Scandals take many forms. And ones that have been partially acknowledged, but then ignored, invariably do the most damage. Charlie Haughey's excessively lavish lifestyle on a politician's salary is one example. The abuse of vulnerable children in care is another.
It's not easy, and it is certainly unpopular, to hold up a mirror to the failures of society. The net of responsibility invariably spreads far beyond those immediately indicted. Competing demands on governments from powerful interests frequently mean that the poorest and most marginalised receive least, and their plight is often brought to the attention of the public only through outside intervention.
That is what happened with the scandal in Irish education. Three years ago the OECD reported that nearly one-quarter of all Irish adults between the ages of 16 and 65 years were functionally illiterate.
That meant they could not fill out simple forms in search of work or read the kind of instructions you would find on medical prescriptions. The stark message was rammed home when the United Nations subsequently found the "human poverty" index in this State was the second-worst in the industrialised world.
At a time when politicians and community leaders were priding themselves on the emergence of the "Celtic Tiger" in a high-tech economy, these were awful statistics. For the first time in many years, Ireland had fallen in the ranking of social progress used by the UN Development Programme.
In spite of increasing affluence, the State dropped from 17th to 20th place among industrialised nations. Ireland might be one of the most desirable places to live, but on a poverty index we have massive inequality of wealth, poor life expectancy and high illiteracy levels.
THE United States topped the index with 16.5 per cent of its population living in poverty, followed by Ireland at 15.3 per cent and the UK at 15.1 per cent. In contrast, Sweden returned a poverty level of 7 per cent.
The appalling literacy levels can hardly have surprised the Department of Education and Science or the teacher unions, but they still quibbled with the findings and insisted the situation had improved dramatically in recent years. It was, they suggested, a hangover from the bad old pre-1970 days when large class sizes made it extremely difficult for teachers to cope.
But, while the Department was behaving in swan-like mode above the waterline, underneath legs were paddling like fury. It commissioned a survey which found that up to 10 per cent of all students now in primary schools have serious literacy problems, in spite of dramatically reduced class sizes.
In 1978 there were 175,000 primary school children in class sizes of 40 or more. This fell to 27,000 in 1988 and to 1,000 last year. But, in spite of smaller class sizes, tests conducted for the Department of Education have shown no improvement in pupils' reading scores during the past 20 years.
It is only now that officials are confronting the broader picture: the quality of teaching being provided. For decades we have lived with the fanciful notion that Irish education is among the best in the world. Teachers enjoyed special social status. No more than the priest or the doctor, they were generally beyond reproach, and they moved in a highly stratified society.
Most of those the education system failed were the first to take the emigrant boat as unskilled workers from town and country and the problem was conveniently exported as damaged goods. But the rapid growth of the economy in recent years has meant that many such people are now staying at home. As job bottlenecks develop, businessmen look to the long-term unemployed and those with serious literacy problems as an important human resource.
Willie O'Dea is an unlikely hero. The Limerick politician fights a mean constituency battle and tends towards the acerbic end of the Fianna Fail spectrum.
But the Minister of State at the Department of Education has, by all accounts, excelled himself in a campaign to promote adult literacy.
THE UN/OECD literacy figures were extremely helpful in extracting money from an embarrassed Coalition Government. But Mr O'Dea was far more thorough than that. He commissioned and published a Green Paper on Adult Education in 1998 which gave priority to improving levels of literacy and numeracy and advocated an annual budget of €10 million. A White Paper was promised for later this year.
In the meantime, the Limerick Minister was gouging money out of the Department of Finance. The adult literacy budget jumped from €3.6 million in 1997 to €5.3 million in 1998, but moderated to €5.66 million this year as pressure came on from Micheal Martin to invest more money in remedial teaching at primary school level.
Our abysmal record in terms of "second chance" education was also confronted. No more than 5 per cent of Irish entrants to full-time courses at third level are mature students. In Britain that figure is almost 30 per cent. Studies show that parental levels of education, particularly those of mothers, influence children's performance in schools.
The Green Paper argued that adult and second-chance education was vital, along with financial support for lone parents, if the intergenerational cycle of disadvantage was to be broken.
Last week Mr O'Dea was able to announce an increase in allowances for long-term unemployed persons engaged in adult education courses - bringing payment up to FAS scheme levels - at an annual cost of €3.5 million.
An effort is being made, but the problems are enormous. And while Mr O'Dea struggles with the results of administrative and educational failure, his senior colleague, Mr Martin, is attempting to tackle the scandal at source.
Money is being pumped into remedial teaching at primary school level. From next month remedial resources will be made available to every national school. But there will still be only 1,400 teachers for 3,300 schools. The new agenda will cost about €30 million in a full year and will require a new level of co-operation and training, between remedial and ordinary teachers.
THERE is ready recognition within the Department of Education that remedial teachers were "appallingly used" in the past, without any proper interaction between them and other teachers in deciding what was best for their students. To counter that, all national and remedial teachers will be required to take training courses next year. According to one official, the INTO now recognises the great difficulties that exist and accepts that the teaching methods of its members "must improve".
There may be an element of blame-transference in such a comment, given the failure of successive governments to properly fund primary school education. But teachers who have consistently refused to have the results of their work evaluated and compared with other schools can hardly be held blameless.
Poor teaching methods, burn-out and a simple lack of commitment must have all contributed to our appallingly high level of illiteracy.
As a society, we cannot feign ignorance any longer. We know what has to be done. We have tolerated a grossly incompetent, unfair and underfunded system of education for far too long.
If the Government's commitment to sharing the fruits of success means anything, Charlie McCreevy, the punter's friend, will open the purse-strings wide in the coming Budget.