I want to turn now to the manner in which moneys are made available in the case of secondary education, in particular grants for reequipping the schools which have become derelict or virtually unworkable. One of the defects of long-term capital planning in this State that has been raised is that money tends to be technically voted but not, in fact, applied instantly. This was raised in the case of the £50 million which the Government are supposed to be applying to the re-flating of the economy. In this specific connection I want to raise the case of a school in my own constituency, the Holy Faith Convent secondary school, Finglas. This school is in fact a converted barracks with 466 pupils on the roll, 27 teachers— 24 lay and three religious—on the staff, including a full-time physical education teacher and a full-time arts teacher. Three classes are permanently housed in a building which is already officially condemned. There is no assembly hall, no gymnasium, no art room and no proper library accommodation in this school. To double for a library some books are kept in a small room which also acts as a staff room of sorts. There is no office whatsoever for the headmistress.
I raised this case with the Minister for Education. The answer I received was that the money is technically available but cannot be paid at this point. The reply stated:
Since 1968 building grants have been paid for additional accommodation consisting of 12 classrooms including six special subject rooms plus ancillary accommodation. This accommodation was provided in two stages of building. The cost of these works was £62,000 approximately. Proposals for a further stage of building are at present under consideration. The Minister regrets, however, that it is not possible at the present time to say when an allocation of capital is likely to be available for the next part of the project.
As I said before, I am not competent to follow people like Deputy FitzGerald into the intricacies of economics but I would like to know how much of the technically impressive figures which are put before us for grants for this sort of capital building in schools are hypothetical and how much of them are actual. It is one thing to vote the principle of the money and another to provide it. This is now happening because the money is not being provided.
I now want to deal with the issue of free books. It is a well-known practice in this city, and the Minister knows this as well as I do, that the manner in which the capital subvention for free books is distributed is highly discriminatory. There are schools in which free books are distributed on the basis of the production of the blue card. In reply to a question of mine on the 4th November, 1971, the Minister said that in 1968-69 the money made available for free books was £283,000. In 1969-70 the amount was slightly less at £282,581. In 1970-71 it was £299,588, virtually a static figure, despite the fact that the cost of books has increased and the value of money decreased in this period. Can anyone imagine a situation more humiliating to an individual child than that he can only be given free books on the teacher asking him to produce a medical card? This practice goes on in our schools.
I have already said in the context of primary schools that while I welcome the Minister's allocation of additional funds towards the provision of visual aids I do not regard the amount of money as satisfactory. I would like to see it substantially increased. In the context of secondary schools the Minister should grasp a further nettle. I am not making a party political point when I say that in the context of recent discussions on other topics the grasping of nettles by the Government is not a practice which they find very congenial. Among the many barriers of traditional practices in education that of opposition to co-education should be faced rapidly because it is a further form of division within our teaching system which I would like to see broken down. I do not think there is any need for me to develop that.
Deputy FitzGerald made much of the possibility of an advanced leaving certificate. I am pretty familiar with his thinking on this subject as he and I have argued about this for many years both in this House and in other places. His thinking is understandable to the extent that it is wrong that the advanced pupils should be held back in the 17 to 18 age group. This problem is met in England to some extent by what they call the State scholarship examination. I agree with Deputy FitzGerald in his argument about this but he made a second point with which I cannot agree, that the leaving certificate was improperly applied as being, on the one hand, a terminal examination preparing people for job employment opportunities and, on the other hand, an examination designed to qualify people for university entrance. This is an argument which in my view has dangerous social implications. The Minister knows as well as I do that students in both secondary and university education, little subsidised as they are, are nevertheless subsidised as they community. I would be loth to see the day where young people in secondary schools were specially favoured by the introduction of an additional examination precisely designed to select people for university entrance.
Here I must dissent qualitatively from what Deputy Dr. FitzGerald has said. In my view, any pupil who enters the stream of secondary education does so with the possibility that at the end of it he will proceed no further, if that is the right phrase, than with the leaving certificate into the competitive world of economic life and at the same time is faced by the other possibility of entrance into tertiary education. Any attempt to restructure the inter-leaving certificate system in such a way as to add an additional year or an additional examination which would refine still further the number of people, the areas of people, who get into our universities would be an attempt which I personally would oppose very deeply on social grounds. I think it would be a most unfortunate thing because the application of selection procedures at the 12-13 age group already by our secondary schools, the selectivity of our universities, would all tend to suggest that the intrusion of yet a further examination would only have the effect of making the structure of university education still more a class thing than it is at the moment.
In this context, I would ask the Minister to be more specific to us in his reply to this debate about the future of the intermediate examination. I am not one of those who are hostile to examinations in their own right. Examinations have in common with democracy and Christianity that they are extremely poor systems but that better ones have not been invented as yet and the process of periodical assessment seems to me in schools to carry built-in dangers and shortcomings which I would fear very deeply and I would hope that the Minister would never accept the argument of what are called educationalists—and I have dilated on that subject before— against examinations as such. I hope he would never yield to these arguments to the extent that he would eliminate those elements of our educational structure which are at least as egalitarian as they are at the moment.
At the moment, broadly speaking, the people who attend secondary schools are already selected. They are selected by assessment; they are selected by interview and they are selected by wealth. Let us face this. The leaving certificate at least presents them with a competitive opportunity, with all its faults, and with the introduction of the new curricula I do not think its faults are as great as they used to be by far. At least, it presents them with an opportunity to compete on equal class terms for entrance to university and the kind of academic thinking that Deputy Dr. FitzGerald expresses in favour of a still further selective examination is a kind of thinking with which I am very familiar in academic circles. It usually goes with the argument, that as Kingsley Amis puts it, more means worse. It usually goes with the argument that the university is something special, something private and something in which, as I have just said, quality is a matter of smallness rather than size. Here, as in quite a number of other things, I would be on the Minister's side rather than on Deputy FitzGerald's side.
By all means, improve the curricula of the leaving certificate continually, as the Minister's Department has been doing ever since the time of the late Donogh O'Malley. By all means improve the use of visual aids, the element of oral instruction and examination. Improve imaginatively the structure of curricula. Cease to issue to examiners in the leaving certificate those appalling structured sets of briefs that used to be issued: give seven marks for knowing that X king came to Ireland on Y date. By all means cease doing this, but to differentiate between a terminal examination in our secondary schools and entrance examinations to the universities would be to impose an unnatural barrier between those who are predeterminedly university entrants at the age of 14, in fact, and those who are not.
Let us face it, in our society it is still wealth that determines this and, broadly speaking, most parents know when their children are 14 whether they will go to university at 18 or not. They do not have to wait for the results of the leaving certificate examination to tell them that. They will make every effort to make sure—and this is a failing of all of us, a human failing— that their children get access to universities. Very few of us have so much detachment from the realities of education that if either the examiner or a critical assessor brings home to us the news that our child is deficient in academic expertise, we will correspondingly accept that he should not go to university. Most of us make every effort to ensure that he does so. I would fear that Deputy Dr. FitzGerald's special advanced examination designed to university entrance would only serve to foster the already divisive elements in Irish education and I find myself in the rare and, for me, quite unpleasant, situation of disagreeing with my colleague Deputy FitzGerald here.
Vocational education is to me the major growth area of contemporary education in Ireland. I shall have a lot more to say about that in dealing with the issue of community schools. Suffice it for the moment to say that, again looking down the pattern of expenditure which the Minister outlined to me in reply to my question of 4th November, 1971, the pattern is, if anything, static: £2.5 million in 1968-69; £3.3 million in 1969-70; £2.9 million in 1970-71 and an estimated £2.7 million in 1971-72. This of course is capital, I admit, rather than current expenditure but the rise in current expenditure, while dramatic in the period between 1967-68 and 1970-71 is only marginal in the period between 1970-71 and 1971-72, inasmuch as it rose from £9.4 million to £11.2 million. This is an unfortunate thing.
I feel this to be potentially the most exciting area of our whole teaching structure because there is something unique about vocational teaching. It is at one and the same time the most important sector in terms of the future educational needs of our community and the only sector of our educational system which is wholly controlled undenominationally and democratically.
At first, the vocational schools were limited to the provision of postprimary education to the age of 16. They were also limited in practice to technical or non-academic subjects. It is fair to say they were the poor relations of the traditional secondary schools which prepared pupils for the leaving certificate and for university entrance. No one more than I dislikes the principle by which the child is told at the age of 12/13 that he enters one gate to one school if he wants to learn the academic disciplines, with the mark of being a middleclass gentleman, and enters by another gate if he wants to become a craftsman, a technician, to learn carpentry rather than Latin.
This to me has been one of the most unpleasant barriers in Irish education. I admit that the Minister and his predecessors have attempted to break this down, successively but not always successfully, because very often, as I have said in this House before—I refer to it again because there has been a two-year intermission since I last said it—it is very much more common for the teachers in the traditional secondary areas where Latin, Greek, French, the classic academic subjects are the norm, to permit their students, if they so desire, to learn science or woodwork rather than to encourage the flow to occur in the opposite direction.
To this extent the whole concept of the community schools was welcomed on these benches at a press conference, as the Minister pointed out, because we felt the community schools were likely to accelerate the degree of cross-fertilisation between secondary and vocational schools. For many years the vocational sector was that to which the underprivileged child was sent to acquire a craft or a skill of hand or eye, as it had been called. We all want to see this programme done. Frankly I regard it as in some ways being much more fundamental in the basis of the community schools rather than the question of religion or denomination. I will speak at more length on this later.
On the issue of development in this area, the Minister has, I am sure against his will, dragged his feet. The figures for expenditure that I have outlined adequately demonstrate that. Heaven knows I do not often speak on constituency matters, but we certainly do not know what has happened in regard to the Ballymun complex, though all sorts of strange rumours have trickled down to me about the disused university buildings in the centre of Dublin. However, I think the Minister should accept the necessity to come clean, to be frank with the House in respect of (a) the extent to which he is prepared to indulge in massive expenditure and (b) what will happen to Ballymun? He should tell us these things.
Before I leave the subject of vocational education I wish to say one thing. Speaking as a university man— too many of us here tend to lapse into the fault of identifying ourselves with our own specific areas of interest—I should like to say that if some of my colleagues who continually complain about the staff-student ratio and the overcrowding in our universities were to bring themselves to the exercise of seeing the conditions in which they work and study in Kevin Street and Bolton Street they might wax less furious about university autonomy and the beauty of university education.
Inevitably this leads me to what is being now almost overlooked and yet of vital importance, the community schools. Ministerial policy on community schools has fluctuated so much and with such a degree of detail since the first intentions of the Department were set out in October, 1970, in a report which was never published formally but which was printed with apparent accuracy by The Irish Times, that I honestly confess to be confused as to what the present position is. This is not from lack of study on my part.
The initial proposals were welcomed by me on behalf of this party, perhaps with a degree of naiveté because I did not then realise, in October and November of 1970, the extent to which they would be subsequently distorted. That they were subsequently distorted is a historical fact. Now, in turn, they seem to have taken some improvement for the better. We have been told during this debate that the totally objectionable faith and morals element has been dropped. This is a massive advance and it is rare and unusual for us, for Deputy FitzGerald, Deputy Cruise-O'Brien or me, to find out a piece of information on the floor of the House. Usually one gets it from reading reports of a Fianna Fáil ArdFheis. We are glad this has been so improved. It appears now that the trustees will be appointed by the Minister and not, as initially implied, by another authority. This gives considerable satisfaction and I think Deputy FitzGerald can take considerable satisfaction from the part he played in this, causing the Minister to change his mind.
A certain amount of credit can accrue to people on those benches, to Deputies Cruise O'Brien, Desmond and me. I do not seek to curry favour with a particular newspaper but I mention the Educational Review, consistently good, of The Irish Times. All these things have improved the structure of the community schools but have not, in my opinion, totally solved the question. The community schools issue to me is twofold. It is denominational, on the one hand, and it raises the whole issue of what is meant by community control. Necessarily, most concentration has been on the denominational point; the point that in those areas where members of the minority either predominate or exist in such numbers of them to feel entitled to a voice in the control of their secondary education, they should not be deprived by the State of this right and placed under the control of the Catholic majority. Of course, I concur with the view that they should not be so deprived. I regret deeply the bad image the scheme in its amended form —not its initial form but its middle form—gave to our country in the eyes most particularly of our separated alleged fellow-countrymen in the North. At the same time I do not think that is the major issue in itself. It may seem an odd thing to say, but the reason I say this is that I am a Catholic and if there were not a Protestant alive on this island I would disapprove of the original structure devised by the Minister for Education for those schools. A community school to me is a school controlled by a community and to speak of a Protestant community, in an allegedly pluralistic society, is as revolting to me as to speak of a Catholic community. I do not understand what these distinctions mean. To me a community school is controlled by the parents, the teachers, the local municipal organisations, the taxpayers, the Government, the Minister, but it is not controlled by “invited in” bodies of whatever denomination. Deputy FitzGerald was slightly confused here in his thinking and perhaps a little unfair even to the Minister. At one point he said—I quote from memory but I was taking careful notes of his speech—“The Department pay the money and call the tune.” I do not think the Department pay the money and call the tune. They certainly pay the money, which is a polite way of saying that you and I pay the money, but they do not call the tune. I do not regard as a satisfactory solution a situation in which denominational schools, be they Protestant or Catholic, are set up in this State and subsidised by the entirety.
What is the present state of play in the community schools issue? It is almost impossible to say on the information we have at hand. Deputy FitzGerald spoke of the participation of those involved and certainly no one has done more than Deputy FitzGerald to bring about a situation in which those involved would participate but there is no secondary school existing in some of the key areas like Tallaght and Blanchardstown which, to do the Minister justice, he has admitted are special cases, but they will only be special cases for four or five years and what happens then? The parents will be, I understand, selected in the first instance. What follows I know not. In the case of Mayfield in Cork there is no school of either kind. I do not know for certain what happens there. Unlike Deputy FitzGerald I do not think the simple fact of the representation of parents in an area in a community school makes it necessarily meaningfully a community school. I have before me a pattern of the statistical breakdown of pupils and teachers in different schools and different areas. In Blanchardstown—secondary pupils, nil; vocational pupils, 158. This was on 26th May, 1971. In Tallaght—secondary pupils, nil; vocational pupils, 255; Mayfield, nil. There are other cases like Athy, a pretty thorny case, as we will all find out soon, secondary pupils, 444—a fairly viable unit in terms of the Minister's apparent educational thinking; vocational pupils, 258. In Ardee, another complex area, secondary, 299; vocational, 137.
Those are figures as of May, 1971, but to base a school structure upon the distribution of pupils and teachers at May, 1971, is to ignore the fact that we inherit an educational system which is itself intrinisically biassed in favour of the children of the more privileged classes. The late Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, whenever the subject of the revival of the Irish language was discussed, used to make a speech with which I did not agree and did not understand, Heaven knows. He would say: "You have not got the right to destroy the Irish language in this country even if you get the votes of the people to destroy it because what about my father? He is not here to speak. My grandfather is not here to speak. You have not got the right to do it." Inverting the argument I would say you have not got a right to structure an educational system which ignores the children of the people who are not yet going to any kind of school at all and their children. This is where Deputy FitzGerald and myself have a slight difference of emphasis. Reading of the Fine Gael press conference I got the impression that Deputy FitzGerald would be satisfied with a situation which was simply flexible, in other words, that the structure of management of the schools would be related to the structure of educational pattern in the particular area. To do Deputy FitzGerald justice this would be an immense improvement on the proposals of the Minister as they were originally enunciated and would, at least, have a compromise merit of saving Blanchardstown and Tallaght from the original final solution proposed for them by the Minister. But I do not think this is an adequate answer in itself.
Overall, there must be, as I have said repeatedly in this debate, a philosophy of education and I do not think the Department have the right to throw around a phrase like "community school" without going to the Oxford Dictionary and looking up the word "community" and seeing what it means. I say this as a Catholic. A community is not a religious, sectarian thing; it is a community of people of disparate religious interests, disparate social interests, who are entitled to have these reflected in the manner in which their origins, ethnic, educational and everything else, make them wish to do so. This is where I would seek again for this White Paper from the Minister. I know I am going to be called some kind of Communist here but I see the need for a White Paper from the Minister saying what is my conception of a community. I stand on very good ground here because I have taken care to do my homework with my Catholic thinkers, my John Courtney Murrays, my Enda McDonaghs, and their view of a community is not one which is a community coterminus with a particular sect and I sometimes suspect that the Minister's, against his will, is. Against his will I say because I want to say, in defence of the Minister, that I do not blame him or the civil servants for the morass into which the community schools thing has fallen.
Deputy FitzGerald read out a most impressive list of about ten organisations all of which condemned the community schools proposal but, with a disingenuousness which I can only suppose to be accidental knowing Deputy FitzGerald as well as I do, he failed to mention that just about all ten of these organisations were opposing these proposals for ten different reasons. In these circumstances I have a certain sympathy with the dilemma in which the Minister has found himself. This was summed up in a cri de coeur made by a member of the Development Branch of the Department of Education in Ardee on 15th June, 1971. His name was quoted in the newspaper but I shall not quote it because it is not fair to do so and there is no need for me to quote it. He said the Department were in the dilemma that they were being told on one hand that they had given too much and on the other that they had given too little. Where the brothers and nuns nominated four of the six members he did not think anyone could reasonably argue that they were not being given a very big say in what was going to happen. This is where there is a flaw in Deputy FitzGerald's thinking.
I am very anxious not to make political points here. It is really not adequate proof of the inadequacy of the community schools project that "it has been attacked on all sides", if one has to add in all logic an appendage to this, "for mutually contradictory reasons". I think the Minister in his secret heart would acknowledge that we have actually given him a considerable amount of help because I think there are quarters where the Minister is running through considerable difficulty where he has been able to say in effect: "Look at these wild men who think that I am giving you too much breathing down the back of my neck." In this way we may have unintentionally aided him in extricating himself from a position into which he had either walked or been walked.
Deputy FitzGerald spoke of forcing things through without consultation. I have not the same instinctive belief in the value of consultation; I do not think that parents, teachers, priests, nuns, bishops, clergymen, Protestant or Catholic, are necessarily the right people to advise you on matters like this. The experience of the merger would tend to suggest that if the Minister proceeds by consultation he will land himself in a situation where he is festooned with hostility and sometimes the most useful thing educationally he can do is put his foot on the floorboards and accelerate ahead without consulting anybody. I would not blame the Minister for not consulting people too much but I blame him for not realising in time—God knows time moves so fast in the present unpleasant days that it is difficult to say when he could have realised in time: something happened today as we all know which may have changed the time scale or the value of our political offerings— that the time to make the non-sectarian, undenominational offerings is before they are begged for, not afterwards. The demonstration of generosity should come in advance of the crisis point, not afterwards.
In his speech the Minister accused us of playing sectarian politics with community schools proposals. He is doing himself less than intellectual justice as his change of mind has shown. I shall not attempt to impose on the liberality of the Chair by broadening the debate into a discussion on constitutional changes but I shall say something I think is relevant. It is easily said in this House that the Northern Protestant does not care about contraception and that those of us who talk about contraception here as a solution to Partition are talking nonsense. It is easy to say that Northern Protestants do not in the main care about divorce, but the point is that to the Northern Protestant every one of these things adds up to a complex of a unitary State in which the Constitution is tinged with sectarianism; the laws on contraception and censorship are tinged with sectarianism, the schools and the hospitals in the main are under sectarian control. It is the whole complex which to him is repulsive, not just one single thing.
Here I think the Minister has played into the hands of those who fear the unity of this State with justice. Speaking solely for myself — Deputy Tunney who agrees with me about many things on education will not agree with this —I think the emphasis we place on the Irish language in the Constitution, in teaching and in qualifications for State employment is yet another disincentive with Northern Protestants against entering this State. That is a personal opinion, something which I am not instructed by my party to say. If the kind of rationalisation of university education which I think, in common with the Minister, I should like to see come about takes place, I hope one of the prices we do not pay for it is to make Irish a compulsory subject for university entrance. I do not think you would inculcate a love for the language in that way or any desire on the part of our separated countrymen to join us.
If I were to go on at great length I could now explore the whole issue of what constitutes a denominational school. At election time it is said that we in the Labour Party do not want denominational schools, that we do not want religious presence in the schools, that we want to drive it out. This is absolute nonsense. Any parent has the right to bring up his child with whatever faith or lack of faith he wishes. I accept the concept of the Catholic school in the sense that I accept that a Catholic parent like myself is entitled, as I do, to have my son instructed in the Catholic religion and prepared to receive its sacraments. I do not accept that there is a Catholic way of teaching maths or science or languages. Yet, this is the interpretation which the outgoing Archbishop of Dublin, that much abused man, Dr. McQuaid, places upon community schools, that these would be Catholic schools to which we could send our children without fear of loss of faith to them.
It may seem an odd interpolation at this point but perhaps it is not inappropriate to wish Most Reverend Dr. McQuaid every health and happiness in his retirement. I disagree with Dr. McQuaid in just about everything, but his service as a pastoral archbishop is beyond question, in school-building, and church building and so on. I am not indulging in personal vituperation, as some would where he is concerned. But the fact remains that there is a different concept in the mind of a bishop like that and in my mind as to what constitutes denominational teaching. If what we shall have here are Catholic community schools and Protestant community schools the Protestants will inevitably retreat into their own community schools. I can think of nothing funnier than a Catholic community school and a Protestant community school in a country based upon Tone's theoretical desire to end our differences and enunciate a common name of Irishmen. I resist and resent the innuendo—it was rather more than that—of the Minister in his speech that we on these benches have been playing politics with this issue.
It is vitally important that the Minister should stand up to those vested interests that would cause him to make of these community schools extensions of the traditional secondary school structure. I admit these vested interests are many. I hope I am making this clear by repeating it deliberately: unlike Deputy FitzGerald I am realist enough to know that if the Minister were to consult with the parents, the brothers and the mothers it would not necessarily make it any easier for him: it could make it more difficult.
The Minister should not underestimate the rapidity with which the thinking of the ordinary Irish people in the last five or ten years has moved upon such issues as education. Certainly he faces some difficulties which are soluble because time will alleviate them; some which are insoluble, for example, the operation of the Ne Temere decree which will always cause, as long as it survives, the majority of Protestant parents, if they have the means to do so, to wish their children to be educated in a separate way. There are many things I could ask the Minister to do but I can scarcely ask him to have that decree abolished; it scarcely lies in his power. But there are some things he could do. and he was, I think, given a good instance of this at his party's own Ard Fheis the other day when, I understand —I was not there, for obvious reasons —a resolution, with the full backing and support of the platform, calling for the deferment of any consideration of constitutional changes until the reunification of our country was imminent, was in fact reject by the floor. This might bring home to the Minister now that he would be taking neither a party political risk nor a career danger if he were to be slightly more courageous and set his course towards the concept of education which has already been endorsed not alone by liberalists, economists and Trinity “queers” but also by educationalists in the Catholic Church, by Jesuits and, by implication, God help us, by the ordinary members at the Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis.
I would ask him to look again at the community school structure and ask himself the question, if he had not gone so far wrong that now was the time to come out and admit his mistakes and give us a look at what the animal is actually like because at the moment none of us knows what it is like. The community school at the moment is a little like the late Clement Attlee's definition of an elephant: I never saw one, but I would recognise it if it came to the door.
I want to say one last thing on secondary education. I am leaving the community school issue there because I think enough for the moment has been said upon it. In the field of secondary education I am seriously worried about the oral expertise of language teachers. This country faces the imminent prospect of entry into the Common Market. Whether we will or will not enter is a matter between the Government party and the Fine Gael Party and my party and not a matter to be discussed here tonight, but it is of relevance to educational subjects to remark that in Germany alone there are 2,250,000 immigrant workers from Italy, Czechoslovakia and other countries.
Recently I attended a conference of young parliamentarians in Cologne and I discovered there that the barman in the hotel was an Italian, so I ventured to talk to him in Italian; My Italian is very bad so he proceeded to answer me in English. This meant he spoke Italian, German and English. When it came to the conference next day, and it came to my turn to speak, I was asked to talk about the issue of mobility of labour in the Common Market. I said: "As far as I am concerned, the barman in this hotel is an Italian and, if mobility of labour in the Common Market means that we provide your barmen, thanks very much; I do not want to know." In fact the situation is very much worse than that because this Italian had not alone a second but a third language. The average pupil leaving primary school, even secondary school here, has not got even a second spoken language which means that not even the bar jobs will be reserved for us in the Common Market but, within the enclaves in which the workers live in places like Frankfurt and Düsseldorf, our people will be equipped for nothing more than the coolie jobs, the labourer jobs, the jobs in which the emphasis is totally upon the physical and not at all upon the intellectual. I am so seriously concerned about this that I would say in all sincerity to the Minister that, if his party must persist in the misguided course of entering the Common Market, and if they do win the referendum, which I hope they do not, I hope he will recognise the obligation to re-tool our teaching of continental languages so that if our people must leave the country they will at least not leave it as the coolie labourers of Düsseldorf rather than, as they are at the moment, the coolie labourers of the Finchley Road and Kilburn.
On universities, there are to me two great omissions in the Minister's references to universities. One is on financing. In reply to my question on 14th November the Minister admitted to an increase of some £800,000 in current university financing. I think everybody knows this is not adequate and the growth in the student population of the universities has been accompanied by worse and worse conditions and worse and worse staff-student ratios to the detriment of the education involved. It is at least a pleasure to be able to stand up at last in an Irish Parliament and talk about university education as something relevant; ten years ago one would have been talking about an expensive luxury confined to the sons of the better-off, like myself, but this is no longer the case. The Minister must, I think, recognise that in the last three or four years university spending has been held at what to all intents and purposes is a constant level even as the number of students have grown. I do not think this is adequate. To me the great gap in the Minister's remark on universities was the complete absence of any reference to the university merger and the resolution of the situation in Dublin.
Some time ago, in reply to questions by Deputy Dr. O'Connell and myself, he spoke about allowing us to see the report of the Higher Education Authority in three months. I am amazed that this has not been brought forward before now. I would have thought this Estimate, the first for two years, would have been the ideal opportunity for the Minister to give us some information of this thinking on this vital point. I speak on this, and I am insistent in saying this, not as a university don but as a Labour elected representative of a largely working-class area. I want to know what is happening to the taxpayer's money. I do not believe that the duplication of expensive faculties as between the two universities can continue indefinitely. I could go on about this all night, as the Minister knows; he will be thankful to hear that I have no intention of doing so. I do not believe that the endless production of many times as many medical graduates as we need can continue ad infinitum. I do not believe that the problem of getting second, third and fourth stage computers in two institutions within miles of each other can continue ad infinitum. I think all these things deserve to be solved. I do not think the situation can continue in which the structures of the two universities are so patently undemocratic as they are at the moment in both universities. There have been reforms of these structures.
In the case of National University, about which I am not as competent to speak as I am about the other college and, therefore, I do not claim infallibility here, at least student representation has been admitted on the governing bodies of the associate colleges at that institute. My own college, a historically inherited ramshackle structure based largely on the phenomenon of fellowship, has been reformed progressively to a degree where an element of democracy exists. Having said that the fact remains that in neither case is the situation satisfactory in any sense. This cannot be deferred very much longer. It is four years this March since Donogh O'Malley died. Sooner or later we must be told what is happening to universities in the city of Dublin. Personally I favour, first, the increasing number of smaller institutions. There are good arguments for a university in Kilkenny and there are arguments for giving to the institute in Limerick a higher academic status than appears is to be given to it. I am not happy about the way in which the student population in both Dublin colleges is growing apace, in a kind of mad spiral competition. Above all, I am eager that the Minister should adhere to the broad outlines of the plan laid down by his predecessor but one and carried on by his immediate predecessor but not, perhaps, in every detail. I had some small part in helping with that plan. A statement issued by the then Minister for Education, Deputy Brian Lenihan, on the 6th July, 1968, contained at least the bones of a solution to the divisions of the university institutions in Dublin.
This solution was "not another one". TCD was always intended to be one of many colleges in a common university. Isaac Butt put forward this scheme as far back as 1873 in his scheme for St. Patrick's University and the late Donogh O'Malley, with a breath of historic imagination rarely found in politicians, saw an opportunity in what became known vulgarly as "the merger" to end what he called the educational apartheid among our people. There have been some improvements since then. For instance, the ban has been lifted but the scheme has been left in utter abeyance and as one of those who welcomed it at the time and who helped Deputy Lenihan to some extent with his progress, I would ask the Minister to stick to his guns now and to remember that there are few people more conservative in the educational sphere than are academics.
I would ask the Minister to look again at the size of grants paid to students attending universities. In 1968 the then Minister admitted that this grant scheme was only a beginning but it has not been amended in any way since except in the case of students whose fees are inflated because of their membership of a particular area but the underlying moneys paid in respect of this scheme have not altered. The Minister should remember that when he is dealing with students today— and I have no desire to seek the favour of students either as a politician or as a teacher—they are very different people to the students of ten or 20 years ago. Increasingly today students are the sons and daughters of Irish people who are not different in class status from us and in many cases lower in the financial scale than us. Everything they say is not responsible or perfect and I would be the first to admit this. They suffer from over-exuberance. As the song says of a bachelor gay: "At 17 he falls in love quite madly" but the only difference in the case of students is that they fall in love with socialism and ten years later this has ceased to be. I think it was Wilde who said that anyone who was not a socialist at 20 years of age was mad and that anyone who was still a socialist at 30 was mad also. Many contemporary students could bear this out. However, the Minister should recognise that students today form a factor in the educational process which they never did in the days of 1959 and 1960 when I was teaching the chinless wonders and the rejects of the Oxbridge-St. Andrews set-up.
There are a couple of other points to which I will ask the Minister to give serious consideration. One of these is in relation to St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, which, potentially, is one of the great growth areas in tertiary education. It is a fascinating campus capable of almost infinite expansion in terms of education and containing within its staff some of the finest intellects in the country. Also, the college is situated in an area touching on north-west Dublin which, as we all know, is scheduled for demographic expansion. I would like to see the status of the teachers in that college given much greater importance and I would like to see the college integrated much more formally into the scheme of national university education and remaining much less a pontifical and much more a secular institute.
Like Deputy FitzGerald, I, too, would like the Minister to address himself to the issue of industrial schools and their rapid reformation. Only this morning in The Irish Times there was a letter that reminded us that the deplorable condition of Marlborough House, as was made known in the Kennedy Report, has not been rectified yet, that this institution is still in use and would remain in use, according to this letter, for at least three and a half years after the recommendation that it should be closed, which was made in July 1969. If this statement is correct, I would like the Minister to comment on it because there are few horrors more tragic than the placing of children in what are public prisons because industrial corrective institutions do not exist for them.
I congratulate the Parliamentary Secretary on the increasing attention given by the Government to sport and to recreational facilities of that nature. This is only a beginning but it is good that a start has been made.
I was sorry that there was no mention in the Minister's speech of the functioning of the National Library. This is something that concerns me very closely as a historian concerned actively with the keeping of archives. I am sure the Minister is aware that the circumstances under which the manuscript section of the National Library operates almost defies description. One wonders how the staff of that section manage to exercise even the degree of order that they maintain in regard to these papers. They are to be congratulated for their efforts in that regard. Given the fact that each year we move away further from the 1916-22 period and that those survivors who have memories of it die, as is inevitable, we should bear in mind that we could be throwing away an enormous national heritage by not providing properly for the preservation of papers deriving from that period and, of course, I include also the papers of much earlier periods. The keeping of archives in general and the condition of the National Library should be a matter of great importance to the Minister. I know that his financial resources are limited but it is a long time since we heard first about the building of a new national library.
Little remains for me to add about the conduct of the College of Art. This matter was covered adequately by Deputy FitzGerald. In the main, I agree with everything he said in this instance. The Minister did not exactly cover himself with glory in that episode but I am glad that a Bill has gone through to deal with the matter. Although we in the Labour Party did not like the Bill very much and would have amended it in many aspects, if that had been possible, it is better that the Bill should serve the purpose of getting off the ground a new institution that would be untainted with the inadequacies of its predecessor. I hope the Minister will press on and do his best to close an episode which reflects no credit on any governmental person concerned. I hope that in the ultimate structuring of the College of Art, far from there being victimisation of those who have identified themselves with struggles in the past against the Department, the future college will be a place where initiative, imagination and independence of thought will be encouraged and not stifled.
By my standards I have made a long and detailed speech. I wish to refer to the point which Deputy FitzGerald raised at the beginning of his speech and which I choose to put last, namely, the absence of a White Paper on overall educational policy. There is a lack of overall view in Irish education but there is evidence of a pattern developing. It is a pattern in which increasing emphasis is placed on size, on regional development and on technology but decreasing emphasis is placed on community, on parish, on staff-student relationships in some areas and on the older academic subjects. This could be the correct policy, but I should like to have it spelled out.
I do not completely agree with Deputy FitzGerald on one point, namely, that if I were a civil servant in the Department of Education and I were offered the alternatives of proceeding by stealth, piecemeal, on the one hand so that after 20 years an irreversible pattern of education would have developed or, on the other hand, of taking the Irish people into my confidence regarding the whole range of education I would be sorely tempted to take the first rather than the second course, rather like the development division of the Department. The first time that you become explicit in the sphere of educational vested interests in this country you get clobbered and I cannot blame the Department for allowing a pattern to develop rather than showing to the people what that pattern is.
Yet, I wonder if the Minister is not underestimating the Irish people? The time is ripe for a White Paper. The Irish people have moved further and faster than possibly the Minister thinks. He could take the risk of spelling out that pattern. It would give the answer to those who oppose the closure of small schools purely for selfish constituency reasons rather than for educational reasons. It would give the answer to those who use phrases such as "university autonomy" and "academic excellence" when all they really mean is "leave me alone in my native laziness". It would be a calculated risk but it would be a very brave Minisster for Education who would take the time in the middle of all his other stresses to adopt this course. As I told the Minister a short time ago, if he does this he will find some unexpected friends in some strange places.
