The last 10 years have seen dramatic educational changes, with a rash of Green and White Papers, two Education Bills, universities' legislation, the abolition of undergraduate fees, the growth of "parent power" and an unprecedented increase in government spending in the sector.
A book to chronicle and analyse this important period was badly needed. What better person to write it than John Walshe, Irish Independent education editor and OECD adviser? Walshe provides valuable historical background to the regionalisation debate, which he believes will be back on the political agenda early in the next century. He reminds us that as long ago as 1973, Richard Burke, usually thought of as a pillar of Catholic conservatism - and his Department of Education secretary Sean O'Connor - proposed both school management boards and regional educational authorities.
He documents in accessible language the preparation of Mary O'Rourke's draft Green Paper, which finally saw the light of day in 1992 under Seamus Brennan's "free enterprise" imprimatur.
He reports the extraordinary public and sectoral response to that discussion paper, and to the National Education Convention which succeeded it.
He describes the byzantine manoevring that went on to persuade the churches that more democratic school management structures to involve teachers and parents were not part of some wicked State plot to drive them out of education.
The constant, often hard-line, defensiveness of the churches is one of the book's recurrent themes. The Catholic Church was often happy to let the minority Church of Ireland, in an enviably strong position due to politicians' extreme sensitivity about how their actions might be viewed in the Protestant North, make the running.
Another hugely powerful vested interest were the universities. They were ill-disposed towards Labour's Minister for Education Niamh Bhreathnach even before she presented new universities' legislation - partly because of her insistence, against much expert advice, on scrapping undergraduate fees.
However, she and her senior officials seem to have handled the presentation of that sensitive legislation particularly ineptly; she even faced the embarrassment of the Higher Education Authority publicly opposing some of its more controversial clauses.
Walshe suggests she might have been better advised to push through her ground-breaking education legislation first, rather than seeing time run out on her because of the requirements of a much-amended Universities Act.
Walshe himself has sometimes been an actor in Ireland's contemporary education drama, with revelations about key leaked documents which made ministers from Brennan to Bhreathnach see red. However this book is not the stuff of sensational headlines. Rather, it is the first serious examination of a political decision-making process which for the first time in the history of the State gave education its rightful place at the centre of government.
A New Partnership in Education: from consultation to legislation in the Nineties by John Walshe (Institute of Public Administration, £17)
