Pending completion of a comprehensive survey of students who entered higher education last autumn, the Higher Education Authority has published the results of a large-scale sample survey of the previous year's higher education intake.
In terms of improving the social mix of students at national level, this sample survey suggests that substantial improvements were effected between 1998 and 2003. However, a huge gap remains between the proportion of children of wage-earners from disadvantaged urban areas and from the rest of the country who enter higher education.
Broadly speaking, the proportion of children of professional people, employers and managers, and salaried workers, entering higher education, which had been rising throughout the 1980s, seems to have stabilised after 1992. But the overall proportion of children of other non-manual workers and of manual workers, which had also been rising since 1980, continued to increase rapidly throughout the 1990s. (See table)
Although these two broad social groups may have different participation rates in universities and ITs, the fact that the overall proportion of children of wage-earners entering higher education now seems to be broadly similar to the figure for children of middle- class parents is very encouraging. A puzzling feature of these figures, however, is the fact that the proportion of children of salaried workers entering higher education does not appear to have increased at all during the past 23 years, and as a result it is now much lower than the figure for manual wage-earners.
The new figures also confirm earlier data showing that some of our poorest counties have the highest proportion of higher education entrants. Thus seven of the nine counties with the best record in respect of higher education are in the bottom half of our counties in terms of income levels: Leitrim, Longford, Mayo, Clare, Kerry, Roscommon and Tipperary.
By contrast, Dublin, with a per capita income level one-fifth above the national average and almost one-third higher than that of Leitrim, has one of the lowest rates of higher education entry.
This is, of course, because of the huge disparity that exists between income levels in different parts of Dublin. In most of the middle-class areas of the city's southeast quadrant, three-quarters of young people enter higher education - a proportion similar to that of rural Leitrim. But only 10 to 12 per cent of children from Ballyfermot and Priorswood/Darndale do so, and the figures for Palmerstown, and Clondalkin-Neilstown remain below 20 per cent.
Our total failure to tackle the social problems of areas such as these during the recent period of huge prosperity reflects Government concentration on a policy of reducing income tax more rapidly than almost anywhere else in the industrialised world, to a level below that of the extreme right-wing United States, of Japan, and of any other western European country.
It seems to me that this quite heartless swing to the right has altered fundamentally the character of Irish society. For, when we were a poor country, we were a caring country. Between 1960 and the early 1980s the purchasing power of earned incomes doubled but successive governments actually trebled welfare payments during this period.
This process culminated in the 25 per cent social welfare increase provided in the January 1982 budget, which paradoxically was rejected by the vote of one of the Dáil's two socialists, Jim Kemmy. However, this sharply increased social welfare provision was maintained by the succeeding Fianna Fáil government, and thus achieved the objective of ensuring that the welfare of each class of beneficiary would be protected from the inevitable hardships of the years of retrenchment that had to follow.
But in the subsequent post-crisis years governments grossly neglected the needs of the less well-off, many of whom live in disadvantaged areas that have been allowed to become virtual ghettoes. From these, even today, only a small minority of children emerge to share the educational advantages that are now open to the majority of working-class as well as middle-class children who are lucky enough to live elsewhere.
(We do not have data for the different areas of our other major cities, but the fact that between 1998 and 2003 the rise in the overall rate of entry to higher education in Cork, Limerick and Galway, was below the national average suggests that similar deprivation of educational opportunity also exists in the poorer areas of those cities).
I simply do not understand how in the face of the persistence of such acute geographical social inequity in a country where total resources have doubled within the space of a single decade and per capita income now exceeds by 10 per cent the average for the rest of the EU, our politicians can justify to themselves their failure to address this problem. Their parallel crude pursuit of tax policies has been more right wing than that of any other part of western Europe or of the United States.
How is it that our political Opposition has failed to put this issue squarely to those now in government? Is the Opposition as well as the Government so transfixed with fear of offending the more selfish and materialistic elements of our electorate that they feel obliged to go along with such an antisocial policy mix?
Given the scale of this failure in social responsibility by our traditional political parties, they have only themselves to blame for last June's huge local elections swing to Sinn Féin, which took place in precisely these neglected disadvantaged areas.
Given that women and middle-class voters continue to balk at voting for Sinn Féin, it is clear that the 25 to 30 per cent overall Sinn Féin vote in these areas means that not far short of half of younger male voters are so alienated from traditional politics that they are prepared to vote for Sinn Féin, ignoring its continuing links with the criminal and violent IRA.