The Appropriation Bill provides the only opportunity we have of looking at the various Departmental Estimates and, in doing so, one is tempted to try the impossible and range over all of them. Practically every one here would have something to contribute under each heading, but, due to the short time at our disposal, we have to select just a few. I shall confine myself to education and agriculture and I do so in the knowledge that the appropriate Departments are not represented here. However, the Department that controls them, the Department of Finance, is represented here and it may be an opportunity for me to show the Department of Finance that more money is needed in certain sectors and that certain proposed schemes are extravagant and should not be proceeded with.
In starting with education, I should begin with the university Vote. Here we find that the picture is the same old depressing one. There is no semblance of a plan to provide our universities with the resources of a modern university system. I felt a little happier in March last when I spoke on this matter because I thought there was a slight adjustment in some of the figures, particularly in regard to University College, Cork where there was an increase of £32,000 but when the directive came, £10,000 of that was labelled for reduction of college debt which knocked the bottom out of any semblance of an increase.
I cannot emphasise too strongly that we pride ourselves in being a modern nation. We listened with pride to the words of President Kennedy when he accepted us as a modern nation. But a modern nation has to have modern equipment and the most essential equipment of any nation is its educational equipment. The most important part of that educational equipment is its university equipment. If you have a university system that is up to international standards and if you have men who can meet their international colleagues and hold their own in international conferences, then you have inspiration in the universities. That inspiration flows out of the students and the desire to transmit knowledge flows out of the students. It is false economy for any nation to keep its university system in poverty and that is what is being done here.
It is not the poverty of the individual professors to which I am referring because, by and large, university salaries are reasonable enough. It is the poverty of resources and that is the greatest tragedy of all because you are not providing the ancillary resources necessary to get from those university people, who are being paid reasonable salaries, what they are capable of giving to the nation. Consequently you engender in them a sense of frustration and they are not to be blamed if some of them take the easy way out, decide to blame the Government, do nothing and spend their time otherwise. Thank God, many of our university people are not guilty of that, despite the handicaps under which they work.
The position is not an enormous one for the Government to face up to because the income figures at present show that the position is not terribly bad. I am quoting from Table 7 of the excellent report issued recently by the Federation of Irish Lay Secondary Schools on Education in the Republic of Ireland. Table 7 of that publication shows that the total income of the university system in the Republic was £1,750,000 in 1960/61, of which about half was provided by the State. Our sister university in Northern Ireland, Queen's University, had an income from all sources of £1,272,000 of which the State provided £1 million. They had that amount for 3,644 students while our total is 10,021. On a per student basis, you can thus conclude that the amount available for the work of the universities here is only half what is considered reasonable and right in the North. There is only a slight difference in salaries so that the difference is in equipment, junior staff and ancillary services.
That bill is not a frightening one. If we were to catch up with the North, assuming that we were to get certain additional income from fees, it would require additional State expenditure of £1 million. That volume of expenditure is not required immediately. You cannot recruit all the staff required overnight. What you want is a planned policy to catch up in, say, ten years. That means that under the heading of catching up, you should increase the subvention to the universities at the rate of £100,000 to £120,000 per annum. Surely that is not asking very much, but, as well as catching up, we have to improve as the others are improving. That imposes a certain strain because the grants in the North and in England are increased and the demands for increased grants are growing. However, we have to catch up on current expenditure first.
The main question is that of buildings. Here the Government are to be complimented on the bold policy they are pursuing in connection with University College, Dublin, which should yield a great dividend but I would ask the Government to remember that there are universities in this country besides University College, Dublin. I would ask them to remember the despised and neglected country cousins, University College, Galway, and University College, Cork, the building needs of which are very pressing because little or nothing in the way of building has been done as far as they are concerned since we got our freedom. The Government would gain big dividends by ensuring that these places are given the space necessary to function as modern universities.
I appeal to the Minister to cut through the red tape and let us not go back to the old question as to whether there should be 1,000, 1,500 or 1,700 students when our numbers have passed 1,700 students. Let us plan a bold policy. A bold policy will yield dividends and if the Government play their part, the provincial university centres will play theirs as they have done in the past.
Another very big discrepancy between the university system here and that in more affluent countries, especially in England and in the Six Counties, is the aid given to students. In fact, it has reached the stage in these countries where young men do not see why they should undergo the rigours of university training unless they are almost paid for it; in other words, a very high rate of scholarship is provided. I do not know whether we may be forced to go along that line but I hope not as far as the others have gone. After all, university education does increase the earning capacity of the person receiving it and it is not unreasonable he should pay back part of what is spent on his education.
While we need a greatly increased scholarship system — the Government have taken some steps recently in that regard—what we need far more is ease of borrowing so that a young man can borrow the money, or a good deal of the money, necessary to put him through the university, if he is not quite in the scholarship class, and then pay it back out of his earnings in the first five or six years after qualifying. I have been advocating this for quite a while. I have been told the legal difficulties are almost insuperable but I do not see why such a contract would not be as enforceable as any other contract for debt that anyone incurs in business.
This report I mention shows the disparity between the system here and in Northern Ireland, that there they spend £483 per university student as against £99 in the Republic. That is not quite as glaring as it sounds because the greatest disparity is in the aid given to students and I think the ratio I have worked out of two to one gives a more realistic comparison.
Recently we have had the foundations coming in, for example, the Irish-US foundation, and the Government have announced their intention of investing some money in this. Such facilities for students studying abroad are very welcome, though it might be said that, due to the generosity of the large American centres, we have not fared too badly in that respect in the past, especially in the past five or six years when we have been able to get a number of our best students abroad for training. However, there is the dilemma that we are sending students abroad for training as jet pilots but are we to bring them home and put them in charge of DC3s? If we do that, these young men will not stay with us. In fact, we note with grave disquiet the few applications we are getting for university posts in the last few years. It is becoming increasingly difficult to attract young men home to posts in the lecturer grade and other such posts. It is not a lack of money that is responsible for that but they always inquire: "What are we asked to do? How many lectures a week must we give? What research facilities have you got? Have you a computer?", and so on. When you tell them you have nothing comparable with what they would have in a second-class or third-class American or British University, then they are not interested in coming back to us. There is a dilemma there and the sooner we show improvement in this regard, the better.
The first essentials are equipment and staff. Then we should get away from our worries about expansion of the present system and how far it should expand. I believe we cannot expand it too much. The world is calling for more and more university education and if there are places available in our universities, I believe they can be filled quite readily from abroad and that, looked at in the lowest terms as a contribution to the national income, it will prove to be a profitable contribution.
Let me take a few figures in this connection. The student coming here, between university fees, general expenses of living, travel in the country, books and so on, spends about £600 every year. Taking a multiplication factor of 1.6 that means that, due to this student being here, the national income is up by about £1,000 and the tax system at present is designed to get back about 23 per cent of this for the Exchequer. It means that roughly a sum of £230 finds its way back into the Exchequer. Consequently, it is good business, if necessary, to subsidise such a student as to some fraction of that amount, at perhaps as low a fraction as we can get away with, but, even at the full university level of £100 per student, that would leave a profit and, as we pointed out, with the necessity for doubling the State contribution, if it is put up at £200 per student, there is still a slight profit.
In any case, it is a proposition that should commend itself to as hardheaded a Department as the Department for Finance, if we look realistically at the prospects of filling places with carefully selected students from abroad and the contribution this can make, realising that it will more than outweigh any cost to the State. I think the mathematics are quite sound.
I must again this year appeal for the neglected members of our system, for Maynooth College and the College of Surgeons. I appealed for both last year. I am not aware the College of Surgeons is in any way a particularly Catholic institution and consequently it was no answer to my plea for the Minister for Finance to come back last March and say I was in some way or another charging the Government with being bad Catholics. I am only asking for justice for these institutions. Maynooth College got a paltry £15,000 in 1957 and that grant was increased by £5,000 the following year, due to the fact that Kildare County Council had suddenly acquired the legal right to levy rates amounting to £5,000 on Maynooth. That was not an increase but a compensation for rates. Rates have apparently gone up since but the basic grant of £15,000 remains as it was in 1957.
In all seriousness, do the Government not agree that nowhere will they get better value for money than they are getting in Maynooth from the professors there who have international reputations in their subjects? Many of those professors could go to corresponding positions in Louvain or elsewhere. I submit it is a disgrace to the country that they should be offered this paltry grant of £15,000 which is only one-twelfth of the amount being spent on veterinary education in this country.
Likewise, the £4,500 given to the College of Surgeons is a disgrace. The grant is something that either should be given or should not be given and if the College of Surgeons are entitled to a grant, the £4,500 is an insult. They should be given a more realistic grant. I believe they are entitled to a fair measure of grant, always insisting that if our university institutions here, or an institution such as the College of Surgeons, are to take in foreign students, the standards of entrance must be set at the proper level so that we will never be accused of taking in students because they could not get in elsewhere. We should take in students only if we can provide for them an education here comparable with the best they can get elsewhere.
I come, briefly, to the agricultural schools and here, again, let me make a plea. The eighth round wage increase has passed them by. The privately-run agricultural schools have been given a 2½ per cent increase while the State schools got the regular 16 or 17 per cent. It was reasonable to give it to the State schools but it is equally unjust to deny it to the privately-run institutions such as Pallaskenry, Warrenstown, Gurteen and others which are doing a wonderful job to make our young farming community scientific-minded, to get them to increase production and carry on against all handicaps.
I would appeal to the Minister to right that position. It is a small figure in the Book of Estimates, but it is a figure that worries me on any principle of justice or fairplay. It costs as much to educate one student in a State college as it costs to educate ten in one of these private institutions. Surely if the State were looking for a good bargain, in effect they could close their own institutions and hand over the work to those private institutions who are able to do it so much more efficiently, to judge by money standards alone. But I am not for a moment suggesting that any institution should be closed. I am suggesting fair play should be given to the private institutions and then we could sit back and watch the revolution in agriculture these colleges would bring about if they had only the help per student comparable with what is given in the State schools.
I now come to another aspect of education. I have to refer to the statement by the Minister for Education in regard to post-primary education. I am amazed this document did not cause more controversy and has not been the subject of long debates in both Houses. The Minister, when he announced the proposals, said:
I am announcing them now so that the public in general, and the members of Dáil Éireann in particular, may have time to consider them before they come for debate when the annual Estimates for my Department are being presented to Dáil Éireann.
I have studied these proposals quite carefully and have studied the excellent report issued by the Federation of Irish Lay Secondary Schools, and I raise the matter here because it concerns the Department of Finance virtually since what is proposed here calls for greatly increased expenditure.
None of us is averse from spending more on education. In fact, in this respect it might be well for us to know that we have been going backwards in our spending on education. In the 1930-31 Budget, £4,697,000 was provided for education, or 21.1 per cent of the total of the Supply Services. That percentage dropped to 15 in 1940-41, to 12.4 in 1950-51, and at the moment it is 13.4 per cent. In other words, education is getting one-third less, percentagewise, than it got in 1930-31, and yet we say we are making progress, that we are more education-conscious than our fathers were in 1930-31. I submit it would be going a long way towards righting the balance if the figure were restored even to the modest percentage of 21.1 for 1930, and I feel sure the Budgets of other countries which we set as a pattern, like England, Denmark and Holland, would show a higher percentage expenditure on education.
Be that as it may, we must come to the proposals of the Minister for Education, which I regard, frankly, as being the most amazing I have ever heard because he speaks of the necessity for this post-primary education and refers on page 5 to what he calls the main weakness of the system:
The first of these is the particular one that, notwithstanding the tremendous growth in post-primary attendances, there are still areas in the country which have neither a secondary nor a vocational school within easy daily reach of potential pupils and where, under the existing system, such is not likely to be available in the foreseeable future.
So the Minister has found those regions at last, and I believe there is one in West Clare, depending on what you mean by accessibility, whether it be three miles, five miles or ten miles from a school. Here we may take the Minister's standard because in relation to these new comprehensive schools he plans to set up, he suggests they should have a radius of ten miles. That gives some idea of the Minister's thinking. There are not many areas in the country that are ten miles from either a vocational school or a secondary school and I am speaking as one who for two years travelled 23½ miles each day back and forth, 47 miles altogether, to a secondary school from Kilmallock to Limerick. I went by bus and it took me an hour and a quarter each way.
I think that limit of ten miles could be increased considerably. It could be increased to 15 miles, or 20 miles in exceptional cases, provided the Minister's intention to give assisted travel is implemented. It is easier to travel 20 miles in a car pool than by bus. It is far less tiring on the pupils. We must not get too soft, but we want to be practicable. The Minister wants to build schools ten miles from existing schools. He wants them to be capable of taking 150 pupils. It would be very hard to meet those two requirements. He wants to put up these magnificent schools in out-of-the-way places, and he wants them to be combined secondary and vocational schools which will have guidance councillors and all the rest. I might say that an area is to go from rags to riches.
The point I want to come back to is that the Minister does not propose to give any additional grant whatsoever to any of the existing secondary or vocational schools to enable them to serve a slightly bigger area. If pupils ten miles from one of the new comprehensive schools are entitled to free transport, justice demands that pupils ten miles from existing secondary or vocational schools are entitled to the same facilities. If the Minister proposes to pay all the salaries and practically all the costs associated with the new comprehensive schools, surely justice demands that he should make the same offer to the existing schools?
It is not an exaggeration to say that since we have had self-government, the secondary school system has been constantly the enemy of the State, and the target of those who endeavour to foster State control, because those who advocate State control see in our independent secondary school system a threat to State control. Our secondary school system is one of the greatest private enterprises we have, whether run by religious orders or lay people. The capitation grants have not moved since 1939. As given in this excellent document, the cost per pupil works out at something like £36, in contrast with £95 per student paid by the State in these vocational schools. I am not criticising vocational schools. I pay tribute to everything they have done, but the plain fact is that it is costing £95 per pupil. Justice demands that the amount spent on secondary schools should be increased to that figure also.
Justice also demands that if buildings are to be provided for these new comprehensive schools, buildings should be provided for existing secondary schools. The buildings are there already, but the Minister insists there is an undesirable dichotomy between our vocational schools and our secondary schools, between academic education and practical education, as it is called. He wants to bring the two together in the new comprehensive schools, and if he wants to do that, all that is needed is the addition of two rooms to the existing secondary schools in which there will be a machine shop and a teacher of the subject.
If the Minister says those things are necessary and will be provided in the comprehensive schools, they should be provided on the same basis, and with the same measure of Government support, in each and every one of our existing secondary schools which wishes to add to its range of subjects. The Minister would find that each and every one of the existing secondary schools would be only too pleased and ready to make such a worthwhile addition. If our secondary schools are to be kept in a state of genteel poverty, weakened, and laughed at because they are weak, we can only read into the Minister's manifesto the beginning of an attempt ultimately to liquidate our secondary school system and replace it by a fully centralised and State-controlled comprehensive school system.
Apparently the advocates of this document are not satisfied with the present measure of State control in the vocational schools. It behaves those of us who feel that State control is going too far carefully to study this document which is prepared to spend several hundred pounds of the taxpayers' money on schools in out-of-the-way regions, and is not prepared to add anything to the £36 per student which is at present spent on secondary education.
The idea that the two systems should meet, and that the vocational schools as well as what they are now doing should also be able to give instruction in the Arts subjects, Irish, English and mathematics, up to inter-cert standard is a pipe dream if ever there was one. To suggest that the standard should be widened to that extent is to suggest that there is uniformity in the students which just is not there. It assumes that the students in the vocational schools can do the practical subjects and at the same time, the academic subjects and reach the same standard. Of course that is nonsense.
So far as I know, this report was brought out without the benefit of any prior study. If there are to be major changes in our education system, I appeal to the Minister, as the senior Minister in the Government, to see that a properly constituted committee is set up to have discussions and make a report, before the Government are committed to this. I feel certain that all the compassionate and social objectives the Minister wishes to attain in extending equal opportunity to children all over the country—to which principle of course we all subscribe— can be attained far more expeditiously, and far more cheaply, by providing the necessary capital grants to existing secondary and vocational schools, and by giving assisted travel from out-of-the-way regions to the existing schools.
If the Minister feels so compassionate about the situation in those backward regions, he should surely know about the greatest difficulty in those regions, that is the difficulty of maintaining an average in our national schools. He should see to it that the law which lays down that there must be so many pupils per teacher is ameliorated because when the number falls below the average, one teacher must go. That is one of the greatest handicaps in out-of-the-way schools. The result is an amalgamation of schools and then one or two teachers have to cater for the whole range of subjects. If he wishes to improve the educational facilities in those regions, he will reduce or wipe out that differential and fix a minimum number of teachers, irrespective of the average.
Another feature in this excellent study by the Irish secondary school teachers is a map they produce showing the percentage of students between 14 and 18 years of age who are in secondary schools, vocational schools, or still in primary school after the age of 12. One finds that there are a considerable number of students in primary schools who have passed the age of 12. If the Minister removed this requirement of so many students per teacher and fixed a minimum number of teachers for any primary school, the resulting increase in teachers would mean that they would be able to cater effectively for studies in the 13 and 14-year old groups. Above all, let us unite and bring together our educational system rather than try to inject another spur into it. Let us remember the truth of the old Irish proverb: Is geal gach nua agus is searbh gach gnath—everything new is wonderful. We have too much of that in our approach to matters here. We should be ready to adopt and change and modify rather than simply to try to supersede our present institutions.
I suggest that the Minister for Finance should use his good offices with the Minister for Education to ensure that there is a proper spirit of co-operation between the officials in that Department and the members of outside teaching bodies, such as the Federation of Irish Lay Secondary Schools. There seems to be far too much eagerness on the part of the Department to try to discredit figures put up by voluntary bodies such as this Federation, rather than to give them credit for the work they have done, or to try to harness their energies in co-operation with the Department to iron out their difficulties across the conference table or ensuring that this mutual recrimination stops.
We have in our teaching bodies an excellent source of study teams to study the various aspects and deficiencies of the educational system. Along the lines of the CIO, which is doing such good work in studying industrial problems, the Minister should draw on the existing teachers to study different aspects of the educational problem. They could do this during their long vacation and as they are already poorly paid, they should be adequately remunerated if they have to serve on such fact-finding bodies for any lengthy period.
I should like now to turn to agriculture and to point out again that there is a complete absence of any plan for an organised increase in agricultural production. We are no further ahead today than we were ten years ago. There is still a lack of proper incentive to the agricultural community to develop increased production on a realistic basis. Senator L'Estrange mentioned the report on the population. All the newspapers have commented on this report and they have commented especially in regard to the group between the ages of 20 and 35 which has been the most heavily hit in regard to emigration. That is a frightening picture because our own future depends on that group. Speaking here in regard to farm apprenticeship, I raised that question in a different way, that is, that this group is missing from agriculture.
I feel certain that if that census were on a sectional basis, you would find that the loss from that group is far less in industry and in towns and cities than it is in agriculture. That is the tragedy of the whole thing. As far as I can ascertain, not more than 3,500 of that group remain on the land each year. We have only about 35,000 on the land between the ages of 25 and 35 and we are only getting a in-take for the future of about 3,500 young men. One might take the average working span from the age of 16 as being somewhat less than 60 years, say 47 years. If you do a sum you will find that you arrive at a total of 170,000 people. Our in-take in agriculture over the past 15 years has been geared to reduce the population on the land ultimately to 170,000 people from its present figure of 380,000. That is a frightening picture and if it comes about, I cannot see what hope there is for agriculture. Those figures cannot be gainsaid. To my mind, that is the real lesson there.
The recent population figures released represent the frightening part of the lesson. If we get to 270,000 people we shall be reduced to being the beef ranch of Europe and I cannot see what future the country can have in that. Government policy should straightaway be geared on an emergency basis to righting that picture and to ensuring that the average intake into agriculture per annum is not 3,500 but is as high as possible: I suggest 8,000 or 10,000 as a minimum objective. Unless we can do that, we cannot create the young labour force and the young farmers of the future who will get from the land of Ireland the wealth we know is in it.
Then, again, we have the impact of automation and the fact that America in its recent plan has shown that it is expected that 15,000,000 of the present labour force there will be rendered redundant in 10 years by automation. New jobs will have to be found for those as well as for the increase in population. That is one of the reasons why we are not making greater headway here in the provision of employment. As well as trying to provide new jobs, we really have to provide jobs for those who are rendered redundant by modern scientific progress. That is one of the major calls at the moment on our increased jobs. Consequently, the problem is really enormous. Unless we can stop this drift from agriculture and stop the reduction in the numbers on the land, then our problem will get out of all bounds when viewed on a national scale.
There is no reason why the drift from the land should not be stopped. At the moment, we have the lowest labour force per 1,000 acres in Europe. We have something like 35 workers per 1,000 acres. The European average is over 70. Surely common sense says you cannot get production out of the land unless you take adequate steps to get it and the adequate steps must be viewed by comparison with what our competitors consider reasonable. If our competitors in Europe, who are highly geared and mechanised, consider they require 70 people per 1,000 acres to get proper agricultural production, do we expect to get proper agricultural production with 35?
Many attempts have been made by Governments in recent years to get agriculture moving. They have ignored the fundamental labour question. I believe that must be righted. The Minister is tackling the question of grants to try to stimulate increased production. There has been a basic weakness in all grants that have been given. The grant is given but no adequate steps have been taken for its conservation. If you give a cow by way of grant, you must ensure she is there in 100 years' time: you must ensure there is such a structure that, co-operative or otherwise, when the present item runs out, there is a replacement fund available.
You cannot expect the ordinary small farmer with his £7 a week to act as banker or businessman for himself. If he gets a little extra money he knows full well how to spend it on his family and he is entitled to do so. But he will not put aside the extra 5/- a week to be able to replace the extra cow he got. There must be some major development in agricultural co-operation in this country to remedy that fundamental defect of Irish agriculture today, namely, capital conservation on our small farms allied to the problem of getting co-operative use of machinery on our small farms.
A radical revolution is called for if our small farms are to survive. The Government have announced their intention of bringing in some Bill to extend the scope of the powers of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society. I hope they will not do this piecemeal. I hope they will get some competent committee together to go into the problem and ensure that the development that does come will provide for conservation of capital grants by the State and at the same time will further co-operative mechanisation and co-operation between the small farmers in the different regions.
We are faced with the problem that, without co-operation on an organised scale and probably with a degree of State interference that we have not had up to this in the co-operative movement, our small farms cannot survive.
I shall touch briefly on tourism, for which there is increased provision. In the past month or so, I have had an opportunity of studying the reaction of many tourists here. I find in general that we have a great deal that we ignore too often but one of the basic defects of our tourism is the short season. We need to lengthen the season. The reason I shall give for lengthening the season is not the one we have had before. I believe the real necessity for lengthening it is to be able to provide full employment throughout the year for the hotel staffs and so build up a first class staff.
Anybody at present visiting our leading hotels, especially in resort areas, cannot help but be struck by the immaturity of the staffs in those hotels. Most of them are very green and are about 15 or 16 years old. You may be certain that next year they will find themselves in Britain and that there will be another group of 15 or 16 years old people in for training. You cannot build a tourist industry on that foundation. Such an industry is scarcely worth building because it does not provide any permanence for the staff it employs.
I believe that, with the emphasis today on education, both adaptation and otherwise, training courses and the like, the Government could very well step into the picture and take the months, say, of March and April and probably October and November as training period months and use our present hotel service in the resort areas as centres in the hotels in which to run these courses. If you could so lengthen the season, then you could keep a permanent staff and you would really build up a first-class tourist industry because tourists, above all, like the service they get and the personalities that are developed by the waiters and the staff.
I have to advert on the Vote for the Department of Local Government to the failure of the Government to give justice to the engineering profession. There is, as the Government are aware, grave discontent among local authority engineers at the way they are being treated by the county managers' organisation. It is high time the Government took stock of the activities of the County Managers' Association and realised that they are arrogating to themselves rights and powers that were never contemplated in the County Management Act. They are creating a feeling of frustration among the engineering profession, because while the managers see that they themselves get their proper increases as timely as others, they are denying these increases to the engineers under their control.
Local authority work is primarily engineering work, the provision of services to the local community, health services, road services and so on. The administration or clerking part is the part of it that is insignificant: yet, in our inverted order of things, the clerking part is on top and we find the service is not going nearly as smoothly as when the county surveyor was the big man in the county and made the decisions. It is the growing octopus of State control spreading its tentacles out from Dublin over everything in the rest of the country. The county managers are the organ by which the Local Government Department do that.
I appeal to have that put right; otherwise, the Government will find that their present difficulty in filling engineering posts will increase considerably because the management side or the clerks in the local authorities cannot leave the country: very few of them could better their position abroad, but the engineers, to a man, could leave the country and double both their prospects and their salaries, if they wished to go. Thank God, most of them so far are patriotic enough to stay but the Minister and the Government would do well to remember that you can drive the willing horse so far, and recognise primarily that the local authority service is the provision of services. In other words, its is mainly a technical, engineering and medical job and not an exercise in bookkeeping or accountancy which it seems to have become.
