On the adjournment: An opportunity for backbenchers to sound off. This week: Tony Gregory on the crisis in school funding
In the week before polling day for the local and European elections, public representatives were called in to two national schools in north inner-city Dublin.
In both cases the school management were at their wits' end. They showed us the Dickensian conditions in their schools and asked us to help.
One school, St Peter's National, Phibsboro, needs total refurbishment to provide a healthy and safe environment. Even the windows must remain bolted as they are likely to collapse. Its most depressing feature was what passed for toilets in the school yard.
The school is co-ed, but does not have co-ed facilities, so the children queue in turn in the open to use toilets in a dilapidated shed.
Five years ago I had attended meetings of parents, staff and management in this same school. At that time there were three single-sex schools here, and the Department wanted them to amalgamate. The carrot was that if the parents accepted the amalgamation, the school would get the necessary funding to carry out the essential refurbishment. The schools did amalgamate but the funding has not, so far, materialised.
The second school we visited that election week was St Columba's National on the North Strand. Their only request, which they had put to the Department year after year, was for approximately €30,000 to modernise the school toilets and make them wheelchair-accessible.
Incredibly they had failed to get this meagre amount from the Department.
Both schools are in the very centre of the capital city of what we are told is one of the world's most affluent countries, the country that has experienced the "Celtic tiger" and its surpluses of billions. That week Ireland held the Presidency of the European Union.
I mention these two schools solely because they had requested their local representatives to draw attention to their plight. They are not exceptional.
Just down the road is Rutland Street National School, a favourite of the Taoiseach, whose constituency this is. As part of the renewal of the area a modern school was promised.
The area plan had something for everyone: lots of private apartments for outside investors, and for the local community a new school, a new training centre for the Lourdes Youth and Community Services, a new leisure complex and a daycare centre for the elderly.
While the tax-incentive private apartments mushroom all around there is no sign of the new school or the training centre.
This, after all, is the north inner city, a byword for educational disadvantage, where sociologists study literacy levels, drop-out ratios and statistics for access to third-level education. It is also the area where the offices of the Minister for Education are located.
How lucky for Michael McDowell, the Minister for (In) Equality, that areas like this exist. Many children here will find it impossible to escape the cycle of disadvantage, but inequality is "good for the economy".
Perhaps that is why the nearby Community After Schools Projects have in the last six months had their funding cut and their continued existence threatened.
These are groups attempting to help local children compensate for their deprived background. They are probably the most innovative and beneficial projects in the area and should be mainstreamed for funding, not cut back and threatened with closure.
Is it any wonder that a crisis meeting of voluntary and statutory agencies was called in recent weeks because children as young as eight were being drawn into drug-dealing near Lourdes Church when they should have been in school.
When I raised this in the Dáil the Minister's reply was that it was a matter for the National Educational Welfare Board.
That same week I called to another national school where the principal was filling out forms listing the various children who were "missing" from school.
She said they would be treated by the Department as just "statistics" and that nothing would be done for them.
I asked for details of the child in most urgent need of care (as a test case) to raise in a Dáil question to see what had been done for the child after a previous report from the school. The Minister's reply to that question was that it was (again) a matter for the National Educational Welfare Board.
The principal was right; nothing had been done. There is little new about all of this. The first public meeting I spoke at as an elected city councillor in 1979 was about educational disadvantage in the north inner city. Relatively speaking, very little has changed since then.
I have lost count of the ministers for education who, like Mr Dempsey, got great PR on their "commitment" to disadvantage but then moved on, having delivered nothing that would make a real impact.
One of the very few exceptions was Niamh Bhreathnach when she introduced the Breaking the Cycle scheme in junior classes in a selected number of very disadvantaged schools. It significantly reduced class sizes and put in additional resources. If that scheme had been expanded to include senior classes and also introduced in all schools in need, it could have made a difference. It was not to be.
I have spoken to many local teachers who still believe that to be the way forward.
Ironically, the limited expenditure on that scheme by Niamh Bhreathnach was dwarfed by the colossal squandering (by the same minister) of scarce resources by the abolition of third-level fees. A small but significant gesture in the direction of the disadvantaged while the nod was given to the affluent (at great cost) to vote Labour.
Failure to address the issue of educational disadvantage is one of the key causes of the increasing rich-poor gap in Irish society. It perpetuates inequality and fuels the drugs-crime crisis, yet successive governments have lacked the political will to address it.
Next week: Olwyn Enright