Seán Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

My apologies for being delayed.

I welcome everybody to the meeting. I often think about this topic, if one would call it a topic. How are we doing as a society? Are we caring? Unless we have a caring society, all of these issues will become greater. My fear is that, when the economy is improving and everybody is better off, we tend to move on and forget about many of these issues. To establish concern, it is vitally important that people are continually made aware through our schooling system of the issues and the efforts needed to deal with them. We should not deal with these issues today and forget about them tomorrow until they come up again in six months, when we will think about them again. By and large, the Irish people are very caring. I believe that is because of where we came from. We were a very poor country. We had to learn to survive and we cared for each other. That was built up through the family unit. I look around myself today and wonder whether we are as caring as we used to be as a society. Those are the questions we have to keep asking ourselves. Are the witnesses happy, unhappy, or somewhere in the middle about the manner in which these issues are dealt with through our educational system?

We owe an awful lot to the religious orders who were so deeply involved in the education system in this country. The numbers in those orders are decreasing continuously. That will have a bearing on our awareness of all of these very important issues. We have underestimated the value of the religious orders that were involved in our education system. They have taken some stick from various groupings down through the years with regard to interference and all the rest of it, but we owe an awful lot to the people in the religious orders who made us aware of a lot of these problems. They also brought home to us, because of their missionary work abroad, what was happening in other countries.

It seems that, as a society, we are not as aware as we used to be of many issues, including not only social problems but issues with sight, which we are talking about here, and hearing. As a politician, I do not hear people raising these issues as much as I used to in the greater scheme of things. It is only when we meet people, such as the witnesses, who are concerned and involved that we get the opportunity to discuss these issues. That creates a massive awareness, at least as far as I am concerned, about what we are doing about these issues and about whether we are slipping or getting careless or are not getting as involved in making certain that all of this training is provided and awareness is raised, particularly through our schools. Do the witnesses have any recommendations in that regard?

I find that the social aspects of education have taken a back seat in our system. People are more concerned about examination results and the standard of education at the expense of overall education in living, life, standards and beliefs. I have 14 grandchildren, so I have a fair amount of dealing with the youth, and in my experience there are some tremendous examples of caring among younger people. I would like to hear the views of the witnesses as to whether there is something we could do to make certain that we never lose that and that it is part and parcel of the agenda when we are teaching our children at an early age. We must create an awareness. Things learned in primary school tend to stay with a person throughout life. They certainly have in my case. I was taught by the Christian Brothers. They took a lot of stick, but they did an awful lot of good in terms of making us aware of our other responsibilities in life. I am interested in the witnesses' views in that regard. Am I exaggerating or is there something worthwhile in what I am saying?