In the course of my remarks in moving this motion I thought I made it plain that I had a double object. One object was to try to induce the Government to set up an advisory council of the kind I suggested, and I thought I made it plain enough what kind of advisory council I had in mind. The other object I had was to provoke the Seanad into a general debate on educational questions. I have always been struck by the silence that has prevailed on these matters ever since 1922, by the difficulty that has always existed in getting a number of most important topics connected with our general system of education discussed by either House of the Oireachtas. It did not surprise or disappoint me, therefore, that the discussion on this motion took the form it did take. As a matter of fact, I may say I succeeded almost too well in provoking the House.
In dealing with the criticisms that were offered to my motion, I think it would be more profitable to take, first of all, what was said about the actual proposal for setting up a council of education, and I should like to reiterate to the House what exactly I meant by that proposal. The discussion very largely took the form of speeches on things that I did not mean at all. The Minister, for instance, devoted a very considerable part of his remarks to the criticism of a proposal which I did not make; that is to say, a proposal for some form of vocational council. I made it perfectly clear that I was not calling for a vocational council.
Then, again, the Minister took the view that in calling for a council of this kind I was trying to restore the old machinery of Dublin Castle. That is a type of criticism which is all too prevalent in this country at the present moment. It has been my lot on previous occasions, when I made suggestions that I thought were valuable or worthy of being considered, to have them turned down simply because something like what I proposed had been done by the British Government in times long gone past. I remember I once suggested that a series of well-prepared text books should be issued for the primary schools, both in the Irish and the English languages, on the model of the series of national school text books that used to be issued by the Commissioners of Primary Education. I was denounced for that proposal simply because the Commissioners of Primary Education had issued text books of that kind, as if that alone were enough to condemn the proposal and any alternative to what was done here in the way of education under the British Government was better than what was done.
I did not suggest that we should get back to the old Dublin Castle system, and I did not suggest we should set up a new system here which would be controlled by men not responsible to the people of Ireland. There is a great deal to be said about the old boards we had here before the Treaty. Everybody realises they were set up in pursuance of a certain object, that their policy was fairly carefully laid down for them and that they did their duty faithfully in pursuance of that object and policy. But it is quite possible to have similar machinery and to use it in pursuance of a totally different object. I believe, and I think a great many people agree with me, that the machinery which existed here under Dublin Castle would be better machinery for carrying out the objects we have in view now than the machinery which we have put in its place.
The men who made up these boards in the old days, both the primary board and the secondary board, were always men of very high educational distinction. Some of them were not by any means Unionists or men hostile to the views of the majority of the Irish people. You had people on these boards like Father Tom Finlay. You had one of our distinguished colleagues in the Seanad at the present moment a member of some of these boards. Neither of these was a man who could be accused of having had any sympathy at any time in his life with the standpoint of Dublin Castle.
The Minister made some rather gratuitous remarks, I thought, about the Resident Commissioner of National Education here in the old days. I do not know very much what the political views of the last Resident Commissioner were. I do not know whether I would have agreed with him if I had ever discussed politics with him; but there is one thing I do know, on which I cannot be contradicted. That is that the Resident Commissioner of National Education was a scholar of high European reputation, a scholar of far greater reputation in other countries than anybody who is within 100 miles of the Department of Education at the moment. That is the point I want to stress. We have not got our educational system staffed at the present moment with men of anything like the same standard as the men appointed by the British Government. I do not want Unionists to be appointed to this council. I do not want enemies of the Irish language to be appointed. I do not want the council to consist of men who will make it their whole object to defeat Government policy in relation to the Irish language. What I do feel is that we have, in doing away with these boards, set up a bureaucracy of the most extreme type in a department of national life where bureaucracy can do the greatest possible amount of harm and where it is likely to be least efficient. It is in order to remedy that state of affairs that I suggested not that we should go back to Dublin Castle, not that we should appoint Unionists or ex-Unionists or people hostile to the views of the Irish people, but that the Government should itself, of its own choice, select a number of distinguished men, men of standing in scholarship and in education—and we have plenty of them in the country—and appoint them, to meet frequently, to supervise and to keep continually under examination certain aspects of our educational system and to give the Minister — who is bound at all times in all likelihood to be a politician, busy with a great many other things, and not necessarily at all an expert in education — the benefit of their experience, their knowledge and their advice.
I cited as an example of the sort of thing I wanted the consultative committee that is in existence as part of the Board of Education in England. There again I suppose I would be accused of being a Unionist or of being hostile to the Irish language if I said that the English have in their Board of Education an institution which we might very well copy on our own scale and on our own level. The Minister for Education in England is not merely the head of a rather under-staffed and badly-organised bureaucratic machine like what we have here. He is the President of the Board of Education. He has under him two Parliamentary Secretaries, a number of chief inspectors, men of high standing, and, side by side with all these, he has this consultative committee which is perpetually at work and which, as I have said, has issued a number of the most important and most valuable reports on every aspect of English primary and secondary education during the last 15 or 20 years. I had here in this House a copy of the latest report dealing with secondary education. I suggest to Senators who are at all interested in our system of education and what we should try to do here, that it would be a good thing to get the Spens report on secondary education in England and to see for themselves the kind of work that it is possible to have done with an instrument like that, the enormous value that is given by that sort of advisory council to the Board of Education itself, to the schools, to the parents and to everyone interested in the future progress of education.
It was something like that I had in mind. I specifically ruled out, perhaps not emphatically enough, the idea that I was suggesting a vocational council to which the Minister devoted so much attention. I believe wholeheartedly that we in this country should work towards a state of affairs in which the State will, to a very considerable extent, loose its grip on our educational system. I believe that ultimately, when we have got things properly organised, our teachers, headmasters and the people actually concerned with education, should have a great deal more say in questions which concern what they are teaching, why they are teaching, and the organisation of the whole programme, than they have at the present time. I believe that that can best be achieved by means of the vocational organisation of education. If there is any department of our social life in which the vocational principle could be applied profitably, I think it is education. To my mind, at any rate, there is everything to be said for giving more and more scope to vocational bodies of that kind and for loosening more and more the grip of bureaucracy, of the anonymous, impersonal clerkdom that we have at present, over our primary and secondary educational systems.
At the same time, I can see that there are big difficulties in the way of setting up such a vocational body at present. The preliminary organisation has not been done. In spite of what the Minister said about all the bodies he is able to consult, our secondary system, in particular, is still far from being so organised that it can be fitted into a vocational system. We cannot wait, to my mind, until it has been sufficiently organised. The reason, in my view at any rate, is that our whole educational system and our educational standards are rapidly going downhill at the present moment. If we let things go on for ten or 15 years more as they have been going on — and it will probably take that time before we can get the vocational system fully under way — we shall have to begin building the educational system afresh, from the bottom up, at the end of that time. When that stage has been reached, we shall hardly have anyone left in the country able to undertake a task of that kind. The matter is one of real urgency. Things are slipping month by month and year by year. Anyone who is familiar with what is happening in the schools, primary and secondary, and in every branch of our educational system, knows that there are all sorts of things that need immediate attention, that need to be reformed, need to be reconsidered and unless they are reconsidered very soon, the time may come when we may not be able to reconsider them at all. We want people who will have the trained knowledge and intelligence to do that. It is for that reason that we ought to set up a council of this kind as an interim step.
I do not see where the trouble would be or what difficulty the Minister would find in setting up such a council. There are plenty of men available. There are at least three ex-Ministers of Education, who could be called in to take part; there are men like presidents of university institutions; there are headmasters and distinguished teachers in secondary schools; there is the splendid organisation of primary teachers, and also an organisation of managers. It would be quite easy, in order to make the council a valuable body, to get men who are experts in the matter of education, and it would also be comparatively easy, though the council might not be elected — not filled from the bottom up, so to speak — to get it fairly representative of all the educational work that is being done.
The only condition which I would lay down would be that the Minister, in selecting the members of such a council, should not select them for any political or extraneous reason, or for the reason that they are enthusiasts, in the sense in which Senator O'Buachalla used the word the other day, for the Irish language. I should like to see them selected for their intellectual qualifications, for their training and for their standing in the educational world, and I see no difficulty in doing that if the Government think it worth while to do it and make up their minds to do it. I do not at all wish to have a body like that chosen on any ground of hostility to the Irish language; but I want an attempt to secure that this whole question of the teaching of the language will at long last be taken out of the realm of politics, that it will be taken for granted that the people of Ireland, 99.9 per cent. of them, are in favour of doing as much for the Irish language as possibly can be done in the circumstances. The number of people opposed to the Irish language, the number of people who want to see all work stopped in regard to its teaching, and who can be counted as real enemies of the language, is infinitesimal. The vast majority of the people, whether engaged in education or otherwise, are only too anxious to do all that can be done to keep the language alive, to extend its use and to make it as far as possible the normal means of communication in the country.
There are two difficulties to be considered in that respect. One of them is the difficulty created by persistence on the part of those who officially represent the Irish language, in regarding everyone who differs from them by a hair's breadth as being an enemy and stigmatising everyone who gets up to offer an honest criticism about the methods they are using as an absolutely dyed-in-the-wool opponent of the whole idea of the revival. That is one obstacle. I would say, in all seriousness, to Senator O Buachalla and the heads of the Gaelic League that as long as they persist in that policy they are creating enemies for the language day by day.
