Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It seems to me that we need to turn a vicious circle into a virtuous circle. One of the challenges we face as we seek to get people to engage with education generally is that some people do not see education as having any benefit for themselves. We all know people who ask what the point of learning Irish or Latin is, because nobody speaks those languages. They do not see the point of learning all sorts of things. Other people believe that all education is good because they see results around them in their own communities. It seems to me that we keep coming around with this circular challenge. Our failure to get people from the Traveller community into professions, because of all the barriers we have placed in their way, is creating a challenge for the next generation. If people are able to look up to a level of previous success when they see members of their own families who managed to get through the education system and do well out of it, they will see that they can get the advantages from education that the rest of society can get from it.

I would like to mention a classic example that really brought this home to me. Some of those present will know Dr. Micheál MacGréil, who did a huge sociological study that included a chapter on the status of Irish-language speakers in society, as opposed to the status of the Irish language. It also included a chapter on the status of Travellers in society. Unfortunately, Travellers were at the very lowest level in terms of the way the rest of society perceived them and Irish speakers were right up at the top. I remind those who might respond to this finding by saying "that is the way it is" that 100 or 150 years ago, Irish speakers were out on the margins - where the language survived - as poor fishermen and farmers with the poorest land. When I started to think about this matter, it struck me that this change was brought about by various forms of State support. It is interesting to recall that because the new State wanted Irish-language teachers, it put many people from very disadvantaged backgrounds through the training colleges because they had the one thing the State was looking for - the Irish language. As a result, everyone in these communities had a relative who became a teacher. Many of them moved into other things. I started to think about social engineering as I looked at Dr. MacGréil's sociological study and reflected on how these groups have diverged over 120 years. I remind the committee that his study is dedicated to the Traveller community and refers to apartheid in Ireland. When he talks about apartheid, he is not talking about Travellers - he is talking about the settled community's attitude to Travellers. We will have a huge challenge when we reach the next module, which relates to employment. None of us wants to do things from which there are no results. When people train for football teams, they want to win matches. When people do things, they want to see results. One of the challenges we face is that when Travellers get education, they find it more difficult than settled people to get employment. This means the results of education are not as immediately obvious.

Leaving the Traveller Community aside, I look across at communities that may have 70% going to third level education and other communities that have 20% going to third level education. One asks why that is so given that they have teachers with the same qualifications and so on. It seems to come back to the expectation issue. For example, in some rural communities very few of the parents went to third level education even though some other relatives may have. They still seem to get an extraordinarily high level of participation. Many people living very far away from the third level institutions go to third level education while some people in areas close to the M50 get low levels of participation. Here we get into issues of expectation and peer pressure from other students. In one the peer pressure seems to be to get on in school as that is the way forward. We might not have given sufficient attention to addressing this major challenge.

How can we create the expectation within the education system that people can reach for the stars and get there? In reality they can become doctors, teachers, top scientist or anything else they want to be. There should be no psychological barrier to getting there, but it seems to be there if we look at this realistically.