Ms Catriona Crowe:

It is a privilege for me to be here today. I am pleased to note so much interest on the part of Members of the Oireachtas on this very important subject. I am privileged to be present to support the History Teacher' Association of Ireland who are some of the most passionate people in defence of a very important subject that I have ever had the honour to meet.

I shall commence with an old cliché. It is a quote from George Santayana, the philosopher, who said: "Those who forget their past are destined to repeat it". We have heard it a thousand times but it is one of the fundamental statements about the value of history. We are now in that phase of this discussion where we are looking at the value of history as a subject as something that pervades the values of a society. For example, if the inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia had been taught proper history during the period after the Second World War it is not impossible that what happened when the state fell apart would have been different. If they had been taught about the complex differences between the different kinds of people who inhabited that territory during that time, they may have had time to come to terms with the dreadful things that would happen to them, instead of something festering underneath and bursting out into a series of shocking atrocities which none of us will forget. We also have to remember that violence is very much a part of the 20th century, which was a spectacularly violent century and of this country's own history, not least during the decade of what I would prefer to call centenaries rather than commemorations on which we have now embarked, where we need to reflect very seriously on what happened, why it happened and whether other things could have happened instead.

The elephant in the room is the question of why subjects are compulsory in curricula. It is for two reasons. Society has decided that those subjects are what we call core subjects that are necessary for the fundamental and basic education of any student. I know that when I studied at secondary school in the distant past if, at the age of 12, I had been offered the opportunity not to study any further mathematics I would have grasped it with both hands. I hated and was no good at it. I was lucky to have good teachers. I scraped a pass in the leaving certificate and, as a result, I can read bank statements and back a few horses every now and again if I have to, and I can manipulate numbers. If I had that choice at the age of 12 I would certainly not have taken mathematics. That is why it is compulsory. Everybody must have a basic mathematical education. I would imagine that quite a number of students today, sadly, would not rush to study the Irish language at the age of 12. I am devoted to the Irish language, as are many members of the committee, but sadly, students may not take it as a subject they would wish to pursue if given the choice.

English is the language that we speak in this country. It is has got a fantastic literature behind it, as does Irish. Is it possible that people might decide that Shakespeare is not for them? Why have we decided that the discipline that relates to the complicated, interesting, joyful, savage past that this and other countries have experienced is something that is disposable when those basic subjects are not seen as disposable? That is a fundamental question. I imagine that geographers could ask the same question and with a great deal of justice. These are the subjects that deal with time and space - two of the things that every human being has a right to know about. It seems to me to be a fundamental category error to exclude them from a compulsory regime. We have heard much about the terrible reduction in numbers studying history, from 53,000 in the junior certificate down to 11,000 in the leaving certificate, if I heard Ms Breda Naughton correctly.

History is a discursive subject; it requires reading and writing. It is not necessarily something that fits naturally into the modern age of instant information, although many teachers spend much of their time trying to track the Wikipedia cut and paste that has emerged in the essays of their students and advising them not to follow that route. My business is primary sources. Mr. Kevin McCarthy was very eloquent on the fact that primary sources have only recently come into view not only at second level but at third level. Professor Diarmaid Ferriter would have been one of the pioneers of ensuring that documents are available to people in a popular format. In order that I do not go on for too long I will give two examples of what they can do for students. One of the most interesting museums in Ireland is Strokestown House museum, which investigates the Great Famine in that area. It has an outstanding display on the assassination of Major Denis Mahon, the landlord who lived in Strokestown at the time. It appears to be universally agreed that he was a bad landlord, being cruel to his tenants and carrying out major evictions. The museum has a series of documents which gives one completely different perspectives on his murder, some Major Mahon's family, some from his tenants, some from the police, all giving a different shade of opinion, none of which is conclusive.

One of the great virtues of studying the primary sources of history, which is what it comes down to and which is hugely foregrounded in the new leaving certificate curriculum, is that one learns to evaluate different kinds of evidence, something that is altogether necessary in an era when we are getting vast amounts of information coming at us, often from deliberately poorly-informed sources, including the tabloid press and the dreadful material on the Internet. There is not much quality material coming at people in a way they can grasp. This is the opportunity for people, before they lose the chance to do it at all, to learn how to evaluate that material in some way or another and to seek better material if they need to.

I had the privilege of putting the 1901 and 1911 censuses online free of charge. I plead that if there is any request to start charging for that resource then we should resist it. This is one of the great things we have in our country now. It is available to the entire population and it overcomes many of the class issues that we have discussed at length today. Secondary school students are using that resource all the time to examine their local areas, the main streets in their towns and not only their family history but the extended history of neighbours and so on in any given area. They are developing all the basic skills that one needs to be a historian. These come from reading that rather simple but nevertheless interesting primary source. The resource is teaching them things about, for example, compassion. When one examines the census records for Dublin city in 1911 one sees vast levels of child mortality. Women bore 13 children but only six survived. This gives one empathy with people in the past which is difficult to come by any other way. I am Pollyanna-ish enough to believe and hope that it affects people's ideas about poverty in the present as well. That would be a good outcome. It also teaches them that there are not always answers to the questions that we ask of the past. There is no seamless narrative that follows its way through. History is a bumpy ride. There are sources for some things and not others.

Mr. McCarthy referred to the difference between political history, sets of dates and so on and social history, which has blossomed greatly in this country in the past 30 years. It deals with the interior experience of what it is like to be alive at a particular time. We get much more through memoirs and novels and so on than we do through history, but history is a significant part of giving us that information. Do we really want to live in a country where many children over the age of 12 years known nothing about history? If they know anything about Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera it is because they might have seen, by chance, Neil Jordan's bad movie on television. Is that good enough? We still have serious interrogation to do in this country on our history. Not all the primary sources are available but we hope this decade will lead to a great improvement in this regard and that we will be able to interrogate and reflect properly. Let us not shut off the opportunity. It should not be a choice. It should be an opportunity for our young people to learn about their past and to benefit from the experience of it. Let us not repeat slavishly the mistakes made by our next-door neighbours just as they are learning to remedy them. They are about to put history back on the curriculum in Britain as a compulsory subject and we are about to take it out. What is that about?