This is a pretty long Bill and I do not intend taking you through the whole of it. I assume that the Senators have read the Dáil debates on this Bill. The Bill is the result of the dissatisfaction of my Department with the system that exists at present and it is the result of the recommendations made by a Special Commission that devoted a great deal of time, energy and ability to an investigation of the whole problem of technical education. I may say that most of the provisions of the Bill follow the recommendations of that Commission. There are two exceptions in which the Bill is not following the recommendations of the Technical Commission. I have elsewhere called attention to these exceptions. The most important is that we found it impossible to devise any working system of machinery that could enforce the whole-time attendance of boys and girls between the ages of fourteen and sixteen at technical classes. It would be impossible to enforce the attendance of boys and girls between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. Once you single out one particular class, namely, those not in employment or in suitable employment, we found it was impossible, when we examined the recommendations of the Commission and their implications, to carry out that recommendation.
The other matter in which we have not attempted to carry out the recommendations of the Commission is on the question of apprenticeship legislation. It was not because we felt that apprenticeship legislation was not desirable and necessary, but because to seven-eighths of its extent it fell within the sphere of the Department of Industry and Commerce, and that Department is preparing a Bill on the matter. This present Bill only attempts to deal with the education of a large mass of the young people of the country from the age of fourteen onwards. It is true that a certain number of youngsters between the ages of fourteen and sixteen are already dealt with, both in the national schools and in the secondary schools, but far the larger number are practically untouched once they leave the national schools, except in so far as they are dealt with by the existing system of technical education.
This is an important problem, and my remarks apply to the country as well as to the towns. There is a tendency on the part of boys and girls when they leave school at the age of fourteen to forget a great deal of what they learned at school. It is proposed to try to remedy that. There is the further problem, namely, the problem of the provision of technical education in the narrower sense to be tackled—namely, the intellectual side of the training for industry. That is what I call technical education in the narrower sense. We have dealt with that problem as fully as we can from our present knowledge of the conditions and our present knowledge of the resources of the country. There are two types of education dealt with in this Bill, one for want of a better term is called continuation education and the other technical education. There is no new system introduced and no new principles practically to speak of except, to a limited extent, that of compulsion, which I will explain later on. There are no new principles introduced either as regards control of technical education or continuation education. The types of education that I have referred to, continuation and technical education in the narrower sense, are actually being provided under our existing system by the technical committees in different parts of the country. So far as that is concerned there is no new condition. What we really attempt in that respect is merely a better formulation of what is now in a chaotic condition.
In the technical schools it has been objected that owing to the system —and not the schools, but the system is responsible—there is a great deal of confusion in mixing up altogether the wider vocational education and the narrower technical education. This Bill tries, as far as legislation can do it, to prevent confusion of that kind. It is a very big problem that we have before us in this country. It is a problem that the country will have to face if it intends to keep its place in competition with other countries. This Bill is not a new departure. It is a reform of the existing system. Control of vocational education and technical education will still, as heretofore, be in the hands of local committees. There is no change introduced so far as the principle of control by committees is concerned —technically, that is. At present local education authorities are the county councils and the borough or urban councils. In future it will be the committees appointed by those bodies, that is the committees appointed by the county council and the borough council. In practice there is no departure in principle there. However, we have made the committees smaller. Up to the present the committees have been absurdly large. Of those often very few attended. It was only on exceptional occasions that you had anything like a full muster, not when the ordinary routine committee work had to be performed. The work had really to be carried on in practice by a small number of people who regularly attended. In future we propose to limit the size of the committee, as Senators will see, if they refer to the second part of this Bill. Furthermore, there is this provision in the Bill as it left the Dáil. In the original Bill there was a provision that there should be fourteen members appointed by the county council, and that of these eight were to be members of the county council. The whole fourteen could be members of the county council if the county council so desired. That was my first attempt to deal with two conflicting interests.
As the Senators are probably aware, however, from reading the debates of the Bill, and also, possibly, from some statements in the Press, it is proposed under this Bill to continue the system we have at present—namely, contribution by rates. That being so, as the power of raising rates within a certain limit is vested in the committee, I was anxious that the county councils, the rating authority, and the borough councils should have a majority of their own members on the committees. It is for that reason that the provision is inserted that there should be eight out of the fourteen members of the committee members of the county or borough council. In that way I hope to safeguard the rating authority of the county council. But the Bill did not quite do that, because it is quite possible that even a majority of the county council present might be against the raising of the rate, and still it might be raised within the limits of the Schedule of the Bill. Therefore, from that point of view the original system is not satisfactory, as the power of raising the rate was vested in the committee. Representations were made to me from various parts of the country that that seemed to impose an obligation on the rate-striking authority. But I have another objection, and it was this: that the incidence of eight out of fourteen of the committee being taken from the county council would unduly limit the liberty of the county council to choose what they thought would be the most suitable people to run a system of this kind.
Consequently as a result of these considerations and the representations made to me from various bodies representing the agricultural community, I introduced a change. I induced the Dáil to accept a change in this part of the Bill—namely, there were these provisions put in: five of the members chosen by the county council must be members of that body, and that five will form the Estimates Committee, and that five alone, or whatever number up to eight is elected by the county council on this Vocational Committee will be the members of that committee who will have the power of raising the rate above the minimum rate within the scheduled limits in any year. In that way I think we have, as far as it is possible to do it, provided for and safeguarded the rating interest—the interests of the county council on the one hand, and secured more liberty from the purely educational point of view, on the other hand. These are some of the important changes in the Bill.
The other important matter in the Bill is compulsion. A certain amount of confusion seems to have arisen on the question of compulsion. I have already dealt with one aspect of compulsion. There is recommendation 18 of the Technical Commission Report that suggests that we should enforce a full-time attendance at school from those not in suitable employment between the ages of 14 and 16 years, but we found in practice that we could not really put a regulation of that kind into effect in the country. We have power in the Bill under which the Minister may compel the attendance at a limited number of hours of instruction per year of those between the ages of 14 and 16, not necessarily for the whole country at the same time. I take it this will be gradually extended—that is to say, there will be a gradual extension of this compulsory section. There have been objections raised to the compulsory section—namely, that it will interfere with the work in the agricultural districts. So far as it is possible to do so by legislation we are trying to guard against that. An amendment in the Dáil which I accepted provided that the actual hours of attendance in the country districts should be fixed by the committee and not by the Minister. The Minister will decide whether in certain areas the compulsory section will be operative. The actual hours of attendance will be decided by the technical committee after consultation with the agricultural committee of the county. In that way the different interests ought to be safeguarded.
The only other matter to which I think it is necessary to call attention is the question of the costs. This Bill, following the example of other countries where the system of post-primary education has been carried through, proposes to introduce the system gradually. There are a number of reasons for doing that. If we were to attempt to introduce this system in one or two years we might very easily make many false starts and waste a lot of money. We might have our resources depleted on schemes that were not the best. For that reason we decided to go slowly. If this scheme were in full operation in the country within the next five or six years we estimate that the total additional cost to the country would be about £300,000. I have indicated that that is the cost in addition to the present cost of technical education. That would be borne partly by the State and partly by the rates.