Did the Minister spend the money he asked for to provide work for the people in the Fior-Ghaeltacht? I think he did not spend it that way and the reason I think that is because a very large body of people in the Gaeltacht who are ready to work and who would take the work the Minister said he would provide for them if they could get it, are getting unemployment assistance. They would not be getting unemployment assistance if there was work to do, because they would be rendered ineligible for it if they refused a job when they were offered it. Therefore, I assume, they were not offered a job, although the Minister undertook to provide work for them. Accordingly, I want to ask the Minister what is the Government policy? Is it to turn all the people of that part of the country, who are the most hard-working section of the community in Ireland, into paupers, or is it his intention to provide them with work?
My submission to him is this, that if he would assess the amount of money that is being spent in the Fior-Ghaeltacht at the present time under the Unemployment Assistance Act and suggest to the Executive Council that his appropriation—the appropriation of the Minister for the Gaeltacht— should be increased by that sum in order to enable him to subsidise Gaeltacht industries, he could try out in that very restricted area a very valuable experiment and that is, how far can you provide work by subsidising labour instead of providing doles direct to men who would prefer to earn their livings instead of getting money for nothing? I say that the situation obtaining in the Gaeltacht provides an admirable opportunity for experimenting on that economic theory which has been described as priming the pump. Instead of distributing money in this way let the Minister go to the Gaeltacht Industries Branch, go to any individual entrepreneur in the Gaeltacht or to any enterprising individual prepared to start work there and say to him: “If you will undertake the production of the merchandise which the local people are in a position to produce, we will make a contribution towards the wages cost.” I think if that is done, and I believe it could be done, it will go a long way to solve a very undesirable unemployment problem in the Gaeltacht and it would do more, because it would provide a national experiment in a very restricted area where there would be no danger of the cost becoming ruinous and it would give us the material on which we could determine for the whole nation an unemployment policy that might solve the difficulties that are overwhelming not only this country but Great Britain, the United States of America and the whole world at the present time.
The Executive Council have now decided to put the Fisheries under the Department of Agriculture and the Gaeltacht is under a Minister of its own. It is extremely difficult to discuss the Gaeltacht without discussing Fisheries too, because, as a matter of fact, if the Fisheries collapse, as they are at present allowed to do in the Gaeltacht, the difficulties of the Minister for the Gaeltacht are doubled and trebled by the failure of a Department over which he has no control at all. I do not know why the Executive Council have decided to transfer the Fisheries to the Department of Agriculture. It seems to me an extremely imprudent plan. I am convinced that the idea of the old Congested Districts Board was right and that was that every service connected with the Gaeltacht should be brought under the direction of one board or individual. In that way, it would be possible to co-ordinate services and to have one head for all of those services in the Gaeltacht and not, as is possible now, to have one Minister pulling against another Minister possibly unconsciously, and thus all the difficulties created by the Gaeltacht problems will be in their full force.
Did I understand Deputy Kissane to suggest that the great majority of the people of the Gaeltacht should be removed from the Gaeltacht and that the Athboy experiment should be extended a good deal more than it is to-day? I think the Ministry ought to make up their minds about that before they start tinkering. In that regard, two matters have to be considered; first, the language problem, and, secondly—and this is far more important—the welfare of the people of the Gaeltacht themselves. If we can so arrange things as to make livelihood in the Gaeltacht possible and happy for the people there, then it would be very undesirable to extend the business of colonies at Athboy or anywhere else. Because no matter what the Minister for Education says, in two generations the Athboy colony will have forgotten Irish and we will find them in very much the same position as the outer fringes of the Breac-Ghaeltacht where the old people speak Irish amongst themselves and the children make no use of it at all in their lives. Nevertheless, if the Government have made up their minds that the problem of maintaining the people in the Gaeltacht at a reasonable level of comfort is impossible, the time has come then to face the issue and to get them out of it. The language must look after itself. It would be an intolerable doctrine and wholly indefensible to suggest that the residents of the Gaeltacht should be kept in servitude, misery and poverty for no other reason than to preserve the language. I believe we could make the Gaeltacht happy and reasonably prosperous for the people there if we had the courage to do it. I believe if we want to preserve the Irish language, and to extend the Irish language from the Gaeltacht to the Breac-Ghaeltacht and to the rest of the country, we have to do it. But we ought to make up our minds which we are going to do and do it. If we are not going to put our backs into the business and make continuous residence in the Gaeltacht possible and reasonably happy for these people, then get them out of it as quickly as you can, but do not hang fire between two failures and leave the people to suffer as a result of our indecision.
I do not believe in making a criticism of this Department without offering some suggestion as to how I would meet the difficulties that arise. When introducing this Vote last year the Minister, as reported in column 1197 of Volume 53, said: "It is estimated that £59,570 worth of turf will be purchased from these areas this year. The whole administrative cost of this is estimated at £1,620 and the purchase price of the peat will go almost entirely to the male labour engaged." I should like to ask the Minister how far has that anticipation been fulfilled? How much peat was bought in the Gaeltacht areas and how much money went into the pockets of the people of the Gaeltacht? I should like to see Irish speakers left in the Gaeltacht and I should like to see the Gaeltacht made an economic proposition. I believe that can be done in one way and in one way only. We have got to provide an opportunity for the children of the Gaeltacht residents to earn good incomes in this country without emigrating so as to reproduce a situation which obtains in other parts of the country, where the moment the child is earning a good salary he is the element that makes continuous residence on uneconomic holdings possible and possible at a reasonably high standard of living.
In this country there are abundant opportunities for earning good wages as school teachers, members of the Gárda Síochána, instructors of one kind or another, nurses and, indeed, in certain kinds of domestic service as children's nurses, for which the children of the Gaeltacht would be admirably suited if they get the educational advantages necessary to equip them for these posts. If we pursue this policy it will have two advantages; first, it will provide these children with the wherewithal to send home to their parents a few pounds every month in order to make it possible for them to live; (2) it will keep these Irish speakers in the country and it will send them out as grown men and women amongst the people where they will speak Irish, use the language and introduce to distant parts of the country the correct accent and blas of Irish as it ought to be spoken. Deputies may say “this is a very inconsistent observation on the part of Deputy Dillon. He is complaining about the Athboy experiment; he is complaining that the Athboy colony will lose the language. Then, why is he saying that these people will keep the language?” My suggestion is this—to make it clear to the mind of every resident in the Gaeltacht that the language is an asset and an instrument whereby he will get a good position. Once he has learned that lesson, once he is convinced that the language has a financial advantage for him, you have in that man an apostle of the language. He will go out and speak it and demonstrate to the world that he is an Irish speaker. In that way, you will get rid of that feeling which is doing so much harm to the Irish language, that feeling which makes people ashamed to speak it. Then the Irish speaker will realise that he has an advantage over those who cannot speak the language; he knows that he speaks the Irish language with the native blas. In this House Deputy Kissane delights in getting up and saying to me: “Yah, I was speaking in Irish and you did not understand me.” I should like to see a little of that in every boy coming out of the Gaeltacht. It does not sit well on Deputy Kissane, because he ought to have sense, but I should like to see that childish arrogance about the Irish language in every youngster who is being sent up to be a Civic Guard or a national teacher or in any other capacity. That is what we want—that he should constantly be looking round at his neighbours saying: “Yah, you do not understand me.”
We are going to provide an alternative to emigration in order to send many people back to the Gaeltacht to study and learn Irish, but this is the great difficulty we have to face. I do not like to be throwing bouquets at my own constituency, but I want to face the real problem. There is a scheme for training nurses and a great many of the girls who come up for training do not seem to have the educational equipment which makes it possible to train them. The odd thing is that Deputy Brady and I know, and everyone else knows, that these boys and girls in the Gaeltacht, in their own home county, are highly intelligent, very hard-working, and apparently fit for anything. But, for some queer reason, they do not seem to take to technical training as well as children not from the Gaeltacht.
I am going to make a suggestion in that connection. I urged on the Minister for Education, when his Vote was before the House, that he ought to contemplate in the near future raising the school age. I suggest to him that as yet he would have very great difficulty in compulsorily raising the school age to 16. I, therefore, suggest that his objective should be to reduce the school age for the primary school to 13, and then to set up a system of schools analogous to the American high school, or what we call the ordinary secondary school; make one year's attendance in that secondary school compulsory, and then offer two years more free, voluntary attendance to any child who wanted to stay. I think in 10 years' time the difficulties of making compulsory attendance at that school for three years instead of one year would vanish; and every child would want to stay, and every parent would recognise that it was his duty to let it stay. But I think that if you try to do it immediately there will be a row.
I am suggesting that if you can try out the unemployment scheme in the Gaeltacht, which is a restricted area, where we can see the limit of our possible liability, let us try out the educational experiment there. We have a problem, and that is to mould children so that they will be fitted for the technical education which will make them wage earners in the way we want them. We want to find out whether the educational plan will work or not. Let us kill two birds with the one stone. I suggest to the Minister for Education that he should offer his co-operation to the Minister for the Gaeltacht and perhaps slaughter three birds with the one stone. He could get six or eight, or, perhaps, ten schools and close them and build one good central school in which he could accommodate not only a primary school for children up to 13 but a school which would cater for children from 13 to 16. He could then bring the children in from the outlying districts in buses, as is done in practically every country in the world but this, give them the kind of education we contemplate here, and turn them out, at 16, native Irish speakers with a modest secondary school education, better equipped than any Gaeltacht child to take technical education of any kind. He could also increase the facilities which are already substantial, but which, I think, should be further increased, for admitting these children to the teachers' training colleges.
In that connection let me turn aside for a moment to say that I feel that if we are in earnest about the revival of the Irish language we ought to lay down the principle that every eligible candidate for training as a teacher, who is a native Irish speaker, should be taken and trained as a teacher, whatever the cost may be. Therefore, these specially educated children could be trained as teachers, trained as instructors or instructresses, trained as maternity or Jubilee nurses, such as move through the country, or taken into the Civic Guards. Having so trained them, while I think the Gaeltacht should be equipped with native Irish speaking instructresses, Gárda, etc., we should hope to equip the whole country with them in due course. Above all, we should make it clear, and would by that method make it clear, to every child in the Gaeltacht that the Irish language was a priceless heritage; we would make it clear to every child in the Gaeltacht that we are really in earnest in the value we set upon the language and in the solicitude we are prepared to show to any body of people who would preserve it, as they have preserved it; and we would, by the process of experimentation which I have outlined, glean invaluable information which may be used all over the country at a later stage.
My submission to the House is that fiddling and foostering with the Gaeltacht is going to get nobody anywhere, and that, unless there is a bold policy adopted which will completely alter the whole outlook of the residents of that area, it would be much better to do nothing at all and let nature take its course; because turning them into paupers, turning the best element in this country, the hardest-working element, the most independent element, into paupers is a wretched commentary upon any Irish Government. When you remember the rounds to which the Congested Districts Board used to go to make work for them rather than to give outdoor relief or put them into the union, and you see our own Government throwing up their hands in despair and saying, "We will put all the men on Aranmore island on the dole, because we cannot find anything else for them to do," surely that is a hopeless confession of failure. That confession of failure must continue unless some bold and comprehensive policy is adopted which has some definite objective in view.
The Minister knows he will get all the co-operation he wants in any constructive work he proposes for the Gaeltacht. I suppose he has had commissions, and is sick of the reports of commissions, but would he not even call in the Deputies of his own Party, representing Gaeltacht constituencies, and ask them to put up definite schemes to him for which he would seek sanction from this House? I hope he may do something of the kind. I hope the Minister for Education will suggest to him that the educational experiment I have outlined could be profitably tried out in the areas I have indicated. If they do that, I am confident that they will get from every side of the House all the help they want; that they will do useful work, not only for the people of the Gaeltacht, but for the whole country; and, by improving the conditions of the people, who are living there, solving a long standing problem, they will, with the expenditure of that money, purchase for the whole people all over the country the only effective instrument whereby the national language can be preserved for succeeding generations.