Just Mary (14 page)

In this period in Europe, the Erasmus scheme for third-level education was bedded down. The seed for the scheme, which provided grants for third-level students to travel and spend time at
universities in the cities of other member countries, had been sown in Gemma Hussey’s time, but now it was flowering and I was able to fully nurture its growth. Fortunately for me, of course,
I did not have to take the money from my budget to do so, as the programme was fully funded by Europe. Whenever now I meet a young person and they say, ‘I have been on Erasmus for a year in
Turin’ — or in Paris, in Budapest, in Vienna — I am always so pleased, and I think back to the day I chaired the meeting in Brussels of all the European Education Ministers, at
which we firmly set the full financial parameters and targets of student numbers of the Programme. It was and is and will always be a wonderful scheme and it gave full expression to the European
ideal.

I remember coming back on the flight from Brussels that day, very excited about what we had achieved. I was aware too that the path we had set ourselves was in fact nothing new. I thought of
Clonmacnoise, so close to my home town of Athlone, just twelve miles up the road in County Offaly — Clonmacnoise, the place to which, centuries ago, scholars from all over Europe flocked for
reflection, for learning, for study. I found myself reflecting that the students of now, by going to these foreign cities, these other centres of learning in Europe, were replicating the paths of
the scholars who came to us then. I remembered also the students of eighteenth-century Ireland who, because of the penal laws which forbade the education of Catholics, flocked to France and to
Italy to enrol in the great halls of learning there, to bring back in turn their new knowledge to Ireland.

Travel broadens the mind, as they say, and there is many a man and woman in Ireland now or across the world who can look back to the Erasmus scheme and what it gave them. Of course, I am not
dwelling on this here in order to say how wonderful I was — after all, the scheme had already started and I was just fortunate enough to be in charge of the European Education seat when it
reached its full flowering. Rather, I am telling the story to highlight the great remit and range of European policies on education, and what these meant for a small country in the Atlantic Ocean
off the coast of Britain. Europe saw how education could help and, as full members of the European project, we were able to benefit wholly from this wonderful vision.

As well as the Erasmus scheme, a huge range of other literacy projects and various other measures were introduced, in which Ireland was keen to participate. Initially, we would receive full
funding for such schemes, as the Vocational Training Opportunities Scheme (
VTOS
), which enabled those who had opted out earlier a wonderful re-entry into education. As time
went on and as we grew comparatively richer, we would have to make our contribution to it, but all in all, the early 1990s was a wonderful period for the flourishing of education in Ireland. I was
so much aware at the time of the extent to which the good reputation and renown of Irish education had spread, and Ministers from other countries would always show a great appreciation of the role
Ireland had played throughout the centuries. In fact, long after I had left Education, I remember meeting in Clonmacnoise the then Austrian Minister for Education: she had come to visit the site
with a group of her friends, not as part of her parliamentarian duties, but purely out of interest and a desire to see that ancient seat of learning. I thought to myself how wonderful it was, that
we had been able to build on those foundations.

Of the latter years of my tenure at the Department of Education, there is one episode in particular which gives a sense of the flavour of life back then in the early 1990s and still has
resonance today. Sometime in the late summer of 1991, I was contacted by Joe O’Toole, then General Secretary of the
INTO
, along with two educational professionals from
North County Dublin, Dr Deirdre McIntyre and Dr Maria Lawlor. These two women had been involved in a particular school project about which they wanted to tell me. I was always very easy to meet. I
do not regard this as a fault — in fact, I always regarded it as a positive thing in any Minister, that he or she should not think themselves so important that they are not prepared to meet,
on the spot, people who have something to tell them.

It was the month of August, and we had arranged a meeting in my Department for 2 p.m. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon. Joe O’Toole and the two women came in and the tale they had to
tell was a good one, which I was very glad to hear. At a primary school in North County Dublin, Dr McIntyre and Dr Lawlor — an educational psychologist and an educational psychiatrist
respectively — had initiated a project they were calling ‘Stay Safe’. The aim of this initiative was to highlight the importance of assuring the safety of young children in their
journeys to and from school. They had devised a very simple programme which outlined for young pupils the rules of the road — not just in a traffic way but in a ‘human traffic’
way too. It also emphasised in particular the importance of never getting into a stranger’s car, and so on. I think at that time there had been a spate of incidents whereby total strangers
had been pulling up in their cars and saying to a little boy or girl walking home, ‘Your mammy sent me to pick you up . . .’ Fortunately in each case, another adult had spotted what was
happening before the child in question could get into the car. My memory is that it was these incidents which had sparked this initiative on the part of these two professionals.

I felt it was a very worthy scheme and set about looking into it further. We called in Tony O’Gorman, Head Psychologist at the time in the Department of Education, and Tom Gillen, Head of
Primary Education. After a long discussion with them, I made an on-the-spot ministerial decision. Now, for those who are not political anoraks, ministerial decisions made on-the-spot are relatively
rare: things are not often done this way and sometimes such an approach can go awry. But my instincts as a parent told me that this particular measure would not go wrong — in fact, all it
could do was go right.

Tony O’Gorman and Tom Gillen consulted with their teams and each other, and came back with a circular for the primary schools — all 3,250 of them throughout the country —
asking them to implement, or to consider implementing the Stay Safe Programme. We couldn’t order anyone to do this — only the Chairperson of each of their Boards of Management would
have had such authority — but we indicated that the Department of Education was giving the scheme their strong stamp of approval, and that the Minister — i.e. myself — was very
much behind such a move. Most of the schools reacted enthusiastically and began to take steps to implement the programme.

A very curious matter developed on the back of this initiative, however. As I had done for many years, at the time I would hold a public clinic each Saturday in an office at my home. This was
basically for my constituents, but anyone in Ireland was welcome to come to see and talk to me. On two successive Saturdays after the unveiling of the Stay Safe Programme, I found my clinic being
visited by busloads of parents from Cork, there to protest against the Stay Safe Programme. Put down in cold print and plain English like this, I know it sounds dotty — but that is what they
were about. They couldn’t all come in — because they wouldn’t all have fitted into my office — but they sent in their spokespersons as they waited outside. Their point of
view, they explained, was that it was solely up to parents to ensure the safety of their children going to and from school. It had nothing to do with, as they saw it, interfering teachers and
interfering Ministers and interfering officials from the Department of Education, who had no business coming in and trying to lay down the law about what a child could and couldn’t do.

I was baffled, horrified and completely unable to understand their point of view, and as I tried to do so, echoes kept coming back to me of what had happened four decades earlier with Noël
Browne and the Bishops, and how they and the Church had been so vehemently opposed to his proposed measures to ensure good healthcare for expectant mothers, insisting that doing so was solely the
job of the husband and not the Irish State!

Many years later, when I was in the Dáil between 2007 and 2011, I put forward a question in the House as to what percentage of the country’s primary schools had implemented the Stay
Safe Programme — an echo in fact of an earlier question I had put down in an Adjournment Debate in the Seanad. Interestingly, the percentage of schools not participating in the scheme —
which had as its only purpose to try to ensure the safety of young children — remained stubbornly high, at over 25 per cent. Most of these non-participating schools were in the Munster
region. I puzzled over this for a short time, but soon the reason became obvious. It was not that the roads were safer in Munster than anywhere else. It was not that Munster did not have its fair
share of lone drivers with bad thoughts cruising the roads. No — it was, in my opinion, the wide prevalence in that part of the country of a typically strong, far-right Catholic ethos which
determined that people there were going to steadfastly resist the Stay Safe Programme.

Of course, time has moved on and, sadly, recent revelations about the terribly damaging effects some elements in the Church have had on the lives of children and young people have made it clear
that it is not always the stranger a child must fear, but sometimes a person within their own community circle. As was brought home to me in later years when I was Chairperson of the All-Party
Joint Committee on the Constitutional Amendment on Children, there is a strong underlying attitude in Irish national life of, ‘My child is
my
child, and hands off anyone who seeks to
interfere.’ The vast majority of Irish parents will send their child to school because they need education, but as regards many other needs, the overriding feeling is that the mother and
father know best, and that is that. Of course, most often, they
do
know best, but surely matters of child safety are of huge importance and any way in which the State can assist in this
area should be welcomed with open arms by any reasonable and caring parent?

One very important task which I undertook in the latter years of my time in the Department of Education was the preparation and drafting of a Green Paper — later to become a White Paper
— on Education Development. Just to clarify these terms, if a Minister in any Department wants to set out key policy ideas for eventual implementation, the way he or she must go about it is
to firstly produce a Green Paper, which will lead to a White Paper, which will ultimately be translated into the formal legislation. The Green Paper with which I was associated,
Education for a
Changing World
, would be published in 1992, shortly after my departure as Minister, to be succeeded in due course by the publication of a White Paper,
Charting Our Education Future
,
in 1995. John Walshe, who was then Education Editor for the
Irish Independent
, later wrote an invaluable book in relation to this type of legislative process:
Partnership in Education:
From Consultation to Legislation in the Nineties
(published by the Institute of Public Administration in 1999). This key initiative — the preparation of the Green Paper — was, I
always felt, a very satisfactory way of rounding off the happy and productive four-and-three-quarter years I spent in my favourite ministry.

I suppose the genesis of the idea for the Green Paper came about in many ways as a spin-off from my very cordial and productive relationships with the various education correspondents in the
media. As I have said earlier, I maintained good professional friendships with Pat Holmes of the
Irish Press
, John Walshe of the
Irish Independent
and the late and much lamented
Christina Murphy of
The Irish Times
. From time to time I would meet with each of them separately, either in my Department or for lunch somewhere nearby, and in that way I was able to
exchange views and ideas about very many worthwhile advances in the field, or discuss shortcomings in the current system, etc. These meetings were, I felt, always very useful, both for me and for
the journalists in question. It is from that period, in fact, that I date my ease with the media, because it became clear to me then how much can be achieved by an elected Minister through building
and maintaining good journalistic contacts. I felt that such relationships also helped both parties to gain a good sense of what the boundaries should be, of what could be released into the public
domain and what could not.

Towards the end of 1989,
The Irish Times
ran a major piece on education, of which the main gist was, ‘Yes, a lot is happening in the field, but there is a real need for a shape to
be put on all of it’. The tone was mildly castigatory, while noting some positives here and there. I confronted Christina Murphy about it and out of the ensuing discussions, an idea grew in
my mind — that perhaps it was time to do a Green Paper/White Paper on education. After all, apart from the Vocational Education Acts of the early 1930s and, further back than that,
Stanley’s Education Letter and Stanley’s Education Act in the nineteenth century, there had since been no educational legislation which would frame progress in the field or chart the
way forward.

I shared my thoughts with Christina Murphy and, in a general way, started to talk publicly about the idea in newspapers and on radio and on
TV
. It wasn’t long,
however, before I got a call from Padraig O’hUiginn, the then Secretary General to the Department of An Taoiseach. He said that this idea of mine was a very good one, but that I should stop
talking about it all the time! ‘Why?’ I asked him. He explained that the Department of An Taoiseach wanted to make some sort of pacifying gesture to the teachers’ trade unions
following the whole debacle of the Pupil/Teacher Ratio, and they wanted the idea of some kind of new policy legislation to come from the Taoiseach, so to speak.