blame them for this because a solution seems almost impossible. It is the problem of combining privately owned, privately operated education with free education. The difficulty here lies in the fact that if education is privately owned and run the different orders, the different school managements and the schools will adopt different policies. Some will adopt policies of providing education cheaply above all. Others will be concerned not with providing it at the cheapest possible rate but with providing the highest quality, with having a very favourable staff/student ratio, with having school libraries and with having playground facilities, et cetera and so provide a more rounded and fuller education. Both of these are lawful aims pursued by different managements very properly but the consequence of pursuing these different aims is to create a private sector in education in which the cost structure varies in the order of two to one. I made calculations in 1967 and at that time it seemed to me that the range of costs in education, including costs of salaries, was in fact in the order of two to one ranging from perhaps just under £60 per pupil in the schools with the lowest fees to perhaps over £130 a year for a pupil in the more expensive schools. This is not surprising. That range of variation is about what one would expect to arise given the pursuit of these divergent objectives of, on the one hand, cheap education at all costs and, on the other, a fuller education with maximum amenities and facilities. Of course, the existence of this disparity in costs does create a problem when one tries to convert this system into one of universal free education. This is a problem which arises out of the fact that secondary education is entirely privately owned and run. It is one which the Government will clearly have great difficulty in resolving.

In the secondary sphere, however, although these problems exist as a result of the role of the Church in education the balance sheet is one which I think all must agree is entirely favourable to the community. Given the choice between not having the Church doing what it has done over the past century and having it do what is has done and leaving us with the problems that arise from it, I do not think that anybody would hesitate for a moment in choosing between these two courses of action. We owe an enormous debt to the Church. There are these problems which we must tackle and resolve.

In the sphere of primary education the balance sheet is less clear. It is not as clear to me that the benefits we have secured from the participation of the Church are as great as in the case of secondary education and the disadvantages that accrued from it have been rather greater perhaps. The managerial system clearly has serious weaknesses. It is showing its cracks at the moment. The primary schools are meant to be community schools. I have tried to find out what, in fact, is the legal position with regard to these schools. I must say I failed. I once pored over the Acts of the 1830s in the hope of receiving some enlightenment but I got none, although I found many other interesting Acts which distracted me from my work. I have not been able to establish clearly what the basis of our present system is.

These schools are, it seems to me, in theory community schools. I understand they are owned by trustees. From what I have heard—and again one has to go by hearsay in this area which is an extraordinary fact in itself—the trustees appear to be the Minister and the bishop of the diocese in question in the case of Roman Catholic schools. The trustees apparently appoint a manager. The manager, by long practice, is the local parish priest.

This practice grew up in the 19th century for I am sure very good reasons. The achievement of a balance between the role of the Church and the State in Irish education in the 19th century was extremely difficult. The suspicions of many of the bishops, but not all—Bishop Doyle being an exception—of the British Government's possible role in regard to Irish education ran very deep. The Government, on the other hand, were trying to get an educational system established and it must be said that they made great efforts in this respect and that we did have a national educational system further advanced even than Britain had at that period.

This is one of the things the British Government did for Ireland even though one of its consequences was to speed up the process of anglicisation as a by-product. In introducing that system it was, perhaps, understandable at that time that the disorganised Irish people, demoralised after a long period of the penal laws and the loss of their leaders at the end of the 17th century and by the Famine coming in the middle of this period, should not have asserted their right to play a part in this and should have been content to accept a system of a rather paternalistic character. The system was one which provided, in the context of the 19th century, a satisfactory solution to the problem of that time.

Of course, it is extraordinarily anachronistic that at the present time towards the end of the 20th century we have these community schools which are, in theory apparently, the property of the community but in which the local community have no role to play at all and, in fact, have not even the right to have a voice in the selection of the manager. I think that if they had such a voice they would almost invariably choose the parish priest or the curate nominated by him. In fact, they have not got such a right and, of course, we must face it that this had adverse effects. If you have a system in which people are automatically, appointed, and if they are appointed ex-officio by virtue of an office which is held largely on grounds of age—because, in fact, the appointment of a parish priest is on seniority —and if the people concerned are universally celibate, you will not necessarily get the most efficient, interested, concerned, able, energetic or educationally orientated managers for your schools.

Indeed, if you set out to devise a system under which you would be unlikely to get that result in a sense you might choose a system like this. In fact, of course, because of the great sense of responsibility of most members of the clergy the system has in most instances worked well. The trouble is that there is no provision—or has been no provision until recently—to cope with cases where it does not work well and the cases of neglect of school management by clerical managers are a source of great concern to local communities and I think, indeed, to the Government, and to the Church who have woken up to this problem recently.

This system of managing local community schools is clearly an anachronism and one which needs to be reconsidered. This is something which will probably be done gradually. I believe that the process of change will be one in which the Church will co-operate. I will come back to that again in relation to the question of the role of the parents. The statement of the Hierarchy on this subject is a very constructive move in the right direction.

I want to make the point at this stage that our problems in Ireland are complicated in the primary sector by the existence of the system which has certainly served us well in the past but which is now something of an anachronism and which does, in fact, militate against the exercise by the parents of rights which are not only guaranteed by the Constitution but which are asserted in theory and in very strong terms by the Church. It has always seemed to me to be, perhaps, the greatest paradox in the Irish Church that this assertion of parents' rights in theory is accompanied in practice by an almost universal denial of rights in regard to the running of community schools.

There are other problems which have arisen from the role of the Church. There is the tendency in some parts of the country to adopt a protectionist attitude in relation to the diocesan colleges. The absence of adequate numbers of schools run by religious orders in certain dioceses is attributable to a long tradition of protecting diocesan colleges from competition by minimising and, indeed, in some cases preventing the intrusion of schools run by religious orders. This has meant that secondary education in Ireland is extraordinarily patchy and particularly in the northern part of the country. I do not mean in Northern Ireland but in the northern part of the Republic and this may be true of parts of Northern Ireland too. The distribution of secondary schools is quite inadequate and, as the Investment in Education study shows, the variation between the availability of secondary education in different parts of the country can be as high as the order of three to one, this being in large measure due to the different policies adopted by the individual churchmen in different areas.

You have another variant of this in other parts of the country and, in the south, in a city like Cork, diocesan policy has prevented any religious order, other than brothers, from establishing schools. These irrational elements in the educational system have complicated the whole problem of educational policy making. These are facts we have to face. We have tended to ignore them and push them under the carpet. They are now pushing their way out at the edges, the carpet is getting a bit frayed, and we have to do something about them.

There is there a whole area of complication. It is complicated further by the fact that when we talk about the Church in Irish education we do not really talk of any institution. The Church means so many different things. It means individual bishops concerned with their diocesan colleges. It means parish priests concerned with the schools they manage. It means religious orders concerned with the schools they run. Indeed, at times these interests can conflict. A couple of years ago there was a serious conflict between religious orders and the Hierarchy in respect of educational policy arising out of the Government's new scheme for free education. This kind of situation can arise and we should beware of talking about the Church in a monolithic sense.

The Church is a whole collection of interests, internally conflicting themselves at times and, for this very reason, difficult to come to grips with. It is not as if the Minister could go to some one person and say: "Look, can we fix this up together?" On the contrary, he is dealing with a variety of interests who do not agree amongst themselves, and it must be extremely difficulty to tackle problems in this way. Our problem in Ireland is not the existence of a monolithic Church. It is the absence in the educational sphere of anything of the kind and the extreme dispersion of authority on the religious side.

Another problem that arises because of the Church-State relationship in Ireland is, of course, the problem of teacher promotion. With so many schools run by religious orders and traditionally maintaining the head-masterships in their own hands, the opportunities for teacher promotions are limited. This has created a very extraordinary position in the secondary teaching profession in particular in Ireland. It has caused problems in the primary sphere at times but these have been dealt with by a kind of standstill policy to prevent any further erosion in the lay area.

In secondary schools, when there are so few lay secondary schools, and when the vast bulk of the teaching posts are, in fact, in religious schools, the absence of promotional outlets poses a very serious problem. It is one which I think the Minister is concerned about and I believe that if he tackles it energetically he will get the co-operation of the clerical managers in dealing with it. One of the problems here was created by the Department's refusal to create headmasters' allowances and their insistence that headmasters cannot be paid anything by the State unless they actually teach. This has created an impossible problem.

The schools cannot afford to appoint lay headmasters because they will get nothing from the State to pay them so they appoint a member of their own community who in some cases does enough teaching to qualify and in other cases does not. The Department must share a considerable part of the burden of responsibility in relation to the problem of the lack of promotional outlets because had there been headmasters' allowances I believe many of the clerically owned schools would have been agreeable to the appointment of lay headmasters. They have said so themselves in discussing this problem. There is a difficulty here.

Another area of complication in the Irish system is the question of co-education. The absence of co-education is not a purely Irish phenomenon—it exists in Britain also—but it is rare elsewhere. Perhaps if the British tradition of segregated education had not existed we might not so easily have developed into a single-sex system of education. The role of religious orders in teaching has meant that schools have developed either as boys' or girls' schools except where there are strong economic pressures, as in the west of Ireland where, due to the low density of population, schools have been mixed without creating any problems.

However, a problem arises where it is proposed to amalgamate two small schools in an area where the boys' and girls' schools are run by different religious orders. The problem of how to get a single school with a sufficiently large stream to warrant the variety of courses and options that are desirable certainly exists. It has arisen recently in Tramore where it may not have been handled as tactfully as it might have been. Perhaps the Department may have done their best but they may have faced local pressures about which they could do nothing. This is an extra problem in Irish education arising from the role of the Church.

My final point is a basic one— the complications involved in having two different streams of education, Catholic and Protestant, in a country with a low density of population. When you also have the separate development of the vocational-type education from the secondary-type education it gets completely out of hand. Even a country consisting mainly of large cities and towns might find it difficult to cope with this problem but for a country with a low density of population to have Protestant secondary schools, Catholic male secondary schools, Catholic female secondary schools and mixed vocational schools in any area is imposing an impossible task.

Many of our problems in education —the lack of variety and the inadequacy of standards—derive from our attempt to run four streams of education in a country with a density of population one-seventh that of Great Britain. The Department are trying to cope with this problem and one has sympathy for them. The position is complicated not only by the sex division but by the religious division and, while this is a point that must be respected and an attitude that will change only with time, there is a growing feeling that this division in its extreme and acute form is unnecessary and could gradually be resolved.

I was struck by the fact that at a rural convention of my own party a few months ago a resolution was passed by an overwhelming majority against religious apartheid in Irish education. However, any change must be gradual. If we started to make radical changes now the minority could conceivably regard those changes as directed against them. They have the problem of maintaining their identity and if it is suddenly proposed to merge them in schools that are nominally non-sectarian but in practice are predominantly Roman Catholic this could pose problems for these people. This is an area in which we must move gradually because of the feelings of the minority and also because of the fact that the majority of the people have a preference for separate religious education that must be respected.

It is worth reciting those problems because it is only when one stands back from them that one can see how complicated is the situation. We face the problem of securing at least five aims which are potentially mutually conflicting, against an historical background with many complications, many arising from the particular role of the Church in Irish education. One appreciates how difficult this task is for the Minister and his Department. While we have many criticisms to make we recognise the problems involved and that they are working to catch up on the backlog of neglect in a situation which is extremely complicated and difficult. They would be helped in their task if they clearly stated their objectives, if they set out what they are trying to do in a White Paper and tried to secure public support for these aims. The failure to state those aims explicitly has been a serious disadvantage.

To revert to the matter of the five aims. I shall first discuss the problem of participation in the educational process. I said earlier that there is an opportunity for participation with the people involved in education which is greater than in other areas. There are problems involved but we are beginning to tackle them. Ideally in theory, the pupils, as the consumers, should be the people mainly concerned. In the past the idea that the pupil might have anything to say about the way in which he was taught would have been dismissed as ludicrous. I recall speaking to a senior official of the Department of Education five or six years ago when I expressed the view, in relation to university students, that they might have something to offer on university education and that even the views of schoolchildren were worth having. Judging by the expression on the official's face I am sure he thought I was mad. However, we are moving a little in that direction and there is a recognition that students in universities have a role to play in the policies that determine their education. As reasonably mature people they have something to offer in helping to ensure that their education is as full as it might be.

In the secondary schools also there is the beginning of a recognition that pupils have something to offer. In the past year we have had a development in Dublin of SRCs in schools, mainly involving senior pupils. One school in Dublin has an SRC involving all the pupils for many years and this has operated successfully. This is itself an educational process: it gives people responsibility within reasonable control to ensure against abuse. It engenders a feeling of responsibility and we must remember that much of the irresponsibility of pupils arises from the fact that responsibility has been withheld from them by adults who have not shown very much maturity themselves.

We must face the fact that up to and including university level there is a problem of maturity and judgment. There is also the more fundamental problem of the transience of students —in the university they are there for only three or four years and in the schools the pupils who could possibly make useful contributions are usually only the top forms. The short period they are there means that to set up an institutional representative structure is difficult because of the constant turnover of people and this has posed problems in the attempt to get SRCs established in some of our schools.

It is encouraging to see the desire of students and pupils to participate. Most of their thinking is constructive. Of course, there is the possibility of radical elements trying to get control of movements of this kind. We must face this problem and we certainly do not solve it by depriving people of responsibility. If they are given responsibility they will cope with the problems themselves. It has been found in universities that the more responsibility students are given the better they cope with aberrant behaviour.

They are much better able to cope with it than the authorities are. It is encouraging that we have had this development and, even at the secondary school level, there has been some attempt, with limited success, to establish some kind of organisation of secondary students at senior level. These are developments to be encouraged. However, throughout the educational process, up to the tertiary level, in primary and secondary education the main role has to be played necessarily by the parents and the whole problem is to secure parent involvement in a system which has been directed hitherto very much against parents to exclude parent participation. Again, this must be done gradually. There is no need to force a revolutionary change, but you do need to put pressure on for change and there is need to encourage a change in attitudes. We are, I think, beginning to get this. I noticed in the Minister's speech a favourable reference. As regards the primary sector, he recommended the proposal of the bishops in the document issued by the Hierarchy, to which I shall refer, and the fact that the Hierarchy have expressed themselves in favour of manager/teacher/parent associations. The fact that the Minister has endorsed this means that we are moving into a period in which parents will participate more fully at the school level. By becoming organised nationally I hope they will be able eventually to contribute to the formulation of educational policy through the process of genuine consultation.

I should like to read to the House the statement that was issued by the Hierarchy. It is contained in a document I was sent by the appropriate authorities, which goes on to comment on the bishops' statement. I find the commentary rather odd in that the bishops' statement is positive and clear while the rest of the document seems to try to take back everything said by the bishops. I am not sure on whose authority this was done, or why it was done. The statement by the bishops is one we can, I think, all endorse.

The bishops approve of some broad principles for the formation of manager/teacher/parent associations for primary schools. The object of such associations is to help facilitate the involvement of parents in the work of the schools, particularly as regards the religious and moral formation of the children and to encourage communication co-operation between parents and managers and teachers, without prejudice to their respective functions.

That could hardly have been better put. The next sentence in the document seems to me to take back what was said. The document says:

The bishops' statement clearly anticipates the danger that parents, or even people without children in the school, may get to run the school or attempt to do so.

Whatever the statement does, it says nothing of the kind. It is a most positive statement. There is nothing in it about the danger of people taking over. The rest of the document goes on then to speak at great length about these alleged dangers:

There is, of course, a danger also that parents generally may show little interest in participation and, for that reason, it is better to stress the positive side. The parental participation in the schools would be a good thing and parents must be encouraged, and even educated, to participate fruitfully rather than have an association. Whatever form parental involvement may take the manager retains his responsibilities and the staff remain in full control of the professional area. But the statement does commit the managers to some form of parental involvement and, a fortiori indeed, commits the teachers.

I am not quite sure what that means. How will the Hierarchy commit the teachers?

From what is the Deputy quoting? He has merely described it as a document.

I wrote to the organisation of clerical managers of primary schools and it was from them I received this document.

How formal should parental involvement be? The bishops seem to follow in line with the thinking of the Plowden Report that formal parent/teacher associations are not necessarily the best means of fostering close relations between home and school.

The bishops, having said the exact opposite, it is difficult to follow the reasoning there.

What matters most, the Report wisely says—this is the Plowden Report—are the attitudes of teachers to parents, where there is a genuine mutual respect, where the parents understand what the schools are doing for individual children and the teachers realise how dependent they are on parental support.

That is the end of the quotation from the Plowden Report. The document goes on to say:

Attitudes involving the managers are of corresponding importance. The smaller the school, it would seem, the less need there may be for a formal association with an elected committee and so on. The bishops do think, however, that in the case of larger schools it may be felt necessary to have an elected parents' committee. We append the suggestion that the bishops make towards the formation of such a committee.

I am puzzled by this comment on the bishops' statement. I welcome the bishops' statement and I hope the bishops will manage to communicate their thoughts more clearly and more forcibly to those whose job it is to implement them so that a much more positive commitment will evolve right down the line. All we can do at the moment is welcome the statement. The fact that we have this positive commitment at the primary level is a great step forward and in a recent article in the Irish Times of Tuesday, January 20th, it was suggested that well over half of the 70 parishes in the Dublin area already have these associations. Great progress is, therefore, being made in this particular area as a result of the intervention of the bishops and, indeed, the encouragement given by the Minister and, to some degree, by former Ministers also. This is something, of course, on which we on this side of the House are very keen and in our policy statement issued 3½ years ago we came out strongly in favour of parental involvement in education.

At the secondary level we now have a parent/school movement in Dublin and parent/school associations organised in other parts of the country and we have in these the beginnings or the embryo of a movement which can lead to much fuller participation by parents in the running of schools. A hopeful element here, though it is not developed as fully as one would wish, is the fact that these committees include representatives of the pupils as well as the parents and the teachers. I expect this is possibly the only tripartite body of its kind in Europe that I have heard of in which you have participation by parents, teachers and pupils in the same committee. This is something which should be encouraged.

The position in the secondary schools is different from that in the primary schools. The primary schools are for the most part community schools and, as such, the parents have a particular role, a role they have been frustrated in playing in the past but which they will begin to play, we hope, in the future in these manager/teacher/parent associations proposed by the Hierarchy. The secondary schools are privately owned. They are owned by bodies dedicated to the provision of education. They regard themselves as trustees for the community and they welcome involvement by parents in the work of the school. There are exceptions. There is still resistance. There are schools which still resist this co-operation, but it must be said that the movement in Dublin has had quite remarkable co-operation, particularly from some of the most influential and progressive religious who have given the movement their wholehearted support. While there are some enclaves of resistance these are diminishing as the movement progresses with the support of influential clergy, nuns and brothers. There is, of course, very full recognition of the fact that the role of the parents must be limited to the area in which it is appropriate for them to play a role. The professional business of teaching is a matter for the teacher. The running of the school is a matter for the manager. The parents' role is participatory. One could envisage them selecting the manager as, in theory, they do under the present system, but management itself must be vested in some person and that person must be allowed to get on with the job and the teachers must be allowed to get on with their job. Fortunately, this is fully recognised and there is no attempt to press the role of the parents beyond its proper place. I think no tension need arise in this regard.

This question about participation, however, is one which we must take up to a higher level. It is not only a question of participation of parents in the running of the school by involvement in parent/teacher associations and committees: it is a question of the involvement of parents and, above all, teachers in formulation of national educational policy. Here, I think there is a marked contrast in the attitude of the Government and the attitude of this side of the House. I am not, as the House will see, making a political speech. In certain areas there is a genuine divergence of view and no doubt for good reasons. The Government have, no doubt, good reason for holding their views but there is a divergence and here, I think, is one of the places where it is most marked. We believe firmly that in the formulation of educational policy and most particularly in matters relating to the curriculum and examinations the role to be played by the Government, by political Ministers, by administrative civil servants and even by professional civil servants, educationists in the Department, is a limited one.

The devising of the curriculum and the running of examinations is not a proper function for a Government Department. In fact, in these islands I think we are now the only place where there is governmental interference in this area. It was the case in the North of Ireland as in the south, that the educational curriculum and examination system was controlled by Government Departments. In Northern Ireland, however, in 1961 a schools committee was established which was given extensive functions theoretically to recommend to the Minister about the curriculum and examinations but in practice they ran the examinations and, in practice, as their recommendations were made publicly to the Minister, not behind closed doors, the Minister, if he wished to reject the recommendations, would have to do so publicly and justify his action. The Minister, in fact, accepted their recommendations and so happy was he with the committee that within a couple of years he volunteered to extend their terms of reference. Now we are in the position that a Bill has gone through the House of Commons and the Senate in Stormont, the Education (Examinations) Bill, introduced at the end of last year, December 3rd, 1969, and I shall just read from the relevant report of the debate in Northern Ireland to show the progress being made there in this regard:

The House of Commons at Stormont yesterday gave a Second Reading to the Education (Examinations) Bill, the aims of which are to provide for the establishment of new examinations leading to the Certificate of Secondary Education. The Bill also provides for the setting up of a Northern Ireland Schools Examination Council with two examination boards, one for the new CSE and one for the General Certificate of Education. The Council will be an independent body.

Introducing the Bill for the second reading the Minister for Education, Captain Long, said that the examining boards in England and Wales for both the GCE and CSE—the latter has been in operation throughout the United Kingdom for several years—had always been independent bodies and responsibility for the Scottish certificate examinations has recently been transferred from the Scottish Education Department to an independent body.

He said that he was satisfied that the Northern Ireland Ministry of Education should no longer be directly involved in the conduct of these examinations. The arrangements set out in the Bill represented the best method of ensuring the co-operation of the various interests concerned in examining at these levels.

Captain Long said that the characteristics of the new CSE were that it was intended to reflect and not in any way dictate the work being done in schools. Its constitutional and administrative arrangements were such that examinations would largely be controlled by the teachers themselves.

There is progress for you.

Will the Deputy give the source and date of the reference?

Irish Times, 4th December, 1969, Stormont Report. This is something for which we have pressed for years past. In our policy document we adverted to the schools committee in Northern Ireland. We pointed out how successful it had been and that the whole question of curriculum and examinations was not a proper matter for political civil servants or political Ministers and that it should be devolved in this way. I have argued this in the Seanad with previous Ministers and have found strong resistance to it and a determination to hang on to these power which are not exercised anywhere else in these islands. One must ask why? Is this part of the philosophy of the Government who believe they must hang on to power in every area? Some on this side of the House would believe that this is simply a reflection of that mentality. It may also be a reflection of a particular aspect of this whole question, the fact that the Government wish to keep control over one particular aspect of the curriculum and, therefore, the rest must be kept under control also.

The Government's Irish language policy, running counter to the wishes of the majority of the Irish people as is clear from public opinion polls that have been carried out on this question, in forcing the language examination system, has meant that they are determined to retain control of the examination system for this purpose. We are, therefore, in the position that there is a refusal to devolve authority in this area because of this particular policy-making aspect. In other words, politics are introduced into the educational system by an attempt to use the educational system to enforce a particular political policy of requiring that this particular subject be passed in the leaving certificate examination or otherwise the certificate will not be given. Because of the determination to enforce this policy the entire educational curriculum and examination system is kept under tight departmental control.

There has been a process of consultation in recent years. The views of teachers have been heard but have not always been listened to. We had the famous case about four years ago where the teachers of English recommended two examination papers in the intermediate certificate. They were told they could not have that. The reason was that there was only one in Irish and apparently it would in some way reflect on the Irish language if it had only one paper and English had two. The educational requirements of the teaching of English had to be subordinated to a Fianna Fáil Party political policy. This situation is intolerable and one which needs to be denounced firmly. The whole question of examinations and curriculum should be a non-political matter. There should be no attempt to enforce a particular ideology in this way. It is a technical education matter as to how best our people can be brought to the highest point of educational development. This is something best done by the professionals. That is recognised in England and has been all along. It has been recognised in Scotland for some years past and it is now recognised even in Northern Ireland. Yet, we must be illiberal in this area compared with other parts of these islands.

I am aware that in some other countries there is State control of education. I know that in countries like France there is very tight State control and that this is one of the great defects of the whole French cultural system. The tight control of education in France is to be deplored and is in itself a cause of great political discontent there. In this instance—I do not recommend doing it in every case—we could look to neighbouring parts of these islands and see the success they have had in devolving authority in this way. This is a professional, technical matter, a matter for the expertise of the people concerned. It is preeminently a matter for the teachers in consultation with parents and other educationists to work out for themselves. For our part we are committed to implementing this in government and getting away from this political control of curriculum and examinations.

I have been dealing with participation at the local school level, at the national level, participation of parents and teachers and I want to move on to the second aim I mentioned, the effective utilisation of resources. I shall not dwell at lenght on this but I have a couple of points to make. We must accept that there is a need for this. Some of the changes in the structure of education which the Government are seeking to introduce arise from the fact that there is a very serious maldistribution of educational resources. The Investment in Education report threw up the fact that there are something like 1,200 teachers in rural areas teaching in small schools under conditions which produce educational results measurably inferior to those in three-teacher schools or schools of more than three teachers and that amalgamation of these small schools could release a net 1,200 teachers to help to cope with the problems of large classes in the cities where there are classes of over 50 and even over 60 and where the problem, as the Minister's reply to a Parliamentary question showed some time ago, is becoming worse.

This maldistribution of teaching resources must be tackled and the Government tackled this over the last three years. On all sides of the House they have had support for a policy that is politically unpopular. The attitude of the Opposition parties on this issue has been a remarkable exercise in political responsibility. Of course, there have been individual cases where we believe the Department's actions have been inappropriate, where they have closed the wrong schools, or gone the wrong way about it or have acted tactlessly and we have quite properly criticised individual cases. We have uniformly in our policy supported the Government in carrying through this exercise but we feel they should carry it through with far more tact and far more consultation than has been evident hitherto.

The Government's idea of consultation emerged at Question Time a few months ago on the question of one of these schools. It transpired that the Minister's and the Department's definition of consultation is to tell the people what you are going to do the day before you are going to do it. That is not consultation. Consultation means going to people to tell them what you have in mind, to explain it to them, to persuade them by arguments, to listen to their views and, if necessary, to go back again to them. It may take three months before you bring the people around to your point of view. It does not mean coming down with a diktat. There is no use pretending as was done in that case, that there was unanimous agreement when, indeed, all except one or two people had the other view. That is not consultation; it is the most phoney exercise imaginable and it destroys the credibility of the Government when they involve themselves in that kind of exercise. We criticised the inadequacy of consultation in these cases and in particular cases we criticised the decisions which were taken.

We had a debate here on the Montpelier School. It seemed to me that here was a serious blunder. I regret that the Minister did not admit that a serious mistake had been made. It was not his fault as he was not Minister then and it may be that the mistake was made before his Department got involved. When a mistake is made it should be admitted. To try to enforce the wrong decisions is foolish. On several occasions, as it transpired when we extracted with great difficulty the figures from the Minister, we saw that the numbers in this case exceeded the level which entitled it to three teachers. Owing to the fact that the manager took no action to get a third teacher or to deal with the inadequacy of the school nothing was done. It remained a two-teacher school although the numbers on several occasions justified it being a three-teacher school as the Minister had to admit. Instead of building up that three-teacher school it was closed in favour of a two-teacher school elsewhere with fewer numbers and which was declining and where there are extraordinarily few children coming forward. In the Montpelier school the average number of children coming forward each year was more than sufficient to ensure that the numbers would be maintained in the years ahead. I pointed this out to the Minister and in the submission of a complete list of children below school age to him he has been able to see that the flow is there. The reply I got from the Minister claimed that some of the children were children who did not normally go to the school. I cannot really see the relevance of this even if it is true which I am not sure, and that others were only there temporarily.

The Minister said that his inspectors inquired of the teacher, who was not a native of the area, and he asked the children and they produced their brothers and sisters to the number of 31 but they did not produce the full list. I did produce the full list for the Minister and he has attempted with no success to discredit it. I cannot remember the exact number but there are 43 or 45 children under school age in the area and his attempts to pretend that this is not the case are not convincing. In the other school there is nothing like that number. The wrong decision was taken and this school should have been retained, the school with the larger number of children coming forward. Perhaps the mistake was made at local level in the first instance by the manager. It is not the Minister's job to stand over a mistake of that kind but it is his job to ensure that justice is done and in a case like this where children are deprived of a school instead of suffering a further extra penalty because the manager did not seek an extra teacher the Minister should have shown special consideration because their interests were not looked after. The school should have been kept open and developed into a viable school as, indeed, it could have been. I am aware that one- and two-teacher schools are not educationally desirable or economically sound ventures but here we had a different case and the Minister should have admitted that he or his Department or somebody else was wrong and rectified the matter.

There is still an opportunity for him to do that for the parents have shown their genuine concern in this regard by keeping the school open and paying the teacher. Of course, many children have moved to another school but quite a number are still there. It is quite wrong that the parents should be burdened in this way when they had a viable school and were deprived of it by the manager not requesting another teacher when it was appropriate and when the school was entitled to it. I would urge the Minister to show some respect for the wishes of the parents when they have shown themselves so concerned for the interests of the community and the children and admit that he was wrong. We will give him every support as we have done on general policy. There are, of course, occasions when mistakes are made but when they are they should be admitted and the position rectified. The problems of the effective utilisation of resources are not confined to primary schools. This problem has given rise to additional difficulties because owing to the low density of population and to the division of the educational system into four streams, to which I have referred, many leaving certificate classes in many schools are too small to be viable. If one is to have a range of subjects, a choice of subjects, if the number of pupils is to justify the continued provision of teaching it is necessary in some cases to rationalise the system. This is a painful exercise because it involves combining schools run, say, by different orders or different sexes and in some cases it may be necessary to amalgamate schools of different religions. The Department have tackled this problem energetically and in some cases not very tactfully; in most cases they have shown the degree of firmness necessary to secure good results. It is a difficult exercise and one should not be too critical if it gives rise to human failings in some cases.

To turn now to the third of the aims of the educational system: the question of high standards. We have to be objective about this. In this country we tend to be terribly on the defensive if any criticism is made of any of our institutions. The primary education system for reasons which are not the responsibility of the teachers has not been securing adequate standards in the pupils who have left the system. The evidence on this is overwhelming. All the attempts to discredit Father McNamara's study have failed. One can explain them away on the edges a little bit and minimise them but one is left with a residue of fact which is compelling. Any objective person reading that study and making full allowance for possible margins of error could not doubt that we are in the position for reasons which are not the fault of the teachers, the educational levels attained by pupils leaving primary schools at 12 or 14 years are lower and considerably lower than in other countries.

This is something we should face up to. When this book came out there was an immense campaign of denigration that anything of this kind could be true and an attempt was made to demolish his conclusions and to suggest that he had a bias of some kind. This was an academic study of the highest order and the study carried out with the highest standards and with the close co-operation of the Department. This was an appalling conclusion. The lag involved was very great and even when he himself had allowed for certain factors which minimised it we were left with a 17 month lag in our children leaving primary schools.

This is a social crime. The pupils who suffer here are for the most part the less privileged in society. Parents with money can get over this problem. Their children can go on to the secondary school and can catch up at that stage, or if there is a problem in a particular case they can send the child to a private school or switch it to some other national school and drive it there themselves if there is a transport problem. We have imposed on the less well off section of our community a lower educational standard and held back their advancement in carrying out this policy in a manner which cannot be justified.

His book showed that at that time —I know it has been modified since; that is one of the great achievements of the study that it did secure a change in policy—that 43 per cent of the time in the national school for teaching other than religious teaching was devoted to the study of Irish. As the total time in our schools is less than in schools in Britain, for example, this meant that the actual amount of teaching of children in English and arithmetic in our schools was not much more than, if it was even, one half of the volume of teaching secured in schools in England. It puzzles me that when this study was published people should express their surpise or dissent from the conclusions. If in fact this was the case—and I think he established it clearly; his samples were very carefully chosen and there was a whole range of different samples that came up with this figure—that there was this extraordinary proportion of time devoted to one subject and that the teaching time for English, arithmetic and other subjects was correspondingly reduced, why should anybody be surprised that the standard of attainment at the end of the child's school career was 18 months behind the British standard? Our children would have to be superbly more intelligent than the British if with half the teaching they could be as well educated.

We have to face the fact that we have pursued a policy of teaching the Irish language in the primary schools which has diminished the volume of education in other subjects to the extent that our children are held back and they go abroad, or we have sent them abroad through the inadequacy of our social and economical policies, at a disadvantage. Let us remember that the studies carried out in regard to emigrants in Britain showed that the Irish have a lower standard of education than the West Indians. That is what this policy has driven us to.

Of course the consequence is not confined to the emigrants. It applies to those left at home also. I know some change is taking place in this but it is a change far too gradual to remedy the social injustice involved. This is something which should have been tackled more energetically instead of gradually changing the system, gradually building up the teaching of other subjects and waiting for more efficient teaching of Irish to make it possible to reduce the time. A decision should have been taken that in the case of the children in these primary schools the time given to different subjects should have been adjusted to equality so that they would be given a fair chance. Even giving equal time to Irish, the imposition of this additional subject would have had a retardatory effect but it would have been much less than it has been by giving to Irish twice the time given to English, the vernacular language of over 95 per cent of the children concerned.

These wrong priorities are the cause of one of the most serious injustices we have perpetrated in this country and one we need not have perpetrated. Goodness knows there is enough social injustice that we have inherited and failed to resolve without adding to it by our own deliberate policies. I speak with feeling on this because this is something which stands to the discredit of the Irish State during the first half century of its existence. It is more discreditable because this country always had a tradition of high standards in education. The enormous efforts put by Irish people into securing education for their children, the extraordinary prevalence of the hedge schools and the large number of children attending them, the early development of the national school system in Ireland, these are all things that have stood to us, and the fact that the effects of these have been diminished by the operation of this policy is something of which we should be profoundly ashamed.

I mentioned earlier that there is a potential conflict between some of the egalitarian policies we properly pursue to ensure equality of opportunity and the maintenance of high standards. There is the danger that in trying to make everybody equal you do this not by trying to pull everybody up to a certain level but by pulling some up and others down. This is something we must resist. There is no reason why we should fall into this trap. We should be able to pursue policies of social justice to ensure that the educational system is profoundly changed so as to crete equality of opportunity while at the same time maintaining standards.

The anti-elitism prevailing today is often misplaced. On the question of equality of opportunity, the fourth aim of educational policy, it has been put to me sometimes by people involved in education who do not like any change in the system that there is no proof that a greater measure of equality of opportunity will be achieved through changes in the educational system. I do not accept this. I think the proposition is selfevident: if you segregate different social classes in different schools you provide a class structure. If you bring them together you will not readily eliminate class differences but you will mitigate them.

Indeed in our own country we have evidence of this. We can see this in the difference between rural and urban education. In the rural areas it is a normal practice for all classes to go to the national school, and class divisions in rural areas are much less acute than in urban areas. In the urban areas the tradition is for the middle classes very often to send their children to non-aided primary schools, at least the Catholic middle class. The Protestant middle class, because there is more social uniformity amongst them, often send their children to Protestant national schools. There is much greater class division in the cities than in the countryside. We should endeavour to eliminate these divisions. Education is the key here and we should not pay too much attention to people who try to throw dust in our eyes by suggesting the contrary.

There are very great problems in changing the system in order to achieve the desired result. In primary education there is the fact that we have the non-aided primary schools as well as the national schools. This is a cause of great controversy and indeed of some bitterness. Some people argue this perpetuates class differences. I think there is a case for saying that in its present form it does to some degree. The position is complicated by the fact that many of these non-aided primary schools are preparatory sections of the secondary school and that most of the intake of the secondary school comes from the non-aided primary sector of the school. Therefore the opportunity for national school children to attend these schools is limited and these schools tend to be one-class schools; at least the class range in these schools is much less than in other schools.

This is clearly undesirable and it is something which needs to be tackled. It is not, however, an easy problem. First of all, I have mentioned as one of the legitimate aims of educational policy that of variety. To take the non-aided schools and put them into the national school system and make them all uniform would be undesirable. The national school system is loosening up as a result of the new curriculum, and it must be freed from the tight hand of bureaucracy which has remained over it for so long. To take the non-aided schools and put them into this system would simply be to lose something of value, because we want as much variety as possible.

We could tackle this problem by trying to encourage as many as possible of the non-aided schools to become national schools. The manner in which national schools can be established is fairly flexible. It should be possible to encourage many of these schools to become national schools. It might need some change in the regulations but it would be worth while contemplating some such change. The standards of these non-aided schools must be considered; some of them are very good and some are very poor. It would be desirable that they be given some assistance from the State for accepting some control and inspection of the standards which we have in education generally.

It would be worthwhile having some system of giving them aid towards the salaries of teachers, for example, in order to encourage them to come within the system and be subject to inspection. This will be necessary if the examination policy in regard to Irish is changed, as will be the case when the Government changes, when the present requirement that you must take Irish in the leaving certificate disappears. The situation would then develop whereby parents would send their children to non-aided primary schools not teaching Irish, and on to a secondary school not teaching Irish, or at any rate not spending much time on it because there would not be an examination at the end. A situation of that kind would be undesirable. If we are to preserve the Irish language and extend its use it must be taught. The only level common to everybody is the primary school level and it must therefore be taught there; but it must not be taught as it is at the moment where twice as much time is spent on teaching Irish than is spent on teaching the vernacular language of the majority. A system whereby people could opt out of that and send their children to non-aided primary schools and then on to a secondary school where Irish was not a required examination subject would be undesirable.

It is therefore desirable to bring these schools within the system before the policy in regard to Irish is changed. At the moment there is no problem because every one of these non-aided primary schools teaches Irish because the pupils go on to secondary schools which have this Irish examination requirement, but if this examination requirement were removed there would be the danger that the teaching of Irish in non-aided schools would disappear. We will have to guard against that by bringing these schools within the system to ensure that Irish is taught there as it is in national schools and the best way of doing this is by offering them aid.

The main object must be to bring as many schools as possible into the national school system and make it more flexible in order to avoid the distinction which exists at the moment. Where a non-aided primary school is a preparatory school to a secondary school we must also ensure there is a clear provision that a large proportion of the intake to the secondary school must come from other sources. We must not allow a situation to develop where the better-off parents send their children to the preparatory school and they then take all, or most, of the places in the secondary school with the result that there is no possibility of national school children attending that school. The Government could act in this matter by requiring as a condition of grants and aid that some proportion of the places be held open for children from other schools. I think this is an important requirement. I would not set out to abolish non-aided schools, but I think some assistance should be given them to bring them within the system.

When we come to the question of free education, which is, of course, the crucial weapon in securing equality of opportunity, we have to face the fact that for the reasons I mentioned earlier there is the serious problem of combining free education and private education, and there is no satisfactory solution to this problem. Any solution we adopt will, in some respects, be unsatisfactory. I think we have to look again at the system we have created. The Minister will recall that a few days before the Government introduced its policy of free education Fine Gael published its educational policies. We were concerned with securing an extension of free education and our proposals were not dissimilar as regards the amount of additional finance required to secure this aim, but our proposals differed in that we thought additional aid should be given on condition that, where that aid would completely replace fee income, education would be free; where it did not replace fee income, the number of free places must be such as to reflect the additional funds given; and that in no case, if they were to receive the additional grant, should less than one-third of the places be free. This would have meant that every school in the country, without exception, would have had not less than one-third of the places free and in the vast majority of cases all the places would be free. The Government chose a course of giving grants only to schools where all the places would be free. It is hard to weigh up the merits of these two policies; there seems to me to be arguments on both sides, looking at it objectively at this point. The Fine Gael policy would have prevented the emergence of schools which were totally fee paying as against schools that were totally free.

In the Catholic schools we now have a very clear cut division between the 30 fee paying schools and the rest; for the first time we have the introduction of two classes of pupils in our secondary schools. Hitherto, there was a gradation of fees but there has never before been a clear cut division between the two classes. I have always thought that the great weakness of the British system was the clear cut division between public schools, grammar schools and modern secondary schools. I think this clear cut differentiation has had profound effects on British society and even on the British economy. We have always avoided that because, although our system had a class bias, it was a graded class bias. One could not say, on hearing a person speak, "Oh, he's a public school boy, he's a grammar school boy or he's a secondary modern school boy." That kind of class distinction has not existed in this country but, as a result of the Government's scheme, there is a distinction between the 30 schools where everyone pays fees and the rest of the schools where no one pays fees.

On the other hand, the Government's policy which was pushed through with great enthusiasm and élan by the then Minister for Education, the late Deputy O'Malley, did secure the entry into the scheme of a large number of schools so that the actual number of places not now free are very small. There are probably more free places under the Government's scheme than there would have been under our scheme, and that is an argument in favour of the Government's scheme, but this was achieved at the cost of brainwashing schools to come into a scheme which they could not afford to join. This has brought about great tensions and difficulties which will cause problems for the Minister in the years ahead. Certainly, the O'Malley scheme did secure widespread free education. There might have been slightly fewer places under our scheme but we would not have had the clear cut differentiation between fee paying and free schools under our scheme. I have no strong views on it at this stage. They were both enlightened schemes and it is a question of balance of judgment as to which scheme one prefers.

There are features of the present scheme which are unsatisfactory and dangerous. One, is, of course, this clear cut division which I have mentioned already; the other is that many schools were brainwashed into joining a scheme which they cannot afford to be in. Schools which had fees of £40 or £50 have come into the scheme in return for fees of £25 and they have been forced to ask parents to make voluntary contributions in order to pay off their building loans. The reason why the fees were £40 or £50 instead of being £10, £20 or £30 was in order to pay off past building debts. However, the great thing about this scheme was that so many schools wanted to join. We were not faced here with the situation that some people thought we would be faced with where schools wanted to remain exclusive. In fact, more joined because of their enthusiasm for free education and their desire not to be exclusive, and this has created problems. Schools joined on the basis that they could just manage from current expenditure and the £25 extra, thinking they would get voluntary contributions from parents to pay off their building debts and everything would be all right. Of course, this has not worked out in practice. Parents commit themselves but very often cannot maintain that commitment and they cannot understand why, if education is free, they have to pay anything. The scheme was sold as free education when, in fact, it was simply an increased grant to eliminate fees in as many cases as possible. This is something which the parents have not understood because the Government oversold the scheme. That is politically understandable, but it has complicated life for these schools who cannot easily explain why in a free education system parents have to pay. When children leave the school and are replaced by other children the parents of the new children have no commitment to pay and do not see why they should enter into any commitment to pay. This has resulted in schools getting into more and more difficulties. The problem is causing great stress and strain as well as imposing unfair burdens on schools and the Minister will have to find some way of getting out of this.

Apart from the 30 Catholic schools outside the scheme—and it is very difficult to see how they can be brought into the scheme unless grants are increased—there is the special problem of the Protestant schools. The Government took a special course of action in relation to Protestant schools. The problem is that Protestant schools, not having the benefit of the dedicated workers of the religious orders, have had to pay full salaries to all their staff and consequently their fee level was so much higher than £25 a year that they were unable to come into the scheme. The Government gave them a sum of money equivalent to the amount they would have been given if they had all joined the scheme and to allow them to distribute this among themselves on a means test basis. This scheme has caused great tension and difficulties. It is thoroughly unsatisfactory and bitterly resented by a very high proportion of the Protestant community. It should never have been introduced and we will have to find some other solution to the problem. Unless a child passes the means test he or she, in many cases, has no prospect of secondary education. I have figures which I think the Minister has not got and I shall give them to him. The effects of this are that Protestants are being forced to send their children to Catholic schools when they want to send them to Protestant schools or to terminate the children's education. There is clear evidence that this has happened. I shall give the Minister the figures and tell him where the schools are. If they do not pass the means test which is a very rigid means test they now have to pay fees which are very high because fees have gone up. The minimum fee in Protestant schools now is about £70 to £90 as far as I can make out. There are many parents who may not qualify in the means test but cannot afford to send a number of children to schools paying £70 to £90 each and they are worse off than previously because the fees of the Protestant schools have, in fact, risen over the period and they are finding it more difficult than before the scheme was introduced.

In one Protestant primary school the number going on to secondary school has gone from 10 in 1967 to seven in 1968 and to two in 1969. They are being deprived of secondary education because they simply cannot afford it. In a school in County Wicklow—I can give the Minister the names of the schools afterwards but I do not think I should identify them here—two of the three sixth standard students last year could not go on to secondary school for financial reasons. Four girls in another Wicklow school have had to go to a Catholic secondary school in the absence of grants. In another place in Wicklow four girls and two boys are at the local Catholic secondary school. In a Dublin school numbers not continuing at school, dropping out completely from school, have risen from one in 1967 to two in 1968 and to four in 1969 and in 1969 these four represented one-third of the school leavers in the school. From another school in County Wicklow children have gone to local Catholic schools in each of the past two years. In Tipperary in 1969 one child leaving sixth standard went to a Catholic secondary school as did a child leaving fifth standard in 1967 and two leaving fifth standard in 1968. Of ten children in another Wicklow school in sixth standard who are due to leave next June five hope to go to boarding school because there is no Protestant school nearby and it is either boarding school, Catholic school or nothing and the other five would like to go to secondary school but have no prospect. Half of the children in this school will have to drop out because there is no Protestant school nearby and the parents do not want to send them to a Catholic school which I think at this stage is a feeling we have to respect. In another school in Tipperary only five out of 18 leaving sixth standard in the last three years have been able to go to a Protestant secondary school and as many again have had to go to Catholic secondary schools.

The Minister's scheme is operating in much the same way as the Ne Temere decree might operate. It is depriving Protestants of the opportunity of education in schools of their own denomination. While we have our views as to the desirability of this kind of segregation I do not think this is the time to enforce this policy in this way on one particular denomination. This has happened simply because of the fact that they are more dispersed, less numerous, that there are many parts of the country where there are not Protestant secondary schools and that they do not have religious orders to provide free education for them on the very limited capitation grants which the Minister provides, which total about £60 a year for schools. The Minister should have regard to this. I do not think he has had these figures before. I collected them with some difficulty. It is important that account should be taken of the fact that in so many cases Protestants have been forced to send their children to Catholic schools. What is very disturbing is the attitude of the Minister's Department. This is a quotation from Mr. Seán O'Connor, Senior Assistant Secretary of the Department of Education, quoted in a Sunday Press article of November 30th:

The position of the Protestant schools, he admitted, was difficult. They cannot seem to exist on the grant of £25 a pupil which is paid to all schools. Of course the short answer that could be given is that parents should send their children to other schools within the scheme such as vocational ones.

I do not think one can say to one religious community here: "secondary education is out for you. It is all right for Catholics. They can have secondary education, choice of secondary and vocational, but as far as you are concerned you are to send your children to the vocational schools or else send them to schools of a different domination." I do not think any public servant should make a statement of that kind. Fortunately not too much play has been made of it but I think it is a most undesirable kind of remark to make. I think the whole policy here is, in its effects, discriminatory. I know that the amount of money given to Protestant schools is, in fact, greater than they would have got if they had been able to come into the scheme. In that sense there is no discrimination of a financial kind against them but the fact is that the Government have purported to give us free education. Either they have or they have not. Either there is a free education scheme as in the "ads.", as put up on the posters around the big caravan at by-election time, or there is not. If it is free education it should be free education for everybody and if it is not free education, which it really is not, they should not advertise it as free education. What in fact the scheme involves is increasing the grants by £25 a year which enables schools run by religious orders on a very low cost basis to eliminate fees. That is not free education and it should not have been advertised as such.

"How Free is Free Education?" is the heading of that article in the Sunday Press. It is a fair comment and a fair question. The whole thing must be rethought and I do not think the Minister should continue to operate a scheme which forces Protestants to send their children to Catholic schools and when that issue is raised on their behalf with officials they are told like Marie Antoinette “Do not eat bread” or “Send your children to vocational schools. You are not Catholics. Therefore you have no right to have secondary education as Catholic have.” I know that is not what is intended. I know the scheme is not intended to be discriminatory. I know that in fact rather more money is given to Protestant schools than to the others but the effect of it on Protestants is discriminatory. We must consider some other approach to this. We must face the fact that in this country the State has benefited enormously by the efforts of the Catholic religious orders. They have enabled the State to provide education on the cheap.

Fair enough. We should take advantage of that. We have taken advantage of it. It is a great bonus we have got. The Protestants should not suffer because of that. The State has an obligation to provide education on equal terms to all. The fact that it gets out of paying a large part of the cost of education in the case of Catholic secondary schools is not a reason for cutting down the amount it pays to all schools, including Protestant schools, to a level which prevents Protestants from getting secondary education for their children.

We should be delighted to get the bonus we get from the action of religious orders. We should put in a suspense account somewhere the amount of money we would have to pay but for them, and use it for good social purposes, and we should be prepared in the case of Protestant schools to pay the amount of money that would have to be paid to Catholic schools but for the religious orders. The Protestant schools should not have to suffer as they are doing at the moment because of the extraordinary and devoted effort of the Catholic religious orders.

It is an extraordinary paradoxical situation that, because the religious orders have done such great work for their co-religionists in providing secondary education, the Protestants are thereby penalised and that you reduce the whole level of payments for education to very much less than the full cost and apply that to the Protestants, who do not have religious orders, as well as the Catholics. This clearly is unacceptable and the Minister must reconsider this policy. I do not think we can continue to force our Protestant co-religionists to send their children to Catholic secondary schools or drop out. I have given figures showing that in some instances the drop-out rate is rising and, of course, it is rising rapidly in the case of Protestants. The effect of the policy is discriminatory and that fact has to be faced.

I recognise that there is a fundamental problem here as to how you resolve this but it is something we just cannot ignore. Incidentally, I should like to draw the attention of the House to the kind of document a Protestant parent has to fill up to benefit from the free education system. This is the means test document: "Details of pupil, school, home. Distance in miles by road from home to nearest State comprehensive or Protestant secondary school. If day pupil and `boarding out' please state address. Particulars of all children and dependants of applicants. Members of family living at home who are in employment. Members of family living at home but not working. Details of special circumstances. Income details of both parents. Gross salary, commission, pension, dividends, rents.... Benefits other than cash. Does your employer provide you with free living accommodation? Is part of your business premises used by you as a residence? If so, are the rents, rates, etc., thereon charged against your business profits? Does your employer supply you with a car which you can use for private purposes? Do you receive free meals, meal vouchers? Have you any other benefits. If so, please specify?"

Is there any space for religion?

"Necessary expenses not accounted for elsewhere. Interest payable before deduction of tax. Income tax paid. Income tax deducted under PAYE. Farmer and/or landowner to fill in this section also. Land, wherever situated, owned by a farmer. Rateable valuation. Acreage. Buildings. Land taken under rent, conacre or otherwise. Total acreage. Usage of farm. Wheat. Number of acres. Amount harvested. Amount sold. Amount received for sales. Stocks. The same for barley, oats, potatoes, sugar beet and other crops. Meadow. Pasture. Other land. Number of men other than applicant employed on farm. Family. Non-family. Livestock. Cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry. Bought. Born or hatched. Sold. Number. Amount received. Type of cattle. Put an `X' against type applicable. Shorthorn, Hereford, Jersey, Friesian, Ayrshires, Aberdeen Angus, Kerry." There are two blank spaces in case they have any other peculiar cattle. "Milk. Number of cows in milk. June to December. Milk produced and sold. Amount received for sales. Other receipts. From sales of wool, hay and straw, timber, eggs, hiring machinery, letting of land and grazing, stud fees, cartage of milk or other items, keeping guests, other receipts. Expenses. Rent, hire of grazing, rates, repairs, insurance, wages, bank or other interest, seeds, fertilisers, feedstuffs, machinery running expenses, motor running expenses, telephone, electricity, service fees, veterinary medicines and other expenses. Estimated total value of machinery at end of year." Underneath that is put rather oddly: "Name of pupil, school pupil will attend"—just to get back to education for a moment. On the other side of the form: "Nature of farm, mainly drystock production, hill and mountain grazing, creamery milk, creamery milk and pigs, drystock and tillage, creamery milk and tillage, liquid milk, other. For office use only—please leave blank" and a lot of queer initials.

That is what a Protestant has to fill up if he happens to be a farmer and wants his children to benefit from the Government's free education scheme. I do not think even this Government have ever devised a means test as mean as this one and as comprehensive and as detailed and as humiliating. That is what we are asking the minority in this country to put up with under the so-called free education scheme. I should like to ask the Minister has he got this document? Does he know what is being done in his name? Does he know what is being done to carry out this scheme? I do not blame the people who are doing it. They took on this job to help their co-religionists. It is the only way they can get money from the Government. They decided to do their best to try to mitigate the burden of education for some of their people but through them the Government are imposing on the Protestant community an intolerable burden. I should like the Minister to take up this whole matter, re-examine it and find some other answer.

I know there is a problem. Basically, if you have a private education with a cost variation of two to one and you want to make it free, you are faced with a dilemma. If you give an amount which will simply cover the cost of the cheapest schools then some schools will have to charge fees of £70. That is the present situation. If, on the other hand, you give the amount of money required to cover the cost of the dearest schools which provide the maximum facilities most of the schools will get twice as much money as they need, something which no Government or Department of Finance would readily contemplate. That is the dilemma.

Some compromise between the two is required. Clearly what is needed is to raise the grants so that as many schools as possible can come in. I think myself the answer may lie in making some special once-and-for-all provision to cover the past building debts of secondary schools. I suspect that if the Government looked at the building debts the schools have accumulated they might well find that with a fairly small increase in the annual grant virtually all the excluded schools could come in if the Government made some special provision to meet these past debts. After all, these debts were incurred to provide educational facilities for our children. The Government now pay 70 per cent of the cost and ultimately pay 100 per cent through the loans system. There is no reason why this should not be made retrospective if this would tidy up the system and enable us to have free education.

Even if that is done, there may still be some problems. There is a basic dilemma. A private system of education is bound to involve variation in costs as different private interests seek different objectives, either the cheapest education or the best education, both legitimate objectives. To make that free does create a problem. I do not blame the Government for not having found a quick and ready solution. I blame them for the solution they found in the case of the Protestants. I think they ought to consider whether there is any way in which they can get out of the situation where we have 30 Catholic girls schools outside the scheme and then the case of these Protestant schools.

I think this requires more debate than it has had. I do not think people have really applied their minds to this. Incidentally, one reason why they have not is that we have never been given any kind of picture of school costings. Apart from the limited figures published in Investment in Education nobody has ever told us what the position is. Most people thought naively that if they had to pay £10 or £12 for a few years in Christian Brothers schools that was the cost of education but the fact that five-sixths of the cost of that school was carried by the State already was not clear to them.

Nobody has ever published costings for schools to show the range. In fact, the only figures I know of which were published are ones which I estimated myself and published in an article in the Irish Times on 8th February, 1967. These I had to build up by extrapolating forward from the data in the Investment in Education report. No further figures have been published since then. We know nothing about the total costs of education or the range of costs of education. The Government should publish data of that kind showing the range of costs and getting school accounts from different schools showing the reasons why there are these variations in costs.

Then it might be worthwhile summoning together a conference of all the interested parties. The Minister should sit down with the representatives of the religious orders, the managers, the headmasters, the teachers, the parents and even, might I suggest, the Opposition's spokesman on education too. We should all sit around a table and try to hammer out some solution to this difficult problem. I know it is difficult and I am not blaming the Government for not having resolved it completely. The Government should publish a full statement of the facts and the actual educational costings, pose the problem of private and free education, call together a conference and say: "Look, here is the problem. How do you think it should be solved?" We need to put our heads together to find an answer to it.

I have spoken of four of the five aims of education which I mentioned at the outset. I want to speak now for a moment or two about variety and freedom. On this there may be some divergence of emphasis between ourselves and the Labour Party. We share with them the same concern to secure equality of opportunity and do this through the educational system but perhaps we place a little more emphasis on the desirability of maintaining variety and maintaining as much freedom as possible.

The role of the Department of Education should be to encourage variety and not to enforce uniformity. This can best be done by devolving authority for some of the things they are doing at the moment. This question of variety is important in relation to the curriculum. Nowadays, greater freedom is given but the curriculum is still tied down by the examination system and this could best be overcome by giving authority to a schools committee to look after this and take it out of the hands of the Department.

In regard to the new curriculum I should like to ask the Minister to let us know at what stage it is now and what are its implications in regard to the size of schools. There are conflicting views: some say that you can only operate the new curriculum in a six-teacher school and others say it can be operated in a small school. I have heard it said that the design of our schools is inappropriate. To what extent is this the case? Is it necessary for us to design our schools in a different shape and how long will this take? The whole question of the new curriculum is shrouded in mystery and only those close to the problem know what is happening. Perhaps the Minister would tell us something about the plans for the new curriculum in the primary schools and the implications in regard to the size and design of schools.

A point made by the teachers' study group in their interesting report on the draft curriculum is in relation to school libraries. They make the point that the amount of money the Department of Education spent towards the provision of school libraries in the last three years was £35,000 or 1.38 shillings per child. This figure compares most unfavourably with the 5.88 shillings which the Plowden Report gives for primary schools in England. It is stated that the position regarding the availability of supplementary readers in Irish schools has been examined by Kellaghan and Gorman. In a survey of a representative sample they found that in city and rural schools which had libraries there was .6 of a book per pupil. Town schools had one book per pupil. As supplementary readers and text books are an integral part of a new curriculum a huge increase in the annual expenditure by the Department of Education towards provision of reading material is not alone desirable but imperative. It was further stated that clearly a wide variety of reading material will be required to cater for the very wide range of interests and ability which are known to exist within each class. This is a problem in regard to the existing as well as the new curriculum. However, the point has been made in relation to the new curriculum and much more money could usefully be spent on school libraries.

A point made in the study group report is the vital importance of conversion courses for teachers, particularly in regard to mathematics. I know the Department are dealing with this matter and the Minister made reference to it in his opening speech.

Another point I wish to make in regard to the curriculum is one that has often been made in this House and refers to the teaching of history in our schools. The damage done by the teaching of falsified history is very serious and its repercussions continue to be felt in the way in which some groups react and the readiness to use violence in pursuit of political ends. This is a matter we have never taken sufficiently seriously and I should like to ask the Minister if he is satisfied that the kind of books that taught a distorted version of history have been taken out of schools. Is he satisfied that history is now taught in a manner that will eliminate prejudice and help people to develop a genuine patriotism and love of country, rather than the negative hatred that has been the result of the kind of history taught in the past? The Department have a resposibility in regard to textbooks and I should like if the Minister would look into this matter.

Regarding the size of classes in primary schools there is a deterioration in the position that is extremely disturbing. On the 18th of December I asked the Minister a question recorded in volume 243 of the Official Report. I asked the Minister (a) the number of children attending national schools on the 1st of February, 1963, and 1st February, 1968, (b) the number of national teachers at each of these times and (c) why the number of classes with 40 or more pupils has increased in this period in Dublin by 24 per cent, from 1,429 or 71 per cent of the total to 1,769 or 76 per cent of the total, and in the rest of the country by 4 per cent from 2,892 to 3,000. The Minister's answer did not explain anything. He said:

As regards the third part of the Deputy's question the explanation is that the shift of pupils to areas of larger population was not matched by a comparable movement of teachers. The securing of larger school units in rural areas will ensure that this imbalance is rectified.

This is difficult to follow because, as the number of pupils in the country as a whole went up by less than 2 per cent, the number of teachers increased by 3½ per cent and it is difficult to see why the proportion of classes over 40 should increase both in rural and urban areas. I could understand it if a redistribution were taking place, where the proportion might go down in one case and up in another. Whatever the explanation it is a most disturbing fact that, far from making progress and despite the closure of certain schools in rural areas, the problem of large classes in Dublin and the country is getting worse.

I do not understand how the Minister can accept this and I want to raise the point here in relation to teachers. I should like the Minister to state what is his policy as regards utilising the existing capacity in teacher training colleges. In his opening speech the Minister implied that all resources were being used and that he was looking around desperately to enlarge the output of teachers. Is the Minister not aware that one of the training colleges has capacity for a further 100 teachers and that for the last eight years the only reason they have been unable to train more teachers is that his Department will not let them do so? Assuming the figure of 100 refers to the last eight years, there are 800 teachers who might have been trained had the Department given permission to this college to do so. Why does the Minister refuse to allow the facilities in St. Patrick's Training College to be fully used? Why does he say that this college may train only men? Why is he enforcing segregation in education at a time when the country is desperately short of teachers? The training college has the classroom space, for which the Minister has generously provided the funds, and they could certainly take in more pupils. I find the whole problem incomprehensible and I cannot see why the Minister should enforce segregation when the college itself is quite willing to train girls as well as men. Perhaps the Minister in his reply would explain the position?

I wonder if there is any way in which we can help with the desperate problem of retardation of children in urban areas? The Minister has launched the Rutland Street project and this is a great step forward. It is something that will achieve a result in itself and, as a social experiment, we shall learn from it. Is there any way in which the community can apply their minds to this problem? The problem of children in the national schools in Dublin and particularly those coming from the poorer areas of the city is appalling. The home conditions in these areas make study almost impossible. There are many problems of delinquency and difficulties in the home and the schools find it extremely difficult to cope with the children. Can something, I wonder, not be done?

I should like to mention here a voluntary effort in progress at the moment with the help of teachers, students and secondary school children from more privileged backgrounds. They have come together—I do not know who organised it—and, with the help of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, who have allowed them a room in Liberty Hall—they have taken children there to help them every night of the week. From what I understand of it this is having quite a profound effect. There are, of course, many problems. It is not simply a question of helping with homework. The fact that someone is interested and wants to help, and has some human concern for them, is having a profound effect on the children. In some cases there may be a tendency towards over-dependency on those helping. The children are children alienated from the world in which they live because of the conditions in which they are being brought up; they find it difficult to break through and others find it difficult to make contact with them. But the fact is they are making contact and they are helping the development of the children, giving them some confidence and proving to them that the world is not as hostile a place as it it seemed. They are trying to give some help with homework so that these children may ultimately benefit from secondary education.

Could we not do more of this? Could we not give more encouragement to this kind of voluntary development? There are literally hundreds of thousands with the goodwill to help, who are themselves sufficiently educated to help such children, if they are organised. All credit to those who have organised this initial experiment. It is a remarkable venture. Their social consciences have prompted secondary school children into giving this assistance to those less fortunate. Do we always have to act institutionally? Must we always wait for the Department to set up a scheme to do things officially? As a community we have been lacking in both the energy and the will to do things ourselves. This example is one that could well be followed. The Minister and the Department should show some interest and, if there is a little help needed in providing more accommodation, perhaps some flexible scheme to help experiments of this kind could be evolved. We should not be too tied down to doing everything through strict and rigid channels. Small sums to help such schemes could do a great deal of good. This is something to which we could give more thought.

With regard to post-primary education, there is a transition problem. I raised this matter before with the Minister and I was not, I fear, very happy with the Minister's reply. The Minister —he may not admit it here—may not be very happy with the position himself. I refer to the minimum age of entry to secondary schools. The Department laid down a minimum age of entry of 12. This is an arbitrary figure. It has nothing to do with whether or not people are ready for such education. It is destructive in its operation because it holds back children who are ready. It frustrates them. They are held back in the primary school when they are more than ready to go on. A very high proportion of children are ready at age 11 and some at age 10. The child who is ready and able to start first year in the secondary course should not be held back because of arbitrary red tape. This is, indeed, utterly abhorrent.

I asked the Minister the reason for this and he said there were educational reasons. They are anti-educational reasons. This scheme is operating perversely, as the Minister knows from correspondence and from representations made. There is a problem where the school is unable to promote children because they are not yet 12. The clever children are held back and the schools are encouraged to promote children who are not ready, but who are aged 12, because more children are needed in the secondary school to bring the numbers up. The scheme has operated in one instance of which both I and the Minister are aware very perversely indeed. The school has promoted the less able children, who are not ready for secondary education, and held back the children who are ready. This has operated right down through the junior school. The perverse consequence of a totally inappropriate Government policy is something the Minister should do something about. I see no reason for this. The reason the Minister gave was that it would avoid the problem that would be created if children went to secondary school under age 12; they would finish too soon and would be too young to go to university or to do competitive examinations for the Civil Service. Since only a minority do that the Minister is holding back all the children simply because some would be ready too soon.

What matter if they are ready too soon? Why keep them in primary school when they are ready for secondary education? Why frustrate them rather than let them finish and put in a constructive year doing 6th form work, something which has been possible in Dublin for many years? I did that myself in one school in 1943. It is now possible also in girls' schools. What possible advantage is there in keeping a child back merely because the child might have a free year at the end during which to do useful 6th form work? The majority of children, when they finish secondary school, go into employment so that this business of waiting a year does not really arise. It is an extraordinarily weak and deficient argument.

I know there is pressure from the INTO on this point and, while I have great sympathy with them in their claims, in this instance they were not able to make any cogent case in favour of this policy. Their reasoning was unconvincing and, as far as I could see, they did not seem very convinced themselves. Able children should not be held back and less able children promoted in their place, with consequent disadvantages for them, simply because of pressure to keep the numbers up in primary schools. That is contrary to any idea of social justice or educational principles. Physical age is not a relevant factor here. The fact is secondary education in other countries starts at 10 or 11. That is true of many countries in Europe. There is no reason why we should say that nobody here may start secondary school until aged 12.

Again, this operates in a discriminatory fashion against Protestant children because, in their schools, it is customary to have a four-year course for intermediate certificate and the normal age at which they leave the primary school is 11. They are now frustrated by this departmental regulation which cuts right across the Protestant educational system. Why should the Minister lay down at what age children move from one stage to another? Is this not a matter for the schools, the parents and the children? Why should there be this ministerial intervention in this kind of educational matter? Here there is quite unnecessary bureaucratic involvement in education. No educationist would recommend anything of the kind. This occurs because the key policy makers are administrators rather than educationists. It is in that situation that this kind of ridiculous regulation can be made and defended by the Minister. I appeal to the Minister to reconsider this. The Minister has made no case for it. The INTO have not made any case for it. Educationally it is wrong and socially it is unjust. Because of the way it operates it discriminates against Protestants. For those reasons the Minister should reconsider it.

In this connection it is worth noting something from the UNESCO document, World Survey on Education, which is quoted in the Teachers' Study Group Report on the draft curriculum for the primary school, at page 45:

The lesson to be learned here is that the child's education should be an organic development and should not involve a significant change of method and matter for him in passing from one stage to another, or from one class to the next, or from primary to post-primary.

The point to be made here is that education is a continuous stream. I do not think there is such a major change either in the kind of teaching or subjects taught at the changeover from primary to secondary. If anything, a bigger break probably occurs at the senior cycle level when the level of teaching is raised to something approaching university level.

We have a system, as most countries do, of education divided between primary and secondary. While such a division may be administratively desirable and a matter of historical fact we should try to avoid anything which places obstacles to movement from one to the other or creates sudden gaps. Again, the Teachers' Study Group Report points out how little co-ordination there is between the curriculum at the top end of the primary and the bottom of the secondary. They argue that the Council of Education's Report on the secondary curriculum is, in fact, completely unsound on this and that there is a very serious problem and they quote chapter and verse in regard to individual subject for cases where there is overlap or a gap. For example, in the history programme topics are suggested for treatment in the fifth and sixth classes which are specifically catered for in the secondary course. They mention some which occur even in the first year course, the year after the pupil leaves the primary school, "Life in a Mediaeval Monastery", "Life Inside and Outside the Pale", "The Reformation", "Life in Penal Times".

On the other hand, there are topics which the vast majority will not study at all in their school programmes from age ten onwards which to us appear essential as they form such an important part of the nation's cultural heritage. They refer to such aspects as studies appropriate to the pupil's age, the myths and legends of ancient Ireland. It would be unfortunate for the student to grow up unacquainted with the richness of this material and without an intelligent understanding of the inherent values of these stories or even the significant part they played in the oral literature of our ancestors through the centuries. Another topic which is not included is the study of the civilisation of Ireland during the Golden Age.

Then they go on to deal with subjects such as mathematics and geography, in each case making the point about repetition, overlapping and gaps. There is no co-ordination between the curricula at primary and secondary level. We have a discontinuity in the system, an artificial obstacle placed in the path of children, a discontinuity in teaching, all of which is disruptive of education.

The Minister should pay particular attention to this problem of transition from primary to secondary. This is something to which, in Fine Gael policy, we have given considerable attention for somewhat different reasons. We were concerned at the sitution in this country that the primary school leaving age is 14 while, in fact, in other countries in Europe the primary school leaving age is uniformly between 10 and 12. In practice, in this country a very large number of children do leave the primary school at 12 because that is the age at which the secondary cycle starts and as more and more children take secondary education—only a small minority do not do so now—the changeover at age 12 is becoming more common. Yet, theoretically the primary system goes on to age 14. One reason why this is continued is, of course, the retardatory effect of the teaching of Irish which, by retarding development for one and a half years means that children may not complete the primary curriculum until age 14 while in other countries they reach the same stage at age 12. There is a serious problem here. In the Fine Gael policy document we looked at this problem and felt that it was desirable that the changeover should take place at age 12. We recognised this was going to involve quite a substantial adjustment on the primary side and suggested that in some instances this could be met by allowing the development of a new type of secondary tops in some of the primary schools, particularly as so many primary teachers are graduates and well able to teach the junior cycle of the secondary level. More flexibility here might be desirable and less rigid division.

The Minister's attempt through the Ryan Tribunal with its unfortunate consequences, the attempt to have a single teaching profession, well-intentioned, although it went wrong, would have helped towards this objective. Within the post-primary scheme itself there is the problem of the relationship between secondary and vocational. I have mentioned some aspects of this already but there are others.

There is the extraordinary situation in which eight years after the Minister's predecessor advocated the close integration of the two, a secondary school which employs a metalwork teacher, trained as such under the Department's course, will not be paid a salary for him and the man himself will be penalised. I mentioned this in questions I put down in the House. It was the case of a man who did this course in metalwork and the secondary school in question, in pursuance of the policy which the Minister's predecessors all laid down of integrating the two streams into one comprehensive stream, employed this metalwork teacher. They were refused an incremental salary for him and the man gets a letter from the Department saying: "As you have failed to comply with the terms of your appointment the Department has no option but to claim a refund of £640 2s 9d in respect of the cost of your training in accordance with the terms of the agreement."

Because this man had the temerity to take a job teaching metalwork in a secondary school in pursuance of the policy the Minister and all his predecessors had advocated he is to be fined £640 and the school is to be paid no salary for him.

I know there are technical problems about teachers' registration and so on but I understand the Minister could overcome these by administrative action were he willing to do so. Certainly, he does not have to press for this fine. There is no law which says he must charge this man £640 for teaching metal work in a secondary school and he could make arrangements for the incremental salary to be paid if he wished to do so. The hypocrisy of a Government Department pretending to be in favour of integration of secondary and vocational education and when, in fact, the school does this both the school and the teacher are penalised, is really deplorable. I have raised this before and I would urge the Minister to change his mind and do something constructive about it.

The position about comprehensive schools is obscure. The number of schools built and being built is tiny compared with what was apparently envisaged by the Government at the beginning. The reason why the programme has made no headway is not clear because the Minister or the Department did not disclose why the change in thinking occurred. There are persistent rumours that there has been pressure from the Church or from some churchmen which has prevented this development. The Minister should clarify policy on this. Development of State comprehensive schools especially in areas where, owing to, in some cases, the policy of particular bishops, secondary education is not developed, is a very good policy and welcomed, I think, by everybody. We should like to know why it is not being pursued more energetically. I do not think it is a question of funds but if it is, the Minister should say so.

Of course, these schools are much more expensive to run. You do not get them cheaply with religious orders financing them for the State. The full cost must be paid. In fact, one value of these schools is to show us what is the full cost of education when it is not financed by the religious orders. I should like the Minister to say why so few have been built and why the programme is going so slowly. It is noticeable that in Dublin in the two cases where such schools have been built both are run by religious orders. There is no reason why they should not be but I should like to know if there is any reason why both are. The idea of something being done by religious orders is quite good. The more diversified the system is the better and the more interlinked systems are with each other the better, but is there any reason why there should not be more comprehensive schools in Dublin? The Minister should say if he is inhibited in any way in this respect.

The Minister announced a date for raising the school leaving age which is two years later than the date originally fixed. He has not explained why there is such a delay. If, as he said, the free education scheme has accelerated the process or the problems of introducing it are minimal, why then is it taking two years longer? I can see that if we had not introduced free education the Minister might have had to extend the time but there is something rather odd in telling us that it was to be done in 1970, according to the Second Programme, but had to be postponed for two years because the free education scheme is so successful and that there are so few problems. The logic of this beats me. Can the Minister explain why it has been postponed for two years and why we cannot have the raising of the school leaving age at the date originally promised? Would he also say what plans there are for raising the age to 16, which, in fact, is the age in some countries? Is the Minister contemplating this in the future? What ideas has he on this subject? This is something to which the Fine Gael Party is committed in principle.

In regard to secondary schools, I should like to mention the dissatisfaction which I felt when I asked the Minister about the size of classes and it transpired that he had no information. His attempts at covering up by saying it was difficult to get information were unconvincing. It seems to me that there would be no difficulty in carrying out a survey of the kind carried out in respect of other matters for the Investment in Education report. All you have to do is get a fair sample of the overall pattern and to do that you ask schools to fill up a form saying how many there were in each class at a particular hour on a particular day. We know that there is an interchange of the classes at 11 o'clock and the size of the classes changes; we appreciate the complexity of that but if you just took any hour in any day and got a sample you would have a pattern for that moment of time which would be statistically valid because the changes in the size of the classes would balance out. This would give us some assessment of the size of classes. It seems extraordinary that the Minister has no information on this when he is operating a policy in regard to the size of classes, because of the relation of grants to the size of classes and the teachers. I fail to understand this. I do not see how you can operate a policy intelligently if you have not got the facts to back it up. I would ask him to give us some information on this.

I was disturbed to read about the shortage of finance which is inhibiting the development of secondary schools. The Minister implied this in a roundabout and rather negative way in his speech. He was explaining why there was not enough money and why schools could not be given the amount of money promised to them for expansion and he said:

In allocating the capital amount available priority is given to grant applications in respect of extra accommodation required for the additional numbers seeking admission to the schools. By exercising cost control and by giving due consideration to the degree of urgency attaching to different applications, every endeavour is made to ensure that the funds available are used to the best possible effect. In the current year building grants will be paid to the conductors of some 170 schools for the provision of varying amounts of additional accommodation.

It is the first time I have heard the word "conductor" used in this context; it is usually "manager."

When we hear the Government speaking about "priorities," a "degree of urgency,""cost control" and so on we know it means "we are short of money and cannot give out the money we promised." We have information on this matter in an article by Michael Heney published in the Irish Times of January 20th last. I may say these articles are very valuable. We are indebted particularly to the Irish Times for this educational feature. I find it of enormous help to have so much of my homework done by their very able journalists. The article stated that lack of Finance had forced the Department of Education to postpone 55 building projects for secondary schools which had already been approved. It said that this restriction, which was the first of its kind since the 70 per cent Departmental grants schools came in four years ago, was due to an unprecedented explosion in school building. About 50 of the schools concerned had been told in a recent circular from the post-primary school building unit that they had no hope of money before March 31st 1971 and even then it was not guaranteed. Another 15 schools were told that no money was available as the total provision of £2.46 million had already been fully allocated but that the money might be forthcoming next year. Since last September the Department have issued no money to finance new building projects in secondary schools.

The article went on to say that the circular stated that the Department were faced with hundreds of secondary school building applications, the bulk of which involved urgently needed new school places. They regretted that in these circumstances they were forced to curtail the building plans of certain schools. The principal of one school, the article said, stated that it was a pretty drastic cutback and that schools had often only half their extensions completed and now neither the school authorities nor the architects knew when they would be completed.

This is a most disturbing feature but why do we have to read about it in the newspaper? Why are ministerial speeches always confined to telling us about the wonderful things we have done? Why not tell us the truth about the difficulties? Why are circulars like this not communicated to the House? The House is entitled to know the position. If the secondary school expansion programme is breaking down for lack of finance, if cutbacks on a massive scale have to be effected, if extensions are being left half finished and plans postponed, surely all this is a matter of considerable public importance and the House should be informed. I should like the Minister to tell us about the circular, to explain what his plans are, what time lag there will be, how long the queue is and how long applications put in now will have to be delayed before they are dealt with and how much breakdown and cutback there is. We are entitled to know this and I would ask the Minister to deal with the matter fully.

The Department operate a means test in regard to the free book scheme which is extremely unsatisfactory in its operation. It is a very inadequate replacement of the scheme recommended in "Investment in Education" and adopted in the Fine Gael policy involving the payment of maintenance grants, or in the case of boarding schools, board grants to parents in the lower income groups who have kept their children at school. The money in this scheme is allocated arbitrarily to the schools who then have to operate the means test and in many cases other pupils are aware of the position of those children who are affected. What is required is that parents in the lower income groups should be given some compensation for loss of their children's earnings by keeping them at school and to give the parents an incentive to retain them at school. Instead of adopting the proposal in that report the Government went overboard with the free transport system costing £3 million. We are all delighted to have this scheme although in its operation it is often inequitable and unsatisfactory because of the limitations of its application.

I wonder if on balance the money provided in the scheme to parents who could afford to pay the bus fares could not be better used to provide assistance to parents of lower incomes to keep their children at school and who now find it difficult to do so. Would the general good not be better served if you had a less stringent means test for the free transport system and instead provide these grants to parents who are less well off. I consider that the priorities are wrong. The Minister will not take me up wrongly if I suggest we should cut back the transport scheme. It would have been better if the Government had done this and thus saved sufficient money to enable them to make the kind of grant I have suggested, in view of the very unsatisfactory book scheme.

In regard to the advanced leaving certificate I would ask the Minister to tell us what the present position is. I was never very clear about its functions, even when it was introduced. Has the position been altered by dropping the grouping system from the ordinary leaving certificate? When is it to be introduced and what function will it perform? Does the Minister envisage the development of a seventh year in school and will there be financial assistance given for this? My own view is that this would be very desirable. It seems clear that in many cases there is a need for an intermediate year between leaving school and going to the university. Even for those children not going to university an extra year would be very valuable before they take up a career. Very little has been said about this recently and we should hear more about it.

I do not propose to open up the question of teachers' salaries. On a Supplementary Estimate we confined ourselves rigidly to the matters involved and we availed of the opportunity to discuss teachers' salaries and tried to be helpful in our comments. As the matter is at conciliation level, I do not think we could usefully add anything to what was said here at that time.

I wish to deal now with the point I referred to on another occasion when I had not my documentation with me. It is not directly connected with teachers' salaries. It arises out of the strike last year. The Minister will recall that I raised the question of headmasters in schools being required to sign a form to the effect that they did not aid or abet the teachers' strike. There was also the matter of their being told they would not get their salaries if the form was not signed. Having asked the Minister about this, I was not satisfied with his reply. The fact as given to me by the Irish Schoolmasters' Association is that some refused to sign this form. It was a most extraordinary thing to be asked to do seeing that they were not themselves members of ASTI. They went to their schools and were willing to work but their employees did not turn up. They were then asked to sign a document— a document not even to the effect that they were prepared to work but that there was no work to be done, but a document saying that they were not in favour of the teachers' strike.

It is intolerable that anybody should have the payment of his salary made contingent not only on his willingness and ability to work, while there, but on whether he was in favour, in his mind, of his own employees' action in the matter. I cannot conceive how any Government could seek to have such a document imposed on a body of people. Beyond that, some of those who signed were still not paid. One of the people was, in fact, ill at the time and could not have been at school; nevertheless, the money was deducted. Of those who signed, some were not paid. The Irish Schoolmasters' Association wrote four or five letters to the Department but did not receive any reply at the time; the first reply they received was in November, a long time after the strike. They simply could not get any response to their letters at the time.

It is intolerable that the Department should ask people not involved in the strike to sign an assurance that they were not in favour of it and that there should be the threat that they would be penalised if they did not sign the document. There is the further fact that the Department did not reply for months to letters addressed to it by the association. A year after the strike, some of the persons of whom I speak had not been paid. Would the Minister explain that? What right had the Department to withhold salaries in that way? The Minister has some explaining to do in this connection. It is an extraordinary performance. I understand it applied to the Catholic headmasters also, some of whom are clerics and who are, perhaps, in a better position because they are supported by their order; they would not starve because they are not getting their salary. It is intolerable that anybody, particularly a married man, should be so treated in these circumstances. Have the salaries been paid in all cases, whether or not they have signed this obnoxious form? The Minister should make the position clear.

I want to turn now to primary teacher training, to which the Minister makes a very vague reference in his opening speech. This is an area where promises which were made have not been implemented and where there is no sign of that happening. I would refer the House to the Minister's remarks on the teacher training course and the qualifications for a teacher. The Minister says he is confident that this matter will be resolved satisfactorily in the not too distant future. How fast can you move backwards? I think it was the Minister's predecessor who said in the Seanad, over two years ago, that a three-year university course, with a university degree at the end of it, would be available to primary teachers from October, 1969. There was a massive diversion of talent from the training colleges to the universities. The average number of honours per student fell sharply in the first year, predictably enough; it was predicted by the Minister's predecessor, too. We are now six months after the promised date when these courses were to start. All the Minister could say is that the resolution of the problems must take some time but that he is confident they will be solved in the not too distant future. Knowing how carefully a ministerial brief is drafted, that, to me, means three years at best—a thoroughly unsatisfactory situation.

I put it to the Minister in the Seanad at that time that his idea of converting, overnight, the teacher training course into a course including a university degree was unrealistic. I put it to him that the possibility of doing this and the taking of a degree that would be treated on a par with existing university degrees was minimal. I put it to him that the teacher training colleges, with their two-year course, were not yet at the stage where this could be achieved. I put it to him that, whereas it might be possible to achieve it relatively quickly in some cases, in other cases it would take longer. I asked whether this was the right approach at all to teacher training. I asked whether teacher training colleges should give the B.Ed. qualification, which would be treated as of a lower standing than a university degree, or whether instead we could give primary teachers university education. In this respect, the B.Ed. qualification has been found unsatisfactory. Either it should be a university degree, and recognised as such, or the teacher should be sent to the university and undergo a separate training course afterwards. Some of the interests involved felt that the Fine Gael idea would be an acceptable solution. My own feeling is that the view of the people in the teacher training colleges has been moving in this direction. Our idea was that primary teachers should go to the university in the normal way and undertake a university degree course. If it is a general degree course, they would accompany it by a concurrent course in teaching theory and practice. At the end of the three years, they would have a university degree. Those with an honours degree would be exempted from the teaching theory and practice course and would go for one year to a teacher training college in order to cover teacher training techniques. I think the present course would be covered by the university course. It would be possible to reduce this time to one year by concentrating on the teaching techniques. The effect would be to double the output from the teacher training colleges and that is something which is badly needed.

Rather paradoxically, the universities are, in fact, very much cheaper than the teacher training colleges because the training colleges, until recently, have been residential. Their costs are very high. Where residence is involved the building costs are much greater than those of the university. I would hesitate to tell the House the difference between the cost per pupil of building extensions in teacher training colleges and the cost per pupil of similar building extensions in the universities. The position with regard to teaching costs is similar because of the mass production which has been forced on us by the Government. The cost per student in the universities is relatively low. One could provide university training, nonresidential, with a year in teaching techniques afterwards at a cost not greater than the cost of residential training at present. The teachers would then have a university degree and have teaching qualifications and training as well. I recommend this approach to the Minister. In the case of St. Patrick's College this may be the better approach. I would not be too dogmatic about it. Perhaps St. Patrick's College should become a university college. This could be done in a relatively short space of time. It is already a major centre of education and research. The staff are well qualified and St. Patrick's College could be a fully-fledged university college in a short time.

I am convinced that no genuine university, giving genuine degrees recognised as such elsewhere, would be satisfied with an overnight attempt to carry out such an operation. This must take place gradually over three or four years. The right approach is to distinguish between cases where a training college can be converted into a genuine university college whose degrees would be fully acceptable and cases where the right answer is for the students to go to a university college and to finish off training in the teacher colleges at a later stage. I recommend to the Minister to have a more sophisticated approach to this problem. This is what I said to his predecessor some years ago. I am convinced of the rightness of this now.

I hope the Minister will have an open mind on this and will not try to force a uniform system on the training colleges. A three-year course which would include the equivalent of a year dealing with teaching, theory and practice and really only two years study of university subjects would not have parity with a university degree. This would be a very retrogressive step. If the Minister is going to elevate the training colleges, or any of them, into university colleges there would have to be a four-year course consisting of three years in the university and then a year studying theory and practice of teaching. The three-year course amalgamating the two types of training would be a second best and would operate to the detriment of the teaching profession. It would make it impossible to achieve parity of status between the different types of teachers. There is no good trying to have a single teaching profession if there are different arrangements for the education and training of the people within the profession.

The Minister referred to career guidance. We must face the fact that career guidance teachers cannot be turned out in three weeks. Such a plan is not acceptable. The Minister is aware that, in fact, a diploma course was introduced in University College, Dublin. This course would provide fully-trained guidance teachers for the schools. The idea of the Department producing a three-week course and foisting it on the schools is retrogressive. The Department is lowering standards instead of raising them. The Minister should not encourage this trend. The Minister should ensure that career guidance is a full diploma course with adequate training.

I come now to the question of university education. I wish to say a word about the merger. At the moment it is difficult to say anything about it because we are on the eve of revelations as to what has been agreed between the Senate of NUI and the board of Dublin University. I am in the happy position of ignorance as to what is contained in the proposals and as to what has been agreed upon. There are various rumours in circulation. The Minister knows that I have been in favour of the merger, though not of the particular form of merger proposed on 6th July, 1968. I was in favour of the merger because I had difficulty in foreseeing adequate co-operation and co-ordination between the two Dublin colleges unless there was some body with co-ordinating power. I was concerned with the fact that we had a proliferation of research institutes in Dublin, such as the Economics Institute, the Agricultural Institute, et cetera. These should, in the ordinary way, have developed within the ambit of the university. Because of the existence of the two universities and the difficulties involved in making a choice between them in locating such activities, this proliferation of institutes exists outside the universities. This has been detrimental to the universities. The volume of research carried out has been very inadequate because all the resources for research are channelled into these institutes and the resources given to the universities are not adequate to provide even sufficient teaching staff, not to speak of providing anything extra to finance staff for research purposes or to provide enough staff so that the existing staff would have sufficient spare time for research.

This has been a most unfortunate development. It has arisen partly from the fact that there were two universities. If there were one university in Dublin it would be easier to have research carried out within it and incorporated within its framework and yet retain the identity of the institutes involved, linking them to the university with exchange of staff. Research staff could teach in the university and university teaching staff could undertake research in the institutes concerned. That was a reason for favouring a merger of some kind. The merger as proposed by the Government was unsatisfactory in most respects. The distribution of faculties left UCD in a very disadvantageous position. The concentration of post-graduate research at one or other institution was unnecessary and potentially damaging to the academic life of the institutions concerned. I was not in favour of the particular merger proposed for this reason. The universities will now come out with some solution. We will not comment on it until we have heard what it is.

The Minister should, when he sees the solution, examine it objectively from the point of view of ascertaining whether he feels it would achieve the aims the Government set out to achieve. The Minister should not get too bogged down in whether it is or is not a merger. The merger as such is not the important thing. It is important whether the legitimate and proper objectives of the merger are likely to be achieved in the solution proposed. If, in fact, they are achieved then the Minister and I, favouring a merger because we thought it was the only solution and we thought the two universities would not co-operate sufficiently otherwise, must reconsider our positions. If, in fact, the solution proposed does achieve whatever rationalisation is necessary—and I have never been convinced that rationalisation is a major problem except in the fringe cases like the veterinary faculty —and if the proposals co-ordinate the two universities, it would be a great mistake to insist on the letter of the merger for the sake of having a merger. It would be foolish to do this against the wishes of the authorities and the staffs of the colleges concerned. This could have unfortunate consequences for university education in Ireland. We must look objectively at the solution from the point of view of whether it achieves the necessary measures of rationalisation of the facilities and whether it achieves adequate co-ordination.

On the question of rationalisation, let me say that from the beginning I was convinced that the arguments advanced were spurious. The original argument was that Trinity were looking for £2 million for a new arts building and the Government could not afford the money and therefore decided to have a merger which would be cheaper and easier. This is all foolish nonsense. The arts buildings in both UCD and Trinity are so large that there is no economy in scale to be achieved by merging. The actual economies in scale in a merger would not amount to more than a couple of tens of thousands of pounds. It is hard to think of any departments you can merge and achieve thereby an economy in scale. There might be something gained in Welsh and oriental languages but the economy would be small, especially in the matter of continental languages. Something might be achieved in the sense of providing a spread of specialists between the two universities but, as I have said, there are very few cases where economies would be effected.

The thing is pointless, therefore, because the idea of rationalisation implies that there are unutilised resources. In both colleges the veterinary faculties are very small and if you took the two together they would still be very small, and therefore there might be a point in amalgamation here. However, in most of the other disciplines there is no spare capacity available.

There could, of course, be economies in the joint use of facilities. Both would be better with the use of one large computer than with two small ones. There may be other scientific equipment in the use of which collaboration might be beneficial. I do not think there is any great problem there. I have examined this in great detail. I did costings in detail for individual departments. I gave size of classes and estimated what the economies in scale would be but found that the economies would amount only to tens of thousands of pounds.

Therefore, I urge on the Minister that if the solution is not a merger he should examine that solution rather as a fact than a prejudice, and if this solution were to cost more in building and staff than the merger, he should examine it most carefully to see if it is worth thinking about. The point is that we should get away from all this emotive talk about the problem. As I have said, any measure of rationalisation would bring very few economies. That is why I ask the Minister to look at it objectively and not to be influenced by the talk about the vast economies to be gained by rationalisation. These economies in practice will not exist.

I come now to the question of co-ordination. This is very important and I have always laid stress on it. It is very important that where you have two universities and specialists in each in different things these specialists should be accessible to all the students of both universities. If, for instance, Trinity had a specialist in Chaucer, it would be wrong that advanced students from UCD would not have access to this man. Therefore, any arrangement made should ensure the full avaliability of exchange of staff, of exchange of students from one to the other, the students to be given credit for it, the exchange of students who would lecture and the giving of credit to these students. Because there are no real economies in rationalisation, we should be very slow to condemn any other solution that might emerge. No more can be said on this subject until we hear what the proposals are. I think the Minister will have an open mind on the whole subject.

On university autonomy, I should like to say a couple of words on its importance because I am not sure its importance is fully understood. We have been hoping to have autonomous universities. However, very often one does not count the blessings and it is only gradually that I came to realise this. Not so long ago when a professor from the continent talked to the staff of UCD and did not talk about the things we thought he would talk about, we asked him why he had narrowed his lecture to such an extent. He told us the Department in France had told him what to talk about. Therefore, those professors are not free to say what they think. There is a bureaucratic system and there is much more freedom here. The consequences of this may be seen in the illiberality, in the hostility between students and governments.

University autonomy is an integral part of a university system. It involves certain rights. It involves the right of the university to determine entrance and degree standards. It involves the right to determine who should benefit by grants. A university may decide on a particular standard, lower than the standard which the Government feel is required. That is the case at the moment in UCD where the standard of entrance is two honours in the leaving certificate although the Government say it should be four. The Government were perfectly entitled to pick their level for the payment of grants but the university must be able to decide on the standard of entrance.

The universities have the right to determine degree standards and I am glad to see there is no question of that being interfered with by the Government. The university should have the right to appoint its staff. This is a very important one, as is the tenure of staff. I am not sure the importance of this is understood. In the Seanad a few years ago the Taoiseach, as Minister for Finance, discussing the Laying of Documents Bill, inadvertently, perhaps by a slip of the tongue, insisted on the importance of parliament having the right to vet appointment in the universities. I pointed out at the time that what parliament had was the right to approve of the creation of posts, and the Taoiseach corrected himself. However, I was disturbed at his readiness to point to the supposed right of parliament to vet appointments.

I do not think the present system through which we cannot create posts without the consent of parliament. without the order being laid on the Table, is necessary or desirable. Trinity can do it but UCD cannot. The right to appoint staff should be held by the universities and there should be no incursion in that area.

University staff security of tenure is also very important. In the NUI there are two ways in which this right is prejudiced. In UCD, 70 per cent of the staff are appointed from year to year. Up to now, the non-statutory staff have been in the position that they had fears their appointments might be terminated at any time. That has not happened: there has been no case of which I am aware in which it has happened. However, there was a recent case of the termination of the appointments of two part-time junior staff. This has caused great concern among the staff. It is a fact, and I assert it from personal experience, that people fear that if they speak out on some issue or other against the college authorities they may have their appointment terminated. So long as they fear this could happen they will be inhibited. There is no doubt that the failure of the UCD authorities to operate democratically in recent years has had the effect on people that they fear that if they speak out their appointments will be terminated. It is unrealistic but there it is.

At the other end, there is the unfortunate power to extend the term of office of a professor by five years, so that in his later years a professor may fear that if he speaks out his term of office will not be extended to the age of 70 and this, in turn, makes him reluctant to say what he thinks. In any university it is important that the staff should have security of tenure and that they should be appointed for life to a specific age which should not be extended. They should be secure during that period unless, of course, they should be guilty of some misdemeanour when they would be dismissed by due process. This principle does not exist in the NUI so that there is a detrimental effect on the working of the college. It is a principle which must be incorporated in the new constitution.

In the light of what the Minister said yesterday it is important and relevant for me to say that universities should have the right to determine their own fees and the remuneration of their staff subject only to any general incomes policy that may exist. During the past couple of years the Government have made serious inroads in this respect. The autonomy of the colleges has been undermined because the Government, first of all, have interfered by telling the colleges not to increase their fees and this has been compensated for by giving an extra grant to the colleges but this extra grant was offset by a failure to give the full grant requested in the ordinary heading. It is obvious that if the colleges do not increase their fees and get the 25 per cent, the Minister can come back and ask "Why should I increase your grant next year when you could have got the money yourselves but did not do so?" In effect, the Government are determining university fees by prohibiting increases. At the same time, during the past two years, the remuneration of the staff has ceased to be determined by the college. Until then the principle was maintained throughout but the college decided what to pay their staff and the cost was incorporated in a request for money from the Government. When asking for money the college listed the purposes for which the money would be used and these purposes would include salaries of staff and so on but during the past couple of years a different approach has become evident whereby the Department insist on the right to control or veto increases in salaries of university staffs. In fact, it is threatened that if increases are given which do not conform to instructions the Department will ensure that in the case of statutory salaries the margin would be annulled in the House. This introduces a new principle and the erosion of university freedom. Of course, the university must act responsibly in the matter of salaries and if they were to act irresponsibly the Government would be likely to take account of that in paying future grants.

To act responsibly is to act in the way that other private institutions act in determining salaries of staff and if there is an incomes policy of any kind in operation the universities must conform but what is particularly obvious is that some of the interference by the Department with regard to increases in salaries has been to prohibit increases in salaries in line with the salaries of civil servants.

All that has been sought during this period by the universities is that they at least keep up with the salaries of civil servants but this has been rejected and, indeed, an attempt has been made to prevent the full payment of one of the rounds.

Civil servants ensure that they themselves get increases but they then refuse the increases to universities' staffs. This principle is objectionable. The universities should be free to determine the salaries of their own staffs as they should be free to negotiate for funds for various purposes as will be done in future under the Higher Education Authority. One can only hope that this authority when set up will be in a position to preserve the autonomy of the universities and that it will give them the right to act in the way in which any other private institution would act. The degree of interference by the Department in relation to this matter is much greater than that with any State-sponsored body. There is no excuse for this. The autonomy of the colleges can be too easily eroded and it would appear that at the moment there are signs of this type of erosion.

Thirdly, I wish to say a word about the democratic running of the universities. Our universities operate under a very antiquated code. In the case of TCD the college has the power and the right to determine its own statute freely and without any Government approval owing to the letters patent of 1911 but in the case of UCD, however, and the other colleges of the NUI the running of the colleges is laid down in great detail in the Charter, in the Act of 1908, in the Charter of the NUI, the Charter of UCD, the Statute of the NUI and the Statute of UCD so that in order to find out what is the legal position it is necessary to examine five documents.

It was established for reasons pertaining to the then balance of power between the Irish Parliamentary Party, the Irish Hierarchy and the Liberal Government in England each of whom had a particular interest. The particular structure that evolved might have been appropriate to 1908 and it might have been appropriate to 1914 but it bears no relevance to the present day situation. Again and again, university authorities and staff are inhibited in their thinking and cannot do as they wish. For example, while the view of the college is that students should play a part in their own disciplinary procedure, the authorities cannot bring this about because of the structure. Of course, in this day and age one cannot expect students to accept a disciplinary code in which they have no say and the more they are involved in their own disciplinary process the more effective that process will become. However, we are told that there are legal difficulties about this and that the charter is so specific as to how this power should be exercised that it is impossible to implement such a process. We are told that the governing body have no power to delegate any functions because the charter lays down the condition that they must perform all these functions themselves including a refund of 30s to a student who had overpaid.

University reform is badly needed. The Minister will recall that a little more than a year ago there was a movement in UCD called "Gentle Revolution," the resolution of which proved extremely difficult because of the rigidity of the structure that exists. If we are to avoid any further explosion the charter must be reformed and when this is being done it is important that the new charter shall be flexible so that if, in future, it transpires that it is desirable to change it, this can be done without an Act of Parliament. On the other hand, it must contain certain entrenched principles to ensure the democratic operation of the institution. This is something we must consider as soon as the merger issue is settled and I would hope that, when framing the new charters of the NUI and TCD, the Minister will have full regard for the views of the staff and students of these colleges. It will be a difficult and delicate task to frame a charter that will ensure the democratic operation of the universities and when he is doing this I hope that the Minister will pay heed to the advice he receives from those directly concerned.

We have been very lucky that we have survived for so long under the existing structure. We have been lucky that last year's difficulties were overcome and that we have been able to carry on for another year. I must say I was more pessimistic and did not think we would have been able to carry on. I regard the reform of the structure of the universities as a matter of great urgency. No doubt the Higher Education Authority will receive from the staffs of the colleges and the students also their views on the subject before long and I hope when these views are submitted the Minister will be prepared to act quickly to reform the structure in line with the wishes of the staff and students.

On the question of grants and scholarships for university students the differential of £150 between the present grants is inadequate. I do not think the Minister can seriously believe the extra cost to parents of keeping a student away from home is only £150. The grant given in respect of the student living in the university city particularly, if it is increased to cover the increase in fees, is reasonable. If the Minister intends to revise these grants upwards to take account of the increase in fees he should look again at the rural grant. The Fine Gael policy proposed a differential of £200. We underestimated it and should have made it £250. The Minister should increase it to that amount.

I mentioned the four honours requirement. The Government have a perfect right to lay down conditions for university scholarships but they ought to consider as soon as possible lowering the requirement to, say, three honours. Four honours does limit these grants to a small minority of possible students and some easing of this, when it becomes financially possible, would be desirable.

The whole question of entrance policy will come up in the near future. The capital provision announced by the Minister and, indeed, the very limited current provision in this year's Budget, even if you add to that the amount to be secured from increased fees, raises the question whether universities can continue to accept an expansion of the numbers entering. The growth of numbers was restrained slightly by raising the entrance standards to two honours. This only had a temporary effect. In fact, it has not held up the growth of numbers very much. The staff-student ratios in our colleges are very much above the appropriate level. In the arts faculty in UCD the staff-student ratio is 26 to one, that is, about three times the British level. This is intolerable. I do not say that our level should be the same as the British level, because owing to the fact that we have very large classes of pass or general degree students whereby there is an economy involved in lecturing, we can have the same standards of lecturing and tutorials or the same number of students per tutorial as in Britain with a somewhat less favourable staff-student ratio. I thought the suggestion of the Commission on Higher Education of a 12 to one staff-student ratio as a target for 1975 was a reasonable one. We could come very close to British standards on that basis. What progress are we making towards this? None. In the arts faculty the position has deteriorated in the last two or three years. The ratio has gone from 25 to one to 26 to one. The extraordinarily small funds available to us have not been sufficient to do more than pay the extra salaries and pay the increased costs of running the college, particularly with the increased costs of moving to Belfield in the case of UCD.

It has not been possible to improve the staff-student ratio. In fact, it would be physically impossible in the time remaining now to achieve a 12 to one staff-student ratio by 1975 in faculties like arts in UCD even if the money was available. You simply could not more than double the staff in five years in the arts faculty without the dilution of quality. There are not that many sufficiently good post-graduate students or people willing to come from abroad to enable us to double the staff in five years.

The neglect of the Government, the inability to provide funds, the persistent granting to the colleges of less than they have looked for, the persistent failure to face up to the implications of the 12 to 1 staff-student ratio, have created a situation where it would be impossible, at least in the case of arts in UCD, to attain the targets even if the Government now provide the money. The present staff-student ratio position is disastrously bad. It imposes a very severe burden. It limits the amount of research the staff can do owing to the burden of teaching. The contact between staff and students is quite inadequate. In the case of first-year students they have virtually no personal contact with the members of the staff in UCD and I do not think they have it in the other colleges either. The inability to break down groups into small tutorials means the students do not even get to know one another. One student remarked to me in his first year that it was hard to get to know anybody else in first year, that the chances of sitting beside the same person twice, even if you tried to do so, were minimal because the classes are so large.

It is intolerable that each year the universities put in their requests for funds to the Government saying: "We need this much for an increase in salaries"—and until this year the increases in salaries have not been questioned by the Department. "We need this much for the increase in costs if we are to move at all towards the staff-student ratio recommended by the Commission on Higher Education. The total bill for this is so much"; then the Government send back half or less than half this amount without saying which bit is to be cut. If you then say: "You have not given us enough money to increase the staff" they say: "We did. We gave you more than was needed for that." Then you add: "But there was not enough to pay for the extra costs." Then they claim:"The money was for that too." It is a kind of three-card trick arrangement.

If the Government get a request for funds from colleges they are entitled to examine it and question it and if there is some miscalculation, if the college is looking for more money than is necessary, the Government should say: "We think your request for money under this heading is wrong and we have decided not to give it to you." But to give a fraction of the amount asked for without any indication as to the inappropriateness of what has been asked for is unacceptable. Was it last April we were promised legislation in respect of the HEA? Perhaps the Minister would tell us when we shall get that legislation. The sooner it comes through the better and the sooner the universities channel their requests for funds through the HEA the better; and the sooner the Government decide whether or not they will provide adequate funds for the universities the better.

If the Government do not provide adequate funds then the universities will have to restrict entry. They do not want to do it. The tradition of our universities has been liberal on the question of entry. In fact, we have been far too liberal in increasing the number of students without having an adequate staff to teach them or adequate buildings to accommodate them. If the universities must restrict entry the blame for that will not rest on the universities, who have resisted this long beyond the time when they should have accepted the need for it, but on the Government.

I do not understand the Minister's statement that for £15 million we can get what the Higher Education Authority said would cost £24 million. This, if true, would be a quite extraordinary condemnation of the HEA, if their margin of error could be as great as that. Does the Minister mean that the Higher Education Authority have miscalculated to the tune of £9 million, made the cost 60 per cent higher than the true cost, or that there are some wonderful new methods which will reduce the cost of building by that amount? Would the Minister say in replying what precisely are these economies, how cuts of this magnitude were achieved? Does he seriously mean that the full accommodation requirements proposed by the Higher Education Authority can be secured for this sum?

A comment in the papers this morning from a member of the Higher Education Authority suggests that the Minister is not being accurate in his statement here. If universities will not be given the funds to expand at the rate stated to be required by the Commission on Higher Education and later by the Higher Education Authority the sooner they know it the better so that they can cut back their expansion in numbers. The Minister will need to explain to universities the basis of these cuts and what the economies are. When we know what economies the Minister proposes—perhaps we are all to be put in prefabs—the Higher Education Authority can decide whether they and the universities believe it is possible to provide the required accommodation for the amount provided.

I want to mention the teaching of theology in the universities. I am sure the Minister has received a document on this subject from the Irish Theological Association and I think a document has also been published by the Irish Federation of University Teachers which is not dissimilar in tone. I hope the Minister will consider these documents. There is almost unanimous agreement between staff and students that the absence of theology in universities is a serious defect. While recognising that there are problems in introducing theology the NUI feels the present ban under this antiquated charter, which was introduced by the Liberal Government as part of its anti-clerical activities in 1908, should go and that theology should be allowed to be taught.

Theology must be taught as an academic discipline and this requires the appointment of staff to be in the hands of the colleges concerned. We recognise there may be problems of a denominational character and that provision will have to be made for certain posts which are denominational in character. The proposals in the Irish Theological Association's memorandum as to how this can be achieved are good proposals and I think the Minister should consider them seriously. As he knows, the arrangement is that the university advertises, selects people and then presents the list of applicants which they consider to be suitable to the appropriate body of the religious denomination concerned, if it is a denominational body; and that body has the right to veto anybody if it feels he is not in a position adequately to represent the theological views of that particular denomination; and the university will then choose its appointee from the remainder. It is also important that anybody appointed cannot be dismissed except in very special circumstances. Provision is made in this memorandum whereby a university would be required to dismiss someone holding a denominational post only if he were found to be guilty of heresy. With these safeguards of academic freedom I think universities would welcome the introduction of theology.

The next point I want to make is one outside the Minister's scope of responsibility, and I shall not, therefore, dwell on it, and that is the ban on Trinity. The Minister will have read the document published by the Irish Federation of University Teachers. I hope he thinks it was well put. I regret, and I hope he regrets, that reaction from the hierarchy has been so negative and, in a sense, so political. Their reason for not acting is a political reason because of the present uncertain situation and doubts about how the merger will evolve. I cannot see how these doubts should prevent them from doing the right thing if they believe it is the right thing to do. The ban is long overdue for removal; in fact, it is widely ignored, and I hope it will be removed before very long.

I would urge the Minister to look into the question of hot school meals. I am sure he is aware of the work done by the North Cork parents association and the study carried out by Mr. Terence O'Brien of the Magee College, Londonderry. Hot school meals are provided in some areas but I hope the Minister will look into the provision of hot meals in all schools. Mr. O'Brien's study suggests how this can be done efficiently and economically and I hope the Department will have due regard to it when making plans for the school meal service.

There are defects in the present school transport system. I was in communication with one of the Minister's officials on the subject of a person who made representations to me and who was prepared to pay his child's fare to travel on the school bus. He had applied in April but had received no reply from the Department and in desperation he came to me. I wrote to the Department and eventually the parent got the necessary permission on 10th October. It is ludicrous that a man should have fruitless correspondence with the Department, then approach a TD—in this case he was not in my constituency—and have to wait six months before being allowed to pay for his child to travel on the school bus. Again we have this extraordinarily lethargic bureaucracy. Surely, if there is room on the bus anyone willing to pay should be allowed to travel on it without having to enter into a six months long correspondence, bringing TDs into it as well, just to get permission to travel on the school bus? I cannot understand why the system has to be so cumbersome. Will the Minister give an assurance that if someone wants to send his child to school on a school bus and is not entitled to free travel, he will be allowed to pay? This would reduce the cost to the State and would be of benefit to the children concerned. I hope the Minister will deal with that in his reply.

I would like the Minister to consider extending the school health service to non-aided primary schools. I know the Minister has to have regard mainly to national schools and that he must not take any course of action which would favour non-aided schools as against national schools but this scheme favours the pupils rather than the school and I would urge the Minister to extend the school health service to these people.

In a previous debate I pressed for an assurance that the £100,000 made available for youth services would be spent. I should like to congratulate the Minister on having made arrangements to spend this sum fully. It is most satisfactory that it has been done and I am glad the matter has been kept under close review. I hope it will be possible to widen the scope of the scheme.

I was concerned to learn that the money provided for educational research has not been fully spent. Reference to this fact was made in the Public Accounts Committee last year and was published in the press recently. The reason given by the Secretary of the Department for not spending all the money was that they could not get enough good projects. I do not blame the Department because there are not enough good projects but the Minister should concern himself if he cannot find educational projects on which to spend £10,000. There is something wrong with the country if that is the situation and if there are projects and the money was provided for them, then there is something wrong with the system of administration.

Our educational statistics are inadequate and antiquated. The Investment in Education Report made a great breakthrough in providing us with new and relevant figures because the figures we had up to then were irrelevant to our needs. What has been done to keep the figures up to date? The development unit was established with the aim of ensuring that we did have a continuous flow of figures but in many cases when one seeks information in order to up-date the report one cannot get the figures. I understood the aim was to ensure that all the figures would be kept up to date regularly. I am continually getting complaints from secondary teachers that they cannot get up-to-date examination statistics which they feel are a very important educational guide. I am talking here about people genuinely concerned about education. I had a communication from one educational expert who said:

At this juncture in Irish education nothing is more needed——

that is possibly an over-statement——

than constant communication between the Inspectors and the schools; standards of learning are in danger of slipping, the new syllabuses and somewhat reformed examinations are an occasion of stress and worry and bewilderment for teachers. It is impossible for a member of a Standardising Committee for a subject to extract even minimal statistics upon which judgments of standards etc. might be made. The Department pleads overwork and inadequate staff.

He then presses for the independent school committee which I mentioned. He says:

An Independent Board could press for adequate staff, for adequate facilities by which statistics could be assembled and made public; and such a board would make public its annual report to the Minister.

This is another good argument for having a proper examination committee, as in Northern Ireland. It could do what the Department, in its present state of overwork, cannot do, at least produce some kind of statistics and some kind of basis for considering the validity of the examinations. In this country we have been terribly neglectful of this field of study. In the universities also we are to blame. We have not done the work we should do on our own examination statistics. I did a minor job last year on one particular examination and got some very interesting results, suggesting wide variations in standards in different subjects. There is no provision for this. It is nobody's responsibility to examine examination statistics and moderate examination standards. It is done on a very general scale on the leaving certificate and the intermediate certificate examinations in the Department but there is no adequate study of examination statistics with a view to improving the whole system of examinations. This is something that should be looked at. The slowness in producing figures is a defect of the present system.

I welcome what the Minister had to say about reformatories and industrial schools. We are all pleased that, at last, the sums of money provided here have been greatly increased. It has been a mystery to me why this was not done long ago. I thought one of the most important features of the 1965 Just Society policy of Fine Gael was the section dealing with this. We had the assistance of several experts here and what we learned from them of the pressure put on these institutions by inadequate finance and the conditions which they were forced to provide for the people in them were horrifying. I do not understand how we could have been so long about it, the sums of money are so small. The Minister should be congratulated for doing something, however belatedly, about this and I hope he will be more generous in the near future until we have really satisfactory conditions in these institutions.

This debate also covers the National Gallery, the National Library and the National Museum. On the National Gallery I am not competent to say much except that as a member of the Public Accounts Committee I was concerned at the evidence given by the accounting officer, the Director of the National Gallery. He gave evidence some time ago that he had got approval in principle for more staff which were badly needed. He had completely failed, however, to get the staff. He had also failed to discover why he did not get the staff. For the Director of the National Gallery to get approval to employ staff, not to get them and not to be able to find out what has gone wrong or who is causing the delay is an extraordinary example of bureaucracy at work. There is something wrong with a system that works like that. I can quite understand the Director of the National Gallery looking for more staff and being told he cannot get them. I might not agree but it makes sense if somebody is trying to save money. However, if staff is approved in principle and then months and years pass and he cannot get the staff or find out who is stopping him from getting the staff or what he should do to overcome this obstacle, there is something very wrong with the system. I recommend that the Minister should look into it. It seems to me that between his Department and the National Gallery and the Department of Finance something is wrong. There is a channel blocked somewhere. I hope it is not in the Minister's Department.

The Minister will be aware that a group has been formed recently to promote the interests of the National Library. The Minister has himself appointed an internationally-known library consultant, Dr. Kenneth Humphrey, to prepare a report on the subject. The space our National Library has and the funds it has are a disgrace. The National Library works in appalling conditions. The increase in space it would need to do its job properly is not just a percentage increase; it is a four- or five-fold increase. Ministers have talked for years about this. Promises have been made. We had one Minister who did show a real interest—Donogh O'Malley— but with his death the thing seems to have lapsed again. I recommend to the Minister to do something drastic about it when he receives this report. We have had so many different projects. One was the project to develop on this site and link with a tunnel to the Trinity Library. Then the library was to move out to Morehampton Road. Then it was to go to the Canal. I forget even the order of these events. At present they are thinking of staying where they are. There is a good deal of property in Kildare Street that could be acquired for development on that site. I am not competent to say whether there is enough, but certainly it is something that should be considered. It may well be that the answer is to provide some of the space not on this site but elsewhere. The British Museum stores some of its material, which is not in normal use, outside London. It may be uneconomic and unnecessary to have all the material in the National Library in Kildare Street but space is needed somewhere and certainly much more space is needed than there is in the National Library. I hope the Minister will take seriously the report that he will receive on that matter.

The National Library should be a great cultural centre. Unfortunately some collections of documents have gone outside this country which should have remained here. We are enormously indebted to Senator Michael Yeats for the donation of his father's papers. As somebody has remarked to me, those papers are almost certainly worth more than the entire National Library building that they are in. This reflects two things—the remarkable generosity of Senator Yeats and the Yeats family and the total inadequacy of the National Library. The Government should always be generous if funds are sought for the retention in Ireland of collections of papers of national interest whether they are historical or literary. I hope we will never be in the position where documents, which are vital as part of our national archives' collection of papers, go outside the country simply through lack of funds. That would be extremely shortsighted policy.

On the question of archives generally the position is regarded by historians as extremely serious. There exists, the Minister probably knows, a divergence of view as to whether, in fact, our national archives should be centred in the National Library or whether there should be a separate public office and national archives. I am not competent to adjudicate on that but I do know that the position is regarded by historians as extremely serious. The amount of material that has been lost irretrievably is appalling. Until recently the neglect of Government Departments to retain documents of historical interest has been deplorable. In other countries there is a system under which every document, before it is thrown out, has to be considered as to whether it is an item of historical value. Nothing of the kind has existed here, though in the last couple of years there have been signs of a greater interest in the subject and some thought has been given to whether documents should be retained or discarded. However, I do not think the present situation is in any way satisfactory and there is still danger of an enormous amount being lost.

There is a shortage of trained staff. In fact the staff position is worse than it was 50 years ago. I shall quote from the Report and Recommendations by the Irish Committee of Historical Sciences:

Fifty years ago, the Public Record Office of Ireland was a well-staffed institution comparable in facilities and reputation with archives elsewhere. Today, there are fewer professional archival personnel in public employment in the Republic than in the County Record Offices of many English counties. Poor facilities and inadequate staffing have elicited unfavourable comment from visiting scholars, and adverse comparison with the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.

Indeed Northern Ireland is a model, I understand, in this respect. We have a lot to learn from them here as in a surprising number of fields.

I would urge the Minister to look into this whole question. It is something with which the Taoiseach has some concern also. It does not concern only one Government Department. Indeed, I have spoken to the Taoiseach on this subject. The views of historians should be considered and we should first of all ensure that no further destruction of documents of value takes place, and, secondly, that adequate archive arrangements are made, whether in the National Library or elsewhere, is a matter for decision. The cost involved is tiny and its importance for future generations of Irishmen is enormous. I hope the Minister will have a look at this because the professional historians are very concerned. There has been some evidence that, even though recently there has been more alertness in the public service to the danger of loss of records, quite recently a number of important records may have been lost.

Having listened to Deputy FitzGerald from 10.45 this morning I am not quite sure whether he is more exhausted than I am. His contribution was enlightening and extremely interesting and listening to him was an experience, but one must try to avoid repetition and I find myself in considerable agreement with the vast bulk of what he has said.

At the outset I want to say that I share a difficulty with Deputy FitzGerald in approaching the debate on this Estimate without having readily available annual, updated, essential, statistics. I certainly appreciate that the Department are very helpful and very co-operative in giving statistical information sought by means of Dáil question. In other Departments, notably the Department of Health and the Department of Local Government, there are many complexities in the compilation of essential basic, statistical data affecting the performance and role of these two Departments. I do not think this Department can be entirely exonerated for not having available, I would submit on an annual basis, educational statistics for the benefit of both the House and the country.

I appreciate the tremendous and invaluable work, which is now outdated after a lapse of time, of the survey team for Investment in Education. The tremendous mass of detail which that team made available to the country was invaluable in the mid-sixties but today, trying to evaluate alternative educational strategies for the seventies, I think the failure on the part of the Department to keep the various indices and details right up to date has been a considerable loss to educational debate and educational development in the country.

In respect of secondary schools and universities there is also very considerable difficulty in getting from them a comprehensive analysis of the costings of their educational work. This deficiency is a matter of serious concern because we cannot argue or debate educational strategies and the alternatives open to the people in this country unless we have the facts. Both in respect of the post-primary sector and the university sector the Department have perhaps not been as urgent in seeking this information as they might have been. Nevertheless the Department deserve a certain amount of sympathy because very often people feel they have their own ivory towers to preserve in the matter of publicly accounting for the spending of taxpayers' money.

In approaching the debate in general those of us in politics must have a degree of humility. I am not a professional educator as such. I have a layman's interest in it and I have a particular interest in it as a member of the Labour Party. Throughout the 1960s there was a tremendous impetus towards the emergence of a far better system of education. Great progress was made in the 1960s, progress which was more extensive than that in the 1950s but, tremendous as this development has been, many of us in the euphoria of educational progress in the 1960s are inclined to feel that a great deal of the work has been done when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Much has been accomplished but it has not been as fast or as extensive as it should have been if we are to meet the challenges of the 1970s. It is not unfair to say, and it is not politically partisan to say, that in the early 1960s the Labour Party gave a great impetus to the growth of a more extensive and coherent educational system. The Labour Party in the 1960 to 1963 period published policy documents on education. In fact, in the 1965 general election education was a key issue. I think it is true to say that the vehemence, the demands and the incessant speaking out on the part of the Labour Party at that time for more equal educational opportunities were a major factor in the concentration of Government effort on policy formation to give greater educational opportunities to all those who had the innate ability to benefit from them.

The policy of the Labour Party then could be said to have, and still has—these policies are by no means fulfilled—two major general objectives. The first objective we had was to advance the development of individual citizens. Secondly, the objective of the Labour Party was to create and develop the skills and talents and knowledge of our people, flexibility in their mental attitudes to enable them to make a fully constructive, fully productive and wholly dynamic contribution to the economic development of the nation. This was stressed by us in the early 1960s. It was pointed out that better education and economic progress were intimately related. Both had a contribution to make. These reports, the Labour Party report in 1963, the Investment in Education report in 1965 and the NIEC report No. 16 issued subsequently stressed repeatedly that the major defects of the system itself were the glaring inequalities in social groupings, in regional locations and in the participation of children particularly at post-primary level.

Progress reported; Committee to sit again.
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